Many of the wildest (and best) laid travel plans are hatched in a small country pub, and the one wagered by Richard King and a gathering of his friends at the Deers Hut pub in the Hampshire village of Liphook, England, was no different. It was the end of 1967’s Summer of Love when Bert Oram, the pub landlord, bet nine lads a pint of beer that he couldn’t drive a double-decker bus around the world.
For better or worse, the challenge was accepted. The group’s vehicle of choice was a well-worn 1949 Leyland with 700,000 miles on the odometer. The bus, nicknamed ‘Hairy Pillock,’ put them back £100 but carried the early twenty-somethings across Europe to Vienna and Athens, over mountains in eastern Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, through Khyber Pass and the lands of Pakistan and India. By the time they reached Tehran, their shoestring budget was as dry as the Iranian desert and crumbling to pieces. Transforming into a folk singing cabaret group, they performed for the Shah of Iran and gained notoriety as they continued to Australia, America, and Canada.
“Two years and ten months after our departure from Liphook, we arrived back in England with our bus, to be greeted at 10 Downing Street by Prime Minister Edward Heath,” King wrote for the History Press. “It was a journey that would be virtually impossible today, and an adventure which is very much of its time, peopled by a cast of colourful characters and personalities from a world that no longer exists. It was an adventure that completely changed our lives.”
This week’s video is the first of three that Richard King has shared on YouTube—a documentary that follows nine Englishman aboard the double-decker bus. King’s book, Band on the Bus, is surely a great compliment to the visuals, self-deprecation, and dry British wit found in The Philanderers’ Pillock Conquers the World (Part One).
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