The Road to Zanskar (Hardwear Sessions)

By Cynthia Houng

In 1958, three English housewives went on a drive. Anne Davies, Eve Sims, and Antonia Deacock bought a Land Rover, and drove it all the way from London to Zanskar, then a part of Tibet.

The women drove 16,000 miles, and then traveled another 300 miles on foot. The entire expedition took 5 months. Along the way, the women met Jawaharlal Nehru, then the Prime Minister of India, climbed a virgin peak (now known as Wives' Peak), and crossed Afghanistan without an escort.

Ovaltine helped sponsor the trip. The company gave the women a small film camera, so they could capture footage for an Ovaltine television commercial. However, the women's footage was deemed "unusable," and Ovaltine filmed a substitute commercial in the studio. Fifty years after the expedition, Ovaltine has released film footage from the 1958 expedition, newly edited by filmmaker Martin Salter:

Davies, Sims, and Deacock followed a long tradition of British "women" explorers. Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), one of the major architects of modern Iraq, was perhaps the most famous of these "English lady travelers." Bell, however, was much more than a lady traveler. Bell, like her contemporary T.E. Lawrence (better known as "Lawrence of Arabia"), was known as a kingmaker.

The 3 women were practiced mountaineers. A member of their party, Anne Davies, spoke Hindi and Urdu fluently, a significant advantage that helped ease the party's way across India and Afghanistan. The English press, however, had a field day with the concept of "housewives" roughing it in the Himalayas, and the subsequent Ovaltine commercial also played up the domestic aspect.

Anne Davies, Eve Sims, and Antonia Deacock lived--and climbed--in a moment when women were expected to be homemakers. Domestic goddesses, yes. Intrepid explorers, not so much. Compared with the previous generation of women (which included Gertrude Bell, and also Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group), the postwar generation (the one that included Davies, Sims, and Deacock) lived in a society that was much more staid and conservative. World War II closed down certain opportunities, and created a society that was much more staid and conservative than the one that came before. The media treated the "housewives' expedition" as something of a joke, and subsequent accounts of European expeditions to Tibet largely ignored their accomplishments. Deacock wrote a book about her travels, but the "housewives' expedition" was soon forgotten.

These were women who understood the cost of taking a different path, and chose it anyway.

Read the Telegraph's recent story about the women and their expedition.

Visit Ovaltine's page and read more about the women and their film..