The African expedition doomed for disaster Louise of Argyll" relieved of her burdens to clear a hummock in the Victoria Falls Gorge (Pic: Stuart Nicoll) The design was perfected over four months of testing, with engineers adding stronger and wider springs for rough terrain and extra-high wheels to give the car 14in clearance. "Louise" comprised the latest in British design: the radiator came from Manchester, the tyres from Birmingham, the springs from Leeds and the steering wheel from Northampton. It was also supposed to convert into a pontoon but when this technology was tested on the River Leven in Dunbartonshire, the car began to sink. In spite of its flaws, Kelsey sent the car down to London to be fitted with beds and filled with a library of books and a gramophone. The result was so peculiar that police had to keep crowds of onlookers off the road when the car was paraded outside the Telegraph's Fleet Street offices. In an era when fewer than one in 350 people owned a car, this expedition was "as exotic as going to the moon today," according to Tim Aymes, secretary of the Scottish Motor Museum Trust. The party sailed from Southampton on July 19, and on the morning of August 29, they drove through Cape Town, waving a Union Jack at the assembled crowds. Within hours of their departure, the car's shortcomings became apparent. They are chronicled in embarrassing detail in Macaskill's diary. The slim black volume, with its handwritten references to burst gearboxes, frail springs and bent front axles, is in the charge of Macaskill's daughter Morag, now 78, at her home in Mulgavie, near Glasgow. Other treasured souvenirs of the expedition include her father's greyish-green bush shirt, ripped at the collar and stained by grass; his small black binoculars in their battered case; two 15ft python skins; and a rhinoceros horn. "Road very heavy," reads the entry from that first day. Had to stop for water 10 miles out. Radiator burst; tried [to] solder it - no use; stayed all night at roadside. Things hardly improved. He writes again a few days later: "Burst one driving axle; shaft stuck in drift; drawn out by oxen; got to Bala Bala - bad going." Kelsey's grandson, Mark Hodgkin, characterises his grandfather as a "gung-ho but rather incompetent adventurer." "He was a fairly swashbuckling sort of bloke," says the 64-year-old. His enthusiasm led to not preparing for the trip as sensibly as he should have done. Even so, the explorers made steady progress for the first two months, covering as many as 94 miles a day as they drove east to Johannesburg and then north to Bulawayo, in what was then Southern Rhodesia. Such speed was impressive given the terrain. "To refer to a 'track" or 'road" is rather misleading," Gilliland wrote in one of his regular updates. For recently we have struck nothing which in the widest use of the words could be called either. All that is left is the spoor of the last wagons that travelled by this route, and in many places it is very, very faint. They had to contend with nature, too. Five of the group slept on the ground each night while Macaskill looked after the car. One night, Pickersgill-Cunliffe woke to find a python slithering across his stomach. "I remember my dad saying they were all in the car beside him before he could blink," chuckles Morag. He didn't like the look of the terrain because there were rocks and stones and in Skye [where he was born] that is where you get adders and grass snakes. Another time, the car broke down in the Kalahari Desert. My father had his head in the engine, and this ostrich came over to see what was going on. He looked up and said: 'I wonder if it could beat the speed we're going?"" His humour masked flagging morale as the group ran short of food, petrol and money. Scott-Brown abandoned the expedition, apparently insisting a train journey would make for better pictures, and the count decided to leave to concentrate on hunting game. At the end of October, Macaskill contracted blackwater fever, a potentially lethal complication of malaria. Remarkably, it took him only three weeks to recover, but he was too weak to continue driving, and sailed back to London in early December. Over the next four months, the remaining crew managed to drive only a few hundred miles further, reaching Serenje in Northern Rhodesia, about a third of the way to Cairo. This is where Kelsey made the fateful decision to go hunting on Easter Sunday and encountered a leopard. He survived the attack and as he lay in a hospital bed in Northern Rhodesia, he described his tussle in a letter to his old headmaster: "Leopard and me met. He made a short rush at me. My magazine jammed, and leopard did good damage to my rifle. Then we had a hand-to-hand fight, and I could only keep him on the ground by thrusting my hand in his mouth or jaw... I have to stop every now and again, as I go off in a faint. He died 46 days later on May 28 after a failed operation on his septic wounds. "We laid him, wrapped in blankets and in the Union Jack, to rest in the bush," wrote Gilliland. We rolled over his lonely grave a block of granite, on which we carved a cross, together with his name and the date of his death. Such is the tragic end of the Cape to Cairo Expedition. He left behind a wife, his three-year-old daughter Brigit, and sizeable debts. And what of the rest of the group? Scott-Brown and the count ended up in East Africa, where the Germans held them prisoner during the First World War; and Pickersgill-Cunliffe died fighting for the British at Gallipoli in 1915 after rejoining his old Worcestershire regiment in England the year before. The car that had failed them so badly was left behind in Rhodesia and was used to carry supplies by locals building a railway. Some 15 years later the general manager of the railway told a colonel researching the trip: "The car has given wonderful service - but was always difficult to start." Gilliland remained at the Telegraph, covering other adventures for two decades more. The adventurous spirit of their descendants is a more lasting legacy. Both Morag Macaskill and Mark Hodgkin separately hope to recreate the drive, but the great-grandson of John Pickersgill-Cunliffe's sister has already planned his expedition, which starts in September. John Jessop, 73, will drive along the original route with his wife in a 26-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser, camping along the way. "We don't want to stay in hotels," says Jessop. We want to see the route as they would have done, and see how it's changed. With luck, though, we won't encounter any leopards - and if we do we probably wouldn't go out of our way to aggravate them.