There's an old maxim that says, if you want to succeed in business find a need and fill it. And that, in a nutshell, is the story of Gerald and Norman Nairn, the men who pioneered the famous bus route across the Syrian Desert - the Nairn Way.
In a sense, the establishment of the transport service - the Nairn Transport Company - was accidental. After leaving their native New Zealand and serving in the British Army during World War I, the Nairns decided to set up a business in the Middle East selling automobiles. For the Nairns, it was an obvious choice. They had run a successful motorcycle dealership in New Zealand before the war, and knew, as well as anyone at the time, the internal working of the combustion engine. Their father, in fact, was one of the first people in New Zealand to own a car - a single cylinder, four-seater American Reo bought in 1905.
By the end of the next year, however, business was so bad that they made a second decision: to run the cars they couldn't sell. They opened a taxi service between Beirut and Haifa, in Palestine.
Because their taxis soon cut the travel time for the 112-kilometer journey (70-miles) to less than a day - compared to the three days then usual for horse-drawn conveyances - the Nairns soon had to schedule daily trips, which in turn meant additional drivers and more cars.
There were other difficulties too. The track between Acre and Haifa, for example, included an eight-mile stretch of beach which was often flooded at high tide. The Naims, equal to the challenge, took along a young boy who would ride on the running board and wade out in front of the car when the beach was underwater to find out if the water was shallow enough to allow passage of the vehicle.
Summer temperatures of 120f could cause inner tubes to melt to the tyres. They moved the service to run overnight. Tyres in any weather were replaced after one or two crossings at best.
On April 2,1923, the Nairns set off on the first of six exploratory trips from Damascus. Three days and 550 miles later the convoy - a Buick, an Oldsmobile and a Lancia pulled up in front of the Maude Hotel in Baghdad. After one of these trips, Norman Nairn proposed to British officials in Baghdad that he and his brother provide a regular mail service between Damascus and Baghdad. He pointed out that by using the desert track the normal time for mail deliveries between India and Great Britain could be cut down to nine or 10 days - instead of the customary six weeks needed to send mail by ship through the Suez Canal - by linking the overland route to the arrival of ships at Port Said.
The Nairns were soon making two weekly journeys instead of one carrying, in addition to mail and passengers, diplomatic pouches for the British, French, Italian, American, German and Russian embassies. The fact that these governments entrusted some of their secret dispatches to the Nairns is some indication of how highly esteemed the service had become.
They never missed a deadline. Mail times between London and Baghdad dropped from twenty four days to nine.
It was not long either before the crossing had become popular with some soon-to-be famous people: H. St. John Philby the British explorer of Arabia; writers Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell and, later, after the Naims had introduced buses into their desert service, the famous detective-story writer Agatha Christie; she crossed the desert in one of the Nairns' buses and, in her autobiography, described how she helped Gerald Nairn pack picnic lunches for the trip.
I have posted about their trucking transport business before, https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2012/08/1923-marmon-harrington-love-their.html but I hadn't read about them doing a txi and postal delivery business until now https://www.motorpunk.co.uk/articles/damascus-baghdad-cadillac-taxi/
http://fuchs-online.com/overlandmail/content/12/12_misc_pamphlets.htm
https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/198104/the.nairn.way.htm
By 1926 the Nairns were operating six-ton, American-made Safeway buses capable of carrying 16 passengers in comfortable, high-backed seats and almost two tons of luggage. With two drivers - which enabled the buses to drive at night too - the Naims found they could reduce the crossing time even more - to 20 hours.
The Safeways were a great success. Though they were heavy and liable to bog down in the desert mud during the brief rainy season in the winter, and though expensive to operate, they forced the Nairns to search for ways to economize - particularly through reductions in expenditure on tires.
With the Buicks and Cadillacs, the Nairns had discovered, they had to change their cotton-foundation tires every 4,000 miles. They realized that what they needed was a completely new type of tire, and eventually interested America's Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in the problem. Firestone began research into the development of a tire which could endure the heat of desert travel and focused on rayon, a new, synthetic fiber created by the Du Pont Company. Rayon seemed to offer the heat resistance cotton could not, and as the tires made with this synthetic used considerably less rubber in their manufacture, they were much cheaper to make. Eventually, a completely new type of tire came on the market, with a life expectancy of 15,000 miles.
All through the early 1920, s, the fiercely independent tribes of southern Syria - which refused to cooperate with the French Mandate authorities - saw the Nairn Transport Company as a natural target, especially when they learned that the company was carrying gold bullion across the desert for a number of banks.
In the previous year, a band of brigands had held up a convoy carrying gold bullion, seized the cargo and mortally wounded a driver, and when other incidents followed in 1926, the Nairns decided they could no longer risk the Syrian Desert crossing. To keep the service going, however, they began to use the southerly route to Baghdad: by way of Haifa, Janin, Nablus and Jerusalem in Palestine, across the Jordan Valley to Amman, northeast to Rutba - where six 15-meter-deep wells (50-feet) dating back to the Romans provide water - and then on to Baghdad.
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