Richard Ellis: A British HGV Driver’s Life in 15 Passports
Richard of Arabia: A British Trucker’s Life in 15 Passports
Text & Pictures by Krissy Ellis, Kuwait
I got in touch with Krissy while she was posting a picture of twelve UK passports and this pic made me curious, so I contacted her. Krissy was so kind to write about her father’s life who was working as a “Heavy Goods Vehicle Driver” in the Middle East. For sure a challenging job at such places and times. Here is his story which is at the same time also some kind of a memorial of Richard for family & friends.
Richard Ellis: “Richard of Arabia”
Richard Ellis’s love affair with the Middle East began in 1978, when he boarded a plane for Saudi Arabia for the first time. He had never left England before. Decades later, he would be buried in the Kuwait Christian Cemetery in Sulaibikhat, the same desert region where his adventures had started. He knew his final flight from South Africa to Kuwait was his last journey. He was going home.
He left behind 15 British passports.
A Childhood Shaped by Stamps
Written by his daughter, Krissy Ellis.
From a young age I was fascinated by my father’s passports. The strange stamps, the visas from countries I could barely find on a map, the dated photographs that made me laugh. Even today, I feel a jolt of excitement when a new stamp hits my own passport. I am a traveler, just like he was.
No Ordinary Family
We did not take holidays to Spain or Disney Land. We spent Christmas in Czechoslovakia, visited villages in Romania, and made road trips from Istanbul back to England in my father’s truck. Before he passed, I asked him to sit with me and trace the routes we had traveled across Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s, using his passports as our map. He died on January 24, 2014, aged 63, before we could finish.
My father always said he had lived the life of two men. At the condolences held for him in Kuwait, visitors came from fifteen different countries.
Where It All Began: Saudi Arabia, 1978
In his own words.
I thought it was the heat from the engines when I stepped off the 747 at night. I soon realized it was the summer air itself, still 30 degrees Celsius after dark. The arrivals terminal was small and chaotic. Customs officers spoke a language I had never heard. There was no queue. The man with the longest arm got served first. Someone was holding a board with my name on it.
Adnan drove me to the villa in the middle of the night. Outside stood a handmade wooden hut with a corrugated tin roof held down by stones. My room had three other occupants. The primitive air conditioning was made from reeds with water running down them and a fan blowing from outside. Mosquitoes. Geckos on the walls. Smells I had no reference for.
I drifted in and out of sleep until I heard English voices. Three experienced truckers. I had held my HGV license for less than a year and had never left the UK. This was the place I had pressured a mate to get me a job. I had arrived in Saudi Arabia. And I very quickly understood I knew almost nothing.
The Early Weeks: Learning the Hard Way
Weeks passed. I still was not used to the cockroaches, the heat, or the near-total absence of air conditioning in the trucks. Being woken by sweat running down your face. Constant stomach illness. No showers. And yet something kept me there.
I was learning about myself and about the culture around me. I was also earning in a single month what a general practitioner earned back home in England. My drive to rebuild what I had lost in a divorce was stronger than any discomfort.
The contrast in Saudi driving culture was extreme. The same people who moved through life with a relaxed “Inshallah” attitude became entirely different on the roads. The constant horn. The impatience. The inability to read danger. And the reality that in any accident involving a foreigner, the foreigner would be blamed simply for being present.
I started learning Arabic numbers and greetings. I ordered an omelette at a roadside cafe. The waiter brought liver and onions. Still a lot to learn.
The Novice Becomes a Professional
The experienced drivers I met in Saudi Arabia were patient with me. They did not hide their amusement at my inexperience, but they also taught me things no manual covered. How to change a truck wheel on the side of a desert road. How to split and reassemble a Trilex three-piece wheel. How to read dangerous roads at night.
I was running between Riyadh and Dammam on the old two-lane highway, overtaking trucks loaded with 70 tons of cement, watching for vehicles approaching head-on with no marker lights. The desert on either side of that road was littered with wrecked vehicles.
It was in Dammam that I first encountered Rynart Transport. Their Turkish drivers were some of the most professional people I had ever met. They treated me with a hospitality I had not encountered before. Many of them became lifelong contacts, and I met them again on overland routes across Europe for years afterward.
Three Decades on the Road
In 1982, when the Iran-Iraq conflict began, my father and his close friend Tony Baker were stranded at Umm Qasr Port in Iraq. They escaped and reached safety in Kuwait.
By around 1986, he had completed what was at that time one of the longest overland truck journeys undertaken: England to Salalah, Oman. The local newspaper, The Newark Advertiser, covered the story. Parents Magazine and News of the World interviewed both my parents in 1983 under the headline “Husbands That Work Away From Home.”
In the 1990s, he transported humanitarian aid to orphanages across Romania on behalf of TV Times, alongside British actors from the television series The Bill. He and my mother also organized and led a convoy of 20 HGV vehicles carrying aid to villages in Albania. Additional deliveries were made on behalf of Save the Children, the British Red Cross, and the International Red Cross throughout Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia.
In the mid-1990s, my parents formed their own transport company. When drivers were waiting for return loads to Europe, my mother would insist they come inside for a home-cooked meal. Strange languages became a regular feature at the dinner table.
Kuwait: Trainer, Mentor, and Institution
In the late 1990s, my father shifted from driving to driver training. He moved back to Kuwait to consult for a large transportation company and deliver Defensive Driver Training courses for cars, buses, and HGVs.
He founded the first driver training academy at Altamira Transport Company in Kuwait. He later established a second academy for KGL (Kuwait Gulf Link). Standing at 6 foot 8 inches, he was known as Big Rick. His presence alone commanded attention.
His projects expanded. He traveled to Ghana to recruit and test drivers for Middle Eastern contracts, personally ensuring that only the most capable drivers were selected and that they were treated fairly once they arrived. He was known within the expatriate community for his outspoken position on the rights of foreign workers in the region.
His work also took him to India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. In the early 2000s he ran defensive driving programs for military units, traffic police, and major oil companies including Chevron, Kuwait Oil Company, and Kuwait Petroleum.
In 2013, he returned to Saudi Arabia for the first time in 20 years. He said nothing looked familiar. Only the hospitality and the roadside cafes.
South Africa: A Final Home
In later years, my parents settled in South Africa between projects. It became their paradise. My father continued writing, this time for the Cape Argus newspaper, regularly pushing for the enforcement of safe driving standards. He was vocal, persistent, and difficult to ignore. There was not a vehicle he could not drive, a language he would not attempt, or a country he would not wander into. Richard Ellis. A Nomad Bedouin in his own right.
The 15 Passports
We found a total of 15 British passports, some of which are two passports stapled together. His final passport remains with my mother. Each black passport contains 94 stamp pages. The first was issued on October 21, 1977, at the Liverpool Post Office, United Kingdom. The last was issued on July 2, 2008, at the British Embassy in Kuwait, expiring April 2, 2019. Taken together, they are not just a travel document collection. They are a biography.
Dear Krissy, thank you very much for all your efforts to share this great story with us.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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