Introduction

In 1961, my father, Allan Kent, who was 28 at the time, went on a road trip from Jersey to Athens overland in a Fiat Cinquecento with his friend Peter Hall. Peter was from Yorkshire and was a trumpet player and played in bands. I don't know if that was why he came to Jersey but it is quite likely because the tourist industry was booming at that time and there were lots of gigs for jazz musicians.

I was four years old in 1961 and I remember them setting off in the little Fiat loaded up with camping equipment. When they came back they brought presents and I got a plastic Roman sword with which I used to whack people ineffectually because it just folded at the hilt. During that winter somebody left it next to the boiler in our kitchen and it melted. Then my parents split up and my step-father entered our lives; he was a painter and decorator and fixed it by putting a piece of wood inside the blade and into the handle, which made it a much more formidable weapon.

In those days, a trip to Athens overland, via Communist Yugoslavia, would have been quite a prestigious feat, often on unmade roads, camping in fields en route, with little of the roadside comforts we now expect in the form of well-stocked service stations and hotels. They got to Athens and back in about four weeks which seems a bit too hasty when you read the account. You wish that they had taken the time to see more en route and have more chance encounters with locals, rather than just speeding as fast as possible to Athens and back. But my father ran the family fruit and veg shop at that time and the lead up to Christmas was the busiest time of the year, and maybe Peter had work to return to.

I don't know much about Peter other than that he came from Yorkshire (and ended up in California) but he was obviously decently educated (probably grammar school) and had literary aspirations. He writes well and has a lot of cultural references and is interested in history. He wrote his journal while they were travelling; if my father was driving, Peter wrote up his journal from the passenger seat otherwise he wrote it in the tent at night. He seemed to be the one pressing to visit the cultural and historic sites while my dad was happy to read, relax, cook, and fix the car.

Peter also seems to have taken most of the photos and I have never seen any that my dad owned so I assumed that they were all taken on Peter's camera.

I came across this manuscript while clearing out my father's office after he entered a residential home when he was 93 years old. I knew that he had been back in touch with Peter and I saw on the envelope (postal date 2000) that Peter had mailed it to him from California where he had retired to. The photos were also printed out but everything looked like it was printed on a home printer and the resolution was not great. There was no CD or thumb-drive in the envelope containing the original files so I had no choice but to scan the 90-ish pages and use AI to convert them back into individual files from which I created these web pages.

This photo of Allan and Peter waiting to fly back from Cherbourg to Jersey demonstrates how different european travel was in those days. The idea of driving your car into the front of a plane and sitting at the back seems incredible to us now.

More information on the Cherbourg-Jersey air link.

Rob Kent, October 29, 2026