Anne Mustoe: headmistress and round-the-world cyclist
It is an exceptional author who can supply a book with three appendices so varied as a technical specification of a bicycle, a timeline of the life of Cleopatra and an ichthyological listing.Admirers of the intrepid former headmistress turned round-the-world cyclist Anne Mustoe were well accustomed to such precise, detailed and charming information in the books in which she chronicled what she termed her “new career”. When she resolved to cycle round the world, Mustoe was 54, somewhat overweight and unfit, and without any idea of how to mend a puncture. She had not ridden a bike for 30 years, wobbled when she tried again, and she hated camping, picnics and discomfort.
Yet, inspired by the chance sighting of a solitary European man pedalling across the Great Thar Desert while she was riding a bus through Rajasthan on a holiday in India, she “traded in the Kurt Geiger shoes and the Alfa Romeo” for a pair of trainers and cycle clips.
Her Condor bicycle, customised for her by a mechanic with a workshop in the Old Kent Road, was bought for her as a leaving present from the girls at her school, and she was still riding it 22 years and about 100,000 miles later on her last cycle trip this year. .
Mustoe was born in Nottingham and educated at Nottingham High School before reading classics at Girton College, Cambridge. In her “old career” she worked in personnel and management training with the engineering company Guest Keen and Nettlefold and ran her own travel business.
Mustoe’s teaching career began at Francis Holland School, Clarence Gate, North London, teaching classics and economics. Later she became deputy head of Cobham Hall, Kent, and in 1978 was appointed to the headship of St Felix School, Southwold.
While at Saint Felix she served as president of the Girls’ School Association, chairman of ISIS, a Suffolk JP and a member of the final selection board for the Foreign Office and Home Civil Service, energetically promoting her school to parents around London and abroad, especially in the Gulf states, in the face of stiff competition from independent boys’ schools then opening their doors to girls.
She raised money to modernise the school boarding houses, strengthened the school’s teaching of Latin and reintroduced Greek, but also raised a new craft, design and technology building, and memorably entertained pupils with readings from female travellers, such as Freya Stark, who had undertaken hazardous journeys in remote areas.
The glimpse of the lone cyclist which inspired her own ambition to cycle round the world came in January 1983. She said it took her four years from that defining moment to screw up her courage, resign her job and cycle into the sunrise, but she calculated that she had no ties, her stepsons were married off, and she could just afford it if she lived modestly until her pension came through.
She set out from London to ride round the world from west to east in 1987 and completed the circumnavigation 12,000 miles and 15 months later. Her first book, A Bike Ride, dealt with all the preparations, route-planning, packing and budgeting, as well as the riding.
The extra dimension with which Mustoe sustained her travels was that she followed historical routes: Roman roads across Europe; Alexander the Great’s route from Greece to the Indus Valley; Pakistan and India with the Moghuls and the Raj; and so on. Across the United States she followed the great pioneer trails, and undeterred by downpours, heat, political turmoil or amorous waiters, she promptly decided to do it all over again, in reverse direction.
For the second ride, and subsequent book, Lone Traveller, she went from Rome, following Roman roads to Lisbon, the Conquistadors across South America, Captain Cook over the Pacific, and the Silk Route from China back to Rome. Special chapters dealt with the day-to-day difficulties of the voyage up the Amazon in small cargo boats, and cycling the Australian Outback, the Gobi Desert and the Karakoram Highway.
Two Wheels in the Dust, encapsulating five winters on the Indian sub-continent riding down from the mountains of Nepal, through India to the highlands of Sri Lanka, was itself a bicycle of a book, really two books in one — marrying incidents from the ancient Hindu epic of The Ramayana (printed in one typeface) to the account of Mustoe’s own travels in the same landscape (printed in another).
For Cleopatra’s Needle the indefatigable cyclist set off from the obelisk of that name on the Thames Embankment to ride back to its original location, Heliopolis in Egypt, hugging the waterways of rivers, canals, and coasts, and mountain streams for her route across the Alps, while Amber, Furs and *censored*leshells dealt with what were, by her standards, three short rides, the longest a mere 2,000 miles, in the paths of merchants in amber (the Amber route from the Baltic to the Mediterranean), furs (the Santa Fe Trail), and pilgrims (the pilgrims’ way from Le Puy to Santiago de Compostela).
Finally came Che Guevara and the Mountain of Silver in which she cycled from Buenos Aires in the wheeltracks of the 500cc Norton as ridden by Che and his friend Alberto Granado in early life, and recalled in the film The Motorcycle Diaries. On her return route Mustoe rode back to Buenos Aires by the Spanish Silver Road from the Bolivian Altiplano.
All her incident-packed journeys were recounted in a warm, accessible, no-nonsense prose in which a wry, understated humour was coupled with indefatigable fortitude, enthusiasm and optimism, making light of robberies, injuries, freak floods, storms, desert heat waves, blizzards in the Rockies and ferocious winds in Jutland and Patagonia — and even of being knocked off her bike by a short-sighted nonagenarian in a Fiat Panda.
Mustoe cycled off on her last expedition in May this year, but became ill in Syria. She died in Aleppo (Haleb).
Mustoe was married to Nelson Edwin Mustoe, QC, in 1960. He died in 1976. She is survived by her three stepsons, one of whom is a solo round-the-world yachtsman.
Anne Mustoe, headmistress, round-the-world cyclist and travel writer, was born on May 24, 1933. She died on November 10, 2009, aged 76
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