The expedition
By 1956 Barbara Toy had made three solo journeys in Pollyanna — Tangier to Baghdad, Libya, and Saudi Arabia — and written a book about each. Her fourth, which The Times' obituary called her boldest feat, was to take the six-year-old 80-inch Land Rover right round the world. She left England and drove east through Europe and Turkey and across the Middle East to Pakistan and India, then down through Thailand and the Federation of Malaya — where, because Pollyanna 'looks a bit military' and her hair was short, she wore her fluffiest clothes so that the Emergency's terrorists would not take her for a soldier — to Singapore, where the Straits Times interviewed her in March 1957. She was only a few months behind the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition's two 86-inch station wagons, which had reached Singapore in March 1956 with six men; she had one car and no companion.
From Singapore Pollyanna went by ship to Western Australia and Toy drove across the continent from Perth to Sydney, arriving in May 1957 for her first visit to Australia since she had left the Roycroft Library in Sydney for London twenty-two years before, and for a reunion in Melbourne with her mother, the widow of the journalist Bert Toy. The Australian Women's Weekly photographed her with the badge-covered Land Rover looking at the Sydney that had grown up since. She reckoned Pollyanna had by then covered 118,000 miles of desert, mountain, hill and plain; her greatest costs were petrol and the shipping freight 'when the continents run out', and she slept in villages or in the desert rather than hotels. Her only weapon was the wooden truncheon an Algerian gendarme had given her in 1951. Every evening, wherever there was alternating current, she dictated the day into a dictaphone, the raw material of the book she would sort out back in London. After exploring Australia again she shipped Pollyanna across the Pacific and drove the United States from San Francisco to New York, closing the circle.
Columbus was Right!: Rover around the world was published by John Murray in 1958, with a double-page map and photographic plates. Land Rover Classic's 2025 Pebble Beach display of expedition vehicles described Toy as the first to circumnavigate the globe in a Land Rover. Rover, which sponsored her after the success of the books, pressed her around 1959–60 to give up the battered 1950 car for a new long-wheelbase Series II, and she wrote bitterly of the exchange in In Search of Sheba. Pollyanna went to a technical college in Chesterfield, was restored by an enthusiast, and was bought back by Toy in 1989; in 1990, aged 81, she drove it round the world a second time, through Australia and the Far East, and was home for Christmas. The car survives with the Pickford family.
