| FEATURE: NEVILLE BURRELL |
Was Neville Burrell born to adventure?
... THE ANSWER WOULD SEEM TO BE NO. Was he drawn to adventure as a child? Not really? Did he follow his father into the Army? No. Did he travel widely in his youth? Well, not really, though he did live for a time in Sicily, a region that has occasionally caused more than its fair share of adventure.
Maybe he followed an adventurous profession? He became an accountant (I started thinking of Michael Palin's sketch about the accountant who wanted to be a lion tamer.)
Yet this supposedly non-adventurous man spent six weeks driving half-way round the world in a car approaching the age of 70 (the car, not Neville). The race was the 2007 Peking-Paris Rally (last staged in 1907), and the car was a 1939 Derby Bentley owned by Neville's old friend Digby Squires.
Why did Neville enter for the race, being, as we now know, a quiet and contemplative sort of fellow? He didn't. He was put down for it by Digby, and their names duly appeared as a racing team on the Rally website. The first Neveille knew about it was when his sister happened to see it on the website and asked him about it.
He took up the challenge, and by 22 May Neville, Digby and the car were in Beijing itching to start. They set off on 27 May, headed west through China and Mongolia, crossed into Russia ("self-important, sneering, time-wasting and thoroughly inefficient") then on through Siberia ("big"), Moscow and St Petersburg (Neville prefers to call it "Leningrad") and into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. They finally arrived in Paris on 1 July, the team and the car intact and triumphant.
The Bentley behaved like a dream, though it couldn't take quite all the abuse they threw at it — they took the sump out of the bottom of the engine when they hit a rock in Mongolia. This mishap cost them several days, but fortunately the engine repair was not too extensive.
What's it like to drive a 1939 Bentley (or any kind of Bentley for that matter)? According to Neville it's great fun. It takes some getting used to, because some things are very different — like not having synchro-mesh on the lower gears. On the other hand, despite its lack of power steering it is lighter to handle than a recent VW Golf Neville owned and it will go from a walking pace to 70 mph in a single gear. Neville has the greatest respect for this monument of British engineering.
I ask him what was the worst part of the trip? Here he is very definite. Getting out of Russia. The rally organisers had paid a big fee to the Russian authorities to "fast-track" their transit in and out of Russia. Getting in was tolerable, but their exit was, according to Neville, a complete nightmare and took eight hours waiting around at the border. They were also harassed by police patrols constantly pulling them over for trivial offences as they approached the frontier.
Apart from that it was the quality of the roads, which he described in many cases as worse than having no roads at all. A bad road with a hard, broken surface can cause more damage to the car than simply travelling on a dirt surface.
Astonishingly, none of the cars in the rally had an accident during the trip. Of the 128 cars that started, 105 finished. Those that didn't suffered mechanical damage or failure, but there were no crashes.
Now he is back at his home at Patney Weir, enjoying life from his new garden office and helping his wife Caroline with their bed and breakfast business.
How does he feel after his adventure? Was it worth it? "Absolutely! Not for the prizes, but for the experience, memories and friendships which will long outlast the memory of any minor discomfort suffered along the way."
Read the full fascinating account of the trip in Neville's blog The Long Run.