Don’t want to pee on anyone’s bonfire but having been a member for a long time and never having contributed much I thought some other members might be interested in some of my ramblings, memories and pictures of my life and times in this ridiculous industry, I intend pulling no punches (haulage rates included) The only problem is that being a silver surfer I have yet to work out how to upload my photos so might have to call on the expertise of pete359 etc I just hope it works. Wish me luck here goes!!
Do your best dude.Will be very welcome and appreciated I,m sure. regards,jack. 
Whilst I await assistance in my plight to upload photos I thought I would give a bit of background. I grew up in a tiny hamlet in North Gloucestershire so close to the Worcestershire border that our cottage was the penultimate dwelling before the River Carrant- The Border or should I say County Boundary. When I was about eleven my father sent me on my bicycle to the end of the village to the yard of E Warner & Son Ltd to ask Ted Warner if he would collect our sow and ten piglets and take them to Gloucester Market. The vehicle which came to collect them on the Monday morning was a Bedford O with a Perkins P6 engine and a livestock container by Jennings of Sandbach registration number FDF 984 which Ted had purchased second hand from W E Lusty of Birdlip. Father decided that I should accompany the pigs to market as he couldn’t take time off work. Probably the worst decision he ever made, I was in absolute heaven riding in that wagon with Brian Brassington.I had had an encounter with a P6 in a 1948 Fordson Major E27N on a local farm as I had always been fascinated by all things mechanical, but all that paled into insignificance - I WAS HOOKED!! From then I spent every available minute in their yard washing out boxes or fuelling up - some diesel some petrol eventually being allowed to drive to wash then to park them.Needless to say this affected my education considerably because all I thought about 24/7 was lorries! By this time the fleet had grown considerably being predominately Seddons also BMC’s Thames Traders and a lone Atkinson with a 4LK Gardner UOA 692 which was bought from A G Taylor of Hylton Road Worcester.When I was 15 on school holidays I went with Terry Brookes in a BMC FFK to Andoversford market to load cattle,lambs and pigs for delivery to City Meats in Birmingham .En Route disaster struck when we were involved in a very serious collision with an oncoming truck causing 2613 FH to “fall over” at Crabbs Cross Redditch (no M5 then) most of the livestock came out through the roof and miraculously all survived .All were coralled by a human cordon until our Albion Reiver 6220 DD arrived to take them onward .Needless to say 2613 FH was write off and was replaced with a Dodge D308 reg 1572 DG. At this point I am having a break to await feedback in case it is too boring or too much detail I promise it won’t all be like this as I don’t have many pics of these early days and humble beginnings, I awit your comments with baited breath!!
Brilliant, everyone’s memories of those times are interesting to the rest of us who read this blog.
John
Great stuff Laurie, don’t stop now mate, you have got the interest started and we eagerly await the next installment.
Steve.
Keep it going…
This is about my 50th attempt to upload a photo so here I go again! Whitesnake - the inimitable David Coverdalle
ALLEBLOODYLULIA!!! This picture was taken on a Sunday morning in February 1962 the day she arrived brand new from Praills of Hereford ,the following day I think it was the largest wagon to have gone into Gloucester market apart from a double decker Mk V AEC Mammoth Major belonging to Thomas Muckle from somewhere in Northumberland. In the background right of the photo is 2613 FH which fell over at Crabbs Cross and beside that is a Seddon UDD 663.I apologise for the poor quality of the photo. I have somewhere got an article that I wrote about the Reiver but despite having had two articles published in Heritage Commercials in 2007 it was not published so I will try and dig it out and put it on here.However that is the end of my night trunk at the keyboard so as Monsieur Saviem would say "a toute a l’heure mes amis au revoir " Just hope I can reemember how I uploaded the photo !
Hi Laurie Dryver, great stuff it’s good to read about how it was with wagons of my era, specially with the detail you present and you’ll get the photo thing in time. I have tried one or two different photo editing programs, none I find easier to use than Picasa, to highlight your beloved Reiver pic, I have resized and added a bit of contrast Hope that is okay with you, looking forward to the next instalment.
Click on the pic and it’ll come up nicely.
Oily
Well I’ve found the promised article but I fear that if I scan it and post it on here ,the font will be too small to read so I will edit it and re-type it so here goes!
Fog hung like an impenetrable blanket in the early hours of a winters morning at Beaconsfield on the A40, the bark of the Leyland 350 in the Albion Reiver had subsided to whimper, 10 mph was too fast, I couldn’t see the kerb. No I was not the driver, but a 15 year old schoolboy who used to leave school in the afternoon, go home ,change clothes, escape through the bedroom window, down the pear tree and run to wait in the chapel porch to wait for the sound of the Reiver ascending the railway bridge. I obviously felt that that a trip to London was eminently more beneficial educationally than sitting at home doing history homework. Also it was worth the thrashing I would get from the old man on my return! (Even at this stage in my life I hadn’t realised that you must always consider the far reaching consequences of any action you take or any decision you make!)
We were returning from a trip to T Wall & Sons. Atlas road London NW 10 undertaken to deliver a load of pigs where they (in the nicest possible way) would be converted into sausages and bacon. These pigs or heavy hogs as they were known. weighed 14 score which is 280lbs imperial weight and as I have not yet gone decimal I could not possibly convert that from avoirdupois into metric weight. Suffice to say that if you had 100 of them in the luxurious transport accommodation attached to the Reiver manufactured by J H Thorne of Dorrington , Shropshire - YOU WERE BLOODY HEAVY!! They made the old girl scort (a local colloquialism for pull hard or grunt - no pun intended) as we ascended the Cotswolds then the Chilterns on the outward trip.I cannot imagine what the attraction it certainly wasn’t the smell of our passengers or their bodily discharges which always stunk of ammonia which really stung the eyeballs when unloading them. I often wondered if I was only taken to crawl under the decks, being small in stature and to save Tim Bown from having to endure the stench !! Still I had home made hamburgers to look forward to at Frank Blunt’s cafe at Stokenchurch. (I think I remember being told that our Mr Blunt was something to do with London-Welsh Transport) To be continued-please let me know when I’m boring you!!
oiltreader:
Hi Laurie Dryver, great stuff it’s good to read about how it was with wagons of my era, specially with the detail you present and you’ll get the photo thing in time. I have tried one or two different photo editing programs, none I find easier to use than Picasa, to highlight your beloved Reiver pic, I have resized and added a bit of contrast Hope that is okay with you, looking forward to the next instalment.
Click on the pic and it’ll come up nicely.
Oily
Hi Oily thanks for your kind remarks and advice. I have read and seen a lot of your stuff on here hope mine is as good. Thanks and regards Noel
great posting noel, keep it coming!!just read your replyto my question about george hicks. when he left young georges he started upa clearing house taking quite a lot of georges work with him!!. me and quite e few other foresters started to work for him including fred read, i started late 1972 and everything was fine for about two years, and then the cheques stopped coming!. he then and went back to dagenham, and that was the last we seen of him and a lot of our money !!!
While we are at Blunts I am going to digress to relate fascinating story ,well at least I think it is! Late one night I was in there , not with Tim but with Ken Warner (nephew of the gaffer) in 427 AD a Mk 15/10 Seddon ,and if any of you remember the lorry park there you will know it was like a bloody assault course. There was a young lad there from BRS Tuffnel Park.Eight legger Octopus pulling a Dyson dangler and he was stuck having a trailing axle he had got the trailing axle on high ground and consequently the drive was doing nowt! His Dad who also did the same job i.e changing over with South Wales boys in Cheltenham or Gloucester had left about 5 minutes earlier so we scrounged a chain gave him a ■■■■■■ and he was on his way rejoicing. We move on now to about 1974 I had just bought my first Volvo, an F86 UDD 639 H and had just loaded a hanball load of bagged fishmeal in Hull Anyone who has ever done it
will know that you cannot even go near the cab until you have showered which I did. Having parked up it was off to a local for food and to imbibe a few (not the Earl de Grey) I go in order my scoff and a pint and go and sit by this bloke who is on his own .As soon as I looked at him I thought I know him as with registration numbers I never forget a face , good job really cos we never had a mirror in our bathroom. I thought for a minute then I twigged and said do you and your old man still work for BRS out of Tuffnel Park?
Well the look on his face was priceless his jaw dropped and he stared at me and said “Do I know you?” Probably not says I but I know you! How says he. I said cast your mind back to 1962 one night at Blunts do you remember a bloke with a cattle wagon giving you a tow? yes I do he said and do you remember he had a young lad with him? Yes I do he said .I said well mister cockney boy- that was me!! To say he was speechless would be an understatement but I bought no more beer that night - like the member says on here it’s a small world but I wouldn’t want to paint it .Little things like that made the job just that little better!!
Anyway back to the original story. I did however have an ulterior motive for these nocturnal excursions which will become apparent shortly. Tim (real name Alfred Charles Bown) would have spent all of the day doing as many as eight collections of our passengers from farms all over Gloucestershire and Herefordshire returning to the yard for fuel in the late afternoon after which I jumped aboard .London was a fair hike in those days and there being no M40 every village had to be invaded by tremendous volumes of heavy traffic (the A40 being the main Haverfordwest to London trunk road) How I remember the halcyon visits to all of the cafes en route. On the way home Tim having started at about 7am would have the “puff” by about Burford or Northleach he would persrvere as long as he could but eventually I would hear those magic words I had waited so patiently for “It’s no good kid you’ll have to have her I’m knackered” I’m not going to enlarge on what happened next but all I will say is that if I missed a gear,tired or not, I got a poke with the pig prod, which looks as harmless as a large torch but contains a few small batteries and a large induction coil! Shocking business! Thats it for now guys- one more episode then one episode to cover about 8 boring years then in to the real bones of it with photos! I’m sorry if I have bored the pants off you but I wanted to explain how and why I did it for so many years and in fact I will be 68 in a few weeks and I am still working in the industry now ! Regards and thanks
noel luving these memories of yours keep them coming regards rowly ward
rward:
noel luving these memories of yours keep them coming regards rowly ward
Rowly my dear friend thank you so much That is indeed an accolade from you ! There is lots to come hope you continue to enjoy it but of course you know me I would rather be speaking it than writing it! Regards Noel
Of course things did no always go to plan, as I well remember on one fateful night later in 1962. Wall’s other meat processing plant was in Godley near Hyde in Cheshire which was a real long distance job and a bit touch and go to get back in time for school bearing in mind in those days it was A38 from Tewkesbury to Worcester then A449 Worcester to Kidderminster then Wolverhampton to The Sunset Cafe at Penkridge for a cuppa then on to the M6 but only to Stafford I think IIRC A34 to Stoke then Macclesfield and all the way from there cross country. I remember one morning my maths master asking me for my homework and I said sorry Sir but I’ve left it in the lorry - he went nuts. Ironically he took early retirement and went lorry driving. However I digress, no surprise there. On this fateful night the inevitable happened and the previously trusty Reiver expired at Newcastle under Lyne. Injector pump failure was the prognosis by the diesel doctor from a firm in Burslem . That poor sod fitted a new pump on the side of the road on a night when it was cold enough for two pairs of bracers and a thermal walking stick and as it was the old LAD cab the operation had to be performed from the passenger side footwell and the nearside chassis.Needless to say our passengers had become more than a little restless but they disembarked ok at Godley without further incident. I was too late for school but after lengthy negotiation with my father and his belt we came to a compromise that if I cleaned out the pigs and dug the garden I would avoid my usual punishment.In retrospect he knew he was fighting a losing battle the diesel fumes would always win.As a father myself I can understand his disappointment at watching your son & heir, whose education was costing him good money, going down the slippery slope of road haulage.
If I had paid attention to my schoolmasters I would have been able to do declension of all Latin verbs including the irregular ones but alas my window seat in the years preceding my GCE “O” levels provided me with a bird’s eye view of the A38 so I could keep up to speed with what was happening in the road haulage industry. Would I see an AEC Mustang Chinese six from the fleet of George Morcom (R G Morcom Ltd ,Fraddon, Cornwall or an Octopus from the fleet of Bill Entress from Swansea or I might just catch a glimpse of a man who was my hero at the time Bill W G R Lloyd & Sons from Stormy Down,Pyle .On my nocturnal journeys I had become a veteran of the A40 and I had the extreme good fortune to meet the illustrious Bill Lloyd in Blunts resplendent in flat cap and bib and brace overalls. What a fascinating man he never dis missed me because I was a boy he always had time for me. He told me that he would load steel from South Wales to London and return with bacon in hessian bags roped and sheeted on his Reiver. I cannot possibly hold these people responsible for the fact that I am not a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon, suffice to say that I have no regrets and if I had time over would do it all again.
I could wax lyrical for ever on subjects like these, my knowledge is due to the fact that I hung up my Roy Rogers cowboy outfit at the age of eleven and decided that I wanted to grow with these men and their machines, I was absolutely in awe of them!!
That’s it for today hope you enjoy!!
I had the same sort of upbringing as you Noel, work hard in school and get a good job,or go to college etc. Both of my Sisters who are younger than I am went to college university etc and became school teachers. I didn’t want to work in a bank or an office, and couldn’t wait to leave school at 15.
I didn’t do any homework for the 11 plus and failed, as I didn’t want to go to Grammar school until I was 16. All I wanted to do was drive lorries, and given my time again, the outcome would be the same.
Keep your memoirs coming, great read.
Cheers Dave.
yes, nice stories keep them coming Ade
Dave the Renegade:
I had the same sort of upbringing as you Noel, work hard in school and get a good job,or go to college etc. Both of my Sisters who are younger than I am went to college university etc and became school teachers. I didn’t want to work in a bank or an office, and couldn’t wait to leave school at 15.
I didn’t do any homework for the 11 plus and failed, as I didn’t want to go to Grammar school until I was 16. All I wanted to do was drive lorries, and given my time again, the outcome would be the same.Keep your memoirs coming, great read.
Cheers Dave.
Thanks Dave nice to hear from you glad you are enjoying it wont be long till you get to see pics of my F10 which used to load from the Gore Regards Noel