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Barbara Alex Toy FRGS (11 August 1908 – 18 July 2001) was an Australian-British travel writer, theatrical director, playwright, and screenplay writer. She is most famous for the series of books she wrote about her pioneering and solitary travels around the world in a Land Rover, undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. Toy was drawn to deserts, and so the majority of her journeys were in the arid lands of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Toy's first solo journey took place almost five years before the perhaps more celebrated six-man team Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition, a London to Singapore overland trip between September 1955 and March 1956 that was also undertaken in Land Rovers. ==Life before Land Rovers== Toy was born in Sydney, on 11 August 1908 to Bert Frank Claud Toy and Nellie Frederica Toy, née Lowing, one of two daughters born to the couple.〔 Her father, Bert Toy (1878–1931), was a newspaper editor and war correspondent. He had reported from the Boer War in South Africa and had worked on and edited newspapers in New Zealand and in Australia, including the ''Wairarapa Age'', the ''Sydney Morning Herald'', ''The Sunday Times'', ''The Sun'', ''The Bulletin'' (where he was literary editor) and the ''Australian Woman's Mirror''.〔 The family were well-read and eschewed formal education; consequently Toy was largely self-taught,〔 although she did attend Neutral Bay School in Sydney for a time. Her father encouraged Toy's interest in writing from an early age. In 1930 Toy married Ewing Rixson, a member of a well-known New York Quaker family. At the time of her marriage, Toy was a librarian at the Roycroft Library, a bookshop and library established by Frances Zabel in Rowe Street, Sydney, in the 1920s.〔 Rixson had a passion for books and travel, (at the time of their marriage he was already a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society), and introduced Toy to the world of travel. However, the couple gradually drifted apart, and separated from her husband, Toy moved to London in 1935.〔 In London Toy became involved in the theatrical world. After an unsuccessful stint as an actress,〔 from 1939 she worked behind the scenes at the Richmond Theatre in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames as assistant stage manager and then stage director.〔 She worked as a volunteer ambulance driver〔 and/or an air raid warden〔 during The Blitz. After bomb damage closed the Richmond Theatre in 1941,〔 Toy worked at the Welwyn Film Studios, where she met screenwriter and film director Norman Lee.〔〔 In 1943 under the pseudonym 'Norman Armstrong', she co-authored ''Lifeline'' with Lee, described as 'a play about the merchant navy in three acts' and her first published work, published by Samuel French.〔 In 1945, Toy travelled to Germany and the Netherlands for ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association, to compile a report on the state of theatre in liberated Western Europe. After she returned to England, Toy became the director of a new theatre production company with her friend Moie Charles. Together, they also wrote dramatisations of three novels.〔 In 1949 Toy and Charles approached Agatha Christie about adapting her 1930 novel ''Murder at the Vicarage'' into a play of the same name. Christie's official biography suggests that the play was written by Christie with changes then made by Charles and Toy, presumably enough for them to claim the credit. The play included a major change to the denouement. Whatever the truth of the authorship, Christie was enthusiastic about the play and attended its rehearsals and first night at The Playhouse in December 1949. The production ran for 126 performances.〔〔Morgan, Janet. ''Agatha Christie, A Biography.'' (Pages 269 and 271) Collins, 1984 ISBN 0-00-216330-6.〕 Toy and Charles also wrote ''The Man in Grey'', a play adaptation of the novel of the same name by Lady Eleanor Smith, and ''Random Harvest'', based on the book of the same name by James Hilton. Toy took over the management of Worthing Repertory Company at the Connaught Theatre in Worthing, a position she held until she resigned to go off on her first overland journey in late 1950.〔 Toy also co-authored a film screenplay with Norman Lee, an adaptation of W. W. Jacobs' 1902 horror story ''The Monkey's Paw'', the film of which was released in 1948. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Barbara Toy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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