In 1959 my uncle, Michael Hetherington, took an actual elephant called Jumbo over the Alps.

For two thousand years historians have been arguing about what route Hannibal took when he crossed the Alps in 218 BC with his 35,000 strong army and a number of elephants to wage war against the Romans.

My uncle and his team had a theory the route led up from Montmelian in the Savoie region of France over the Col de Clapier into Italy. All they needed was to try that with an elephant, which luckily for them the British Consul General in Turin was able to source from the Turin Zoo. 

Expedition leader John Hoyte subsequently wrote Trunk Road for Hannibal. This charming book had pride of place on our family bookshelf and was one of the first books I gravitated towards as a youngster, drawn in by the old black and white photographs, the illustrations and the elephant adventure. 

In 2008 my uncle disappeared while hiking in the Drakensberg mountains in South Africa, and despite one of the largest rescue operations ever mounted in the area, he was never seen again.

He remains forever in my memory as a kind, fun, and intelligent man (he taught the classics and was on the expedition primarily because he was able to interpret the ancient text of Polybius who wrote on Hannibal’s advances into Italy shortly after they occurred).

Earlier this summer two friends from near my Devon village, my cousin, my brother, my nephew and his Australian friend set off on bikes with a much smaller, inflatable elephant to retrace the route of the 1959 expedition from Montmelian to Turin.

It was an incredible trip, full of pathos and discovery – and the realisation that while so much has changed since 1959 when my uncle, his friends and Jumbo went through the small valley villages, the beauty and majesty of those mountains remain forever.

You would need to be in your mid 70s or older to remember actually witnessing the 1959 expedition and we had great fun stopping people to ask them if they did. While some could remember hearing about it, none had actually witnessed it.  

That is until we summited the top of Col de Cenis at the highest point of our ride.  

In a small hostelry on the side of the road we found three generations of women working behind the counter. The eldest, born in 1941, had been helping in her parents’ hotel in 1959 and she remembered the expedition coming through.

She led me to a side wall where among various other bits of paraphernalia pinned to a board was an old, faded newspaper cutting with a photograph of my uncle and Jumbo crossing the border post just further on from where we stood.  

I gave her a laminated copy of a photograph of my uncle riding atop Jumbo. In broken English, and with a wonderful smile she told me she would
put that up next to the newspaper cutting.