The expedition
Tom Sheppard, an RAF officer who had first seen the desert with the RAF Regiment in the Libyan Sand Sea in 1960, reconnoitred the Mauritanian Empty Quarter in 1973 with a Bedford truck, a Land Rover and a Range Rover, pushing about 200 miles into terrain without tracks. Out of that came a Joint Services proposal for a west-to-east crossing of the whole Sahara with a scientific programme attached: a complete coast-to-coast gravity-measurement traverse, which had never been made, together with mineral, lizard and snail collecting for the British Museum (Natural History) and trials of new navigation methods. The Royal Geographical Society backed it.
The vehicles were the first four Land Rover 101 Forward Controls built on the dedicated assembly line at Solihull, chassis 95600021A to 95600024A, the only 101s made in 1974, delivered to RAF Uxbridge in November of that year. Three were fitted with the power take-off drive for Rubery Owen powered-axle trailers, making them six-wheel-drive trains with the fuel payload carried between the axles. Navigation was by sun compass and astro-fixes, the sights reduced on a Hewlett-Packard HP-65 programmable calculator; there was no satellite positioning. Duckhams and Rubery Owen were among the sponsors, and the Royal Engineers issued a commemorative postal cover.
The plan had been to cross Algeria, but Algeria refused entry, which forced the route south through the Sahel. The team — seven or eight men, the sources differ — left the Atlantic coast of Mauritania on 25 January 1975 and went inland by Atar to the Ouadane oasis, reached on 6 February, then east across the Empty Quarter of Mauritania and Mali — 1,621 km without tracks past the Tadhak rocks — to Tessalit on 23 February and Gao on the Niger on 26 February, 3,554 km from the coast. From Gao they drove through Niger and northern Nigeria, where they were on 5 March, to Fort Lamy in Chad and into Sudan on 27 March, a stage of 4,031 km. A 1,024 km leg across western Sudan brought them to the Nile at Dongola on 4 April; they went on by Atbara to Port Sudan on 16 April, crossed the Red Sea by ship to Safaga in Egypt, landing on 26 April, and finished by Luxor to Cairo on 3 May 1975. The expedition map gives the total as 12,054 km (7,494 miles).
Sheppard's report, 'The Joint Services West-East Sahara Expedition 1975', appeared in the Geographical Journal in July 1976, and the RGS gave him the Ness Award; a 150-page full report exists in a handful of copies, one at the National Archives at Kew, and Anglia Television filmed the crossing. Sheppard went on to many solo Sahara journeys and wrote the Vehicle-dependent Expedition Guide, which is where most of the expedition's lessons ended up. Of the four 101s, the last, chassis 95600024A — 'Tail End Charlie', which brought up the rear of the convoy — was restored by its long-term owner David Olliver in expedition livery, still with its powered trailer, and given to the Dunsfold Collection in 2016; a second expedition car, 60 FL 38 — the one of the four without a powered trailer, later the subject of an Oxford Diecast model — is modelled in this registry. Sheppard was reunited with one of the cars, its sun compass still mounted, at a Land Rover press event in 2012, and Barry Doughty, Phil Maye and Geoff Renner marked the fiftieth anniversary at Dunsfold in April 2025.
