EA & Rhodesia - 16/6/55 - Mr Alan Cooper, a Kenya farmer, and Miss Muriel Taylor, a Cheshire school mistress, died of thirst, and Mr Peter Barnes, a Kenya student, and Miss Barbara Duthy, a Nairobi zoologist, had narrow escapes when Mr Cooper's car, in which they were travelling north of Agades in the Sahara desert, stuck in the sand. Mr Cooper set off on foot for Guezzam, and after covering 62 of the 65 miles was picked up by a lorry, in which, accompanied by another car, he returned to the marooned party. Miss Duthy boarded the lorry and the other three members of the party started off in front of the newly-arrived vehicles. Soon afterwards the party found that the lorry was not in sight and waited. The other car approached, but went past on a detour without seeing them. They drained the radiator of water and waited. Mr Cooper died the next day and Miss Taylor three days later. Mr Barnes was rescued by French soldiers and taken in a state of collapse to the Legionnaires Hospital at Agades, where he was treated for three weeks. [The book 'Trek' recounts the journey.]

Women - 2002/2 - Barbara Simpson - as remembered by Joan Goodheart - Barbara came from India, where she was born with her parents and younger brother and sister in the early 1920s. Her father hed been a water engineer in India. I first remember her at the original Makuyu Club known as the Makuyu Hunt Club at Kiringelele where there was a polo ground and some tennis courts. Her parents had a coffee farm nearby and at weekends the children played around while the adults played tennis or polo. Barbara went to a little school at Mweiga run by Laurie Allsop, later a housekeeper at Lawfords Hotel. I visited her there with my mother. I also remember her being brought to our house to say good-bye before going off to school in England. That must have been in 1927. She was a pretty little curly-haired teenager.

From school at Felixstowe she went on to read botany and zoology at the Royal Holloway College, part of London University. While there, during a vacation, she was bicycling in Sussex when her brakes gave out on a hill and she ended up smashed to bits on a brick wall. She spent many weeks in hospital and had to have a series of operations. We knew this as her mother was in touch with mine at this time. She was very brave and as soon as she could, went back to college to finish her degree. This done she returned to Kenya and was employed at the Vet Labs, Kabete.

When war broke out in 1939 she joined the FANY's but her job was a reserved occupation and she returned to the Vet Labs. She drove an old aluminium box-body car with PLUTO emblazoned on every side. As petrol was rationed it was not unusual to see PLUTO abandoned somewhere in Nairobi until she managed to beg some petrol to move on. ……. After the war she learned to fly and acquired her own little plane. When she visited her mother at Makuyu she would land on the golf course and then park her plane for the weekend. Barbara was also a keen guider and had a great sense of adventure. She flew a plane from England and survived coming down in a swamp in Uganda.

During this time she also had the adventure written about in the book 'TREK' when she could well have lost her life. I do not remember when her father died but I do know that her mother carried on running the coffee farm until she was killed in an air crash in Italy on her way back from a holiday in England about 1950. Between 1952 and 1957 Barbara's name appears in our visitor's book with her address as Kabete. Later she and Sandy are there with the address 'Kikuyu', they were married by then. Barbara owned a plot in Watamu with two other women in the 1950's and I think the address given as 'Kikuyu' refers to the small property there. She met Sandy when she flew him around on some Government job. He was a District Commissioner and after they were married I remember seeing them at Kajiado and Kitale where, someone mentioned, they entertained the Queen Mother.

When Sandy left the Administration they came to live permanently at Watamu. This must have been in 1963 or later. Barbara started the guest house which grew over the years, becoming very well known. It attracted young people from all over the world, it was fun and cheaper than anywhere else. She became an expert on marine life and a very keen snorkeller. She also loved bird watching, which she did mostly in the Sokoke Arabuko Forest. She was a great conservationist and naturalist. Barbara was a very good embroidress and when Malindi branch of the EAWL started she took over the Homecrafts for the branch. For many years she took the Malindi exhibits to the exhibition at HQ. She was a councillor and branch chairman for three years.

Campling - Barbara Duthy was born in India in 1914 and came to Kenya as a child with her family, who settled at Makuyu. Her sister was Isolde Ann Duthy …….. Barbara started her education at a small school in Nyeri but was later sent for schooling to England, and it was as a teenager in England that she had her first taste of flying with Cobham's Flying Circus …….. flying with Cobham made such an impression on the young Barbara that after that she could not wait to take it up! But her chance to fly did not come until June 1947, when she was working for the veterinary laboratories at Kabete outside Nairobi and was able to save sufficient money to commence flying lessons ……..

Barbara was just crazy about flying and loved every moment of it; she was always one of those people with a great enthusiasm for life and a capacity to really enjoy it, and earned Private Pilot's Licence Number 138 at the end of August 1947. …… [more]

Barbara was a very competent needlewoman and over the years won many prizes for her beautiful embroidery and handwork. …….. Finally in the mid-1960s the day came to retire, and Barbara and her husband went to settle in a beautiful spot on a ridge overlooking the sea at Watamu Beach, south of Malindi. …….. Barbara kept her flying licence valid until December 1971 when she made her final flight in a Cessna 150, 5Y-AER, but while she may have retired from flying she certainly did not retire completely; she then threw her enthusiasm into boating and the study of seaweeds, on which she and Sandy wrote a book. She also devoted time to her hobby of bird-watching and the study of indigenous plants, and then after Sandy's death she turned her home into a very popular little guesthouse, being still a very busy lady into her 80s! Unfortunately she was gradually crippled with arthritis, and was also almost blind by the time she died in Watamu in 2002 at the age of 87

Paul Stewart, 'Trek', 1991 1955, Kenya. A group of four acquaintances set out to drive from Nairobi to London, via the Sahara desert, in a 8 horse-power Morris Traveller. Under the leadership of Alan Cooper, a down-on-his-luck farmer, the group was made up of a worldly field biologist who recorded the whole trip on her 8mm cine camera, a genteel schoolmistress of uncertain age in search of romance, and a 17-year-old boy whose mother had insisted that the trip would make a man of him. What united them was a desire for adventure.
As they set off through Equatorial Africa the omens seemed against them. The Mau Mau uprising against British rule in Kenya was at it's height and the days of colonial rule were ending. Their journey was to take them through an Africa that very soon would cease to exist. But it was the desert that turned their joyride into a nightmare. What began as an adventure ended as a desperate fight for life in the blazing sands of the Sahara. Trek brings this story to dramatic life and is a classic account of survival against the odds.