VT Coughtrey - Brighton Hostel: Richard Branson

NOTES	Shortly after my little error of judgment, Jock came to see me. He said that he could no longer stay at the Hostel, now that I wasn't there. However, he wanted to do anything for me that was in his power, especially another publicity stunt. I jokingly suggested that he walk from Land's End to John 0'Groats, carrying a placard. Without hesitation, he agreed - there was no stopping him. Furthermore, he insisted that he should be pushing a pram, in which to collect the hoped-for large amounts of money. I called Bryan Breed, who had arranged the Buckingham Palace stunt for us a couple of months earlier and he readily agreed to help. It was arranged that, amid as much publicity as Bryan could manage to stir up, Jock would start from John o' Groats (he wanted to do it that way round, for some reason) and that I would accompany him for the first and last two or three days. Jock promised faithfully not to touch a drop of alcohol for the whole trek, however long it might take. In fact, he said that he felt this epic journey would give him his one last chance of giving up the drink.
	By the time the publicity was organized it was late November, or early December - not the best time to be walking through the Scottish Highlands. As I remember, we had given no thought at all to suitable clothing. Jock set out in his usual dosser's raiment - so did I, come to that! Someone (could it have been Bryan Breed himself?) paid our train fares from Brighton to Wick. When Jock turned up at Brighton station, I was dismayed by the message on the promised placard - CHRIST WAS A DOSSER, it said. I suspected it would be misinterpreted as an insult in the region of the Wee Free, but didn't like to say anything.
	I remember nothing of the journey to John O'Groats, which is odd, since it must have lasted for about 16 hours and involved four trains (including the Tube in London) and a mail bus for the last section, from Wick to John o' Groats, all with a battered old pram and that dreadful placard. An extraordinary thing is that all the reporters, photographers and TV cameras were at Kings Cross in London. The start of the great walk itself, at John o' Groats, was a huge anticlimax, with not a single representative of the news media - or anyone else, come to that, in sight. We dossed in a seafront shelter overnight and set off early the next morning.
	The placard soon began to be the cause of hostile comments and ugly moments, and Jock eventually agreed to throw it in a ditch. After three or four days of trudging through the inevitable rain and wind, we had got as far as Brora (about 65 miles). At that point, I decided I had had enough (it was about as far as I had agreed to go, anyway). As not a single penny had been put in the pram so far, and not a single reporter encountered, I gave Jock the option of giving up, but he wouldn't hear of it.
	I gave him a very small amount of money, then started hitching. The tickets had been one-way. The plan was for me to hitch back to save money. At first, this turned out to be very difficult - a mixture of short lifts and walking in increasingly bad conditions. By the time I reached the wastes of Rannoch Moor, the traffic became almost non-existent. Looking at the map now, I can't think why I chose that route at all. I trudged mile after mile across that desolate place, saturated, very cold and hungry. When I eventually came to the village of Tyndrum, I was sufficiently desperate to knock on the door of the police station, which was in fact the village policeman's private residence. The policeman and his wife were very concerned (though completely baffled as to how anyone could have been so daft as to walk across Rannoch Moor in November, in Summer clothes). They dried my clothes, made me a stack of sandwiches,and allowed me to stay for a couple of hours. Then the policeman stopped the next lorry to come through, and ordered the driver to give me a lift to Glasgow. The driver was not at all happy about this, but thought he had better do as the policeman said.
	In Glasgow, I booked into the YMCA for the night. Next morning, I walked to the southern outskirts of the city and resumed hitching. Initially, I was dismayed, because my first lift was only as far as Motherwell, but from there I immediately got another to Carlisle, then Leicester, then London (right to the usual hitching-place for Brighton, at the Oval), and arrived in Brighton the same evening. The 450 miles from Glasgow had taken only ten hours. This was to remain my all-time best hitching exploit.
	For about a week after that, Jock called nearly every day to give a progress report. He was steadily trundling his pram through the Highlands, apparently oblivious to the weather. He was now being recognized, occasionally, by people who had seen him in the papers or on television (as a result only of the advance publicity at Kings Cross), and they were sometimes putting money in the pram. However, the exercise now seemed pointless to me, as he was having to spend the money they gave him on food and more sensible clothing. It was not pointless to Jock, though. He had a grim determination to see it through.
This achievement deserves a mention on the websites that celebrate the history of the 'End-to-ender' as they call the Land's End to John O'Groats walk. But as there are no photographs or any other proof that it happened, I fear that this account is destined to remain the only record of it.	Suddenly, though, the calls stopped. I was concerned, but not concerned enough, it seems, do anything about trying to track him down. Then, one day, three or four months later, he turned up at the Duke Street office. Not only had he completed the trek from John o' Groats to Land's End, he had decided to carry on walking, back to Brighton! The pram had fallen apart somewhere along the way, but he had nevertheless managed to collect quite a lot of money, once he had reached more populous regions. Although he had used some of it to live on, there was a fair amount left, which he handed over. Had he called me from important points along the way, so that I could have kept the publicity going, the money would have amounted to much more. But more publicity, he said, was exactly what he had feared, and that was why he had stopped calling. There was no doubt at all in my mind that he had in fact walked the whole way from John o' Groats to Brighton via Land's End - a distance of well over a thousand miles. The only reporters on the whole adventure had been at Kings Cross, so there was advance publicity only. The event as it was actually happening wasn't covered at all. To my mind, this effort by a meths drinker in his sixties remains a great unsung achievement - until my mouse click that will send this to the Web, that is! I'm afraid I can't recall ever having seen or heard of Jock again, after that reunion at the end of his trek.