Times article text - 26 April 2013

The following appeared in The Times on 26 April, but isn't accessible without subscription, so we've reprinted it here. No copyright infringement intended!

All her life Liz Barron had wanted to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps. When he was 21 Leslie Pardoe boarded a train in his home town, Barry, South Wales, and asked the conductor for a first class ticket to Shanghai.

Last week, precisely 100 years to the minute since her grandfather set off on his great adventure, Mrs Barron and her husband Tony, 71, boarded a train at Barry and asked the guard for “two first class tickets to Shanghai”.

The couple from Southampton are making their way across Europe and central Asia following exactly the same route as Mr Pardoe, who was on his way to take up the post of deputy city engineer in China’s largest city.

The journey took him first to Moscow, where he boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway, arriving in Shanghai exactly 15 days later. Mr Pardoe travelled first class to Moscow for £10 7s 3d, a sum that would not even get him to Cardiff today.

Mrs Barron had to wait until she was a 63-year-old grandmother to make the journey, which is costing her and her husband £25,000, although they will be making several stops along the way.

The couple began their journey — 6,000 miles as the crow flies — on foot outside the front door of Mr Pardoe’s former home at 28 Romilly Road, Barry.

They boarded the 15.45 to Cardiff, and they caught the train to Paddington. In London they dined at the same Whitehall hotel as Mr Pardoe a century ago before crossing the Channel from Ramsgate to Ostend.

He had travelled with four other young men off to seek their fortunes in the Orient, but their journey nearly ended before they had got half way when their train was derailed just outside Moscow.

Today’s journey to Moscow continued successfully via Brussels, Cologne, Berlin and Warsaw. After Moscow Mr and Mrs Barron will spend four nights on the train to Listvyanka on Lake Baikal in Siberia. From there the Trans-Manchurian railway will take them via Harbin to Changchun in northern China.

The last leg of their journey is the only part that deviates from the original route. Mr Pardoe was able to catch the ferry from Dalien in China to Shanghai, a three day journey, but today’s travellers will take the overnight train from Changchun and arrive in Shanghai on May 14.

Mr Pardoe spent 27 years in the Far East, leaving only when the Japanese invaded in 1940. He met his wife Margaret in Shanghai not long after he arrived and they married in 1916. Mrs Baron’s father, John, was the youngest of four children.

Mrs Barron said: “As a little girl I was fascinated with all the Chinese artifacts in my grandma’s house. One day Grandpa’s diary turned up and I decided that I had to follow what he’d done.

“I then realised we were close to the 100-year anniversary of his trip and everything fell into place. He kept a diary, so we have a pretty good idea of where he went.

“It really was a remarkable adventure,” she said, “and the start of a very eventful life in Shanghai.”