A Fool on Wheels
LAND ROVER LEGENDS 31 BARBARA TOY
‘WOMAN Finds Lipstick Morale in the Desert’. As a headline, it’s very much of its day. You can just imagine a journalist (male, of course!) of a certain age and attitude, coming up with it in the Perth newsroom of The West Australian in October, 1952. It was a pretty poor tabloid headline even then, but it really grates now. What this hack was damning with faint praise was Barbara Toy’s 1952 solo expedition in a Series I Land Rover, when she drove 11,000 miles across the Libyan desert.
It was the second of the many significant Land Rover expeditions undertaken by Barbara, most of which she wrote about in her travel books. She christened her Series I ‘Pollyanna’ and to my mind it is one of the most important expedition Land Rovers from the Rover Company’s golden age of exploration and expedition activity in the 1950s and ’60s. Barbara Toy’s travels were exceptional because she drove solo and unsupported, unlike the vast majority of the expeditions undertaken in those years. And, of course, because she was a woman.
Barbara Alex Toy, known to her friends as ‘Ginger’, was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1908. Her parents valued literature and learning but her father, Bert, who was a newspaper editor and war correspondent, believed that “life was a better educator than formal education”. Barbara was therefore initially educated at home and was widely read before she was into her teens. In 1930 she married Ewing Rixson, a well-known member of a New York Quaker family who had a passion for books and travel. Speaking to journalist Fiona Tarrant in 1998, Barbara said: “We travelled about a great deal. We were down in Italy when he got a cable from his mother saying she wanted to see him in New York. I didn’t want to go and so we, quite amicably, drifted apart. I made a lousy wife anyway!”
After separating from her husband, by 1935 Barbara had settled in London and taken up acting, telling Fiona Tarrant: “I came to England with next to no money or qualifications to do anything, so I decided to go on the stage. I thought all you had to do was walk on and say your lines. There I
