Mushroomman, No it wasn’t me you bumped into I went to Izmir with the BMC parts in the summer of that year, the route then was pretty longway round as we were not allowed to use the military road to Bursa, so it was out to Adapazari, turn right over the mountain to Afyon and then turn right again and run straght to Izmir.
Sooty was indeed married to the daughter of Mack trucks and that is probably why he bought them in the fist place, although he did have a few Seddon/Atkinsons when I iwas there.
I had one of the Macks for that trip and it hade this fancy two stick gearbox, but it did run well and, as you know, they have a very nice bed.
Sooty was turkish through and through but educated at Harvard in the USA. His live in Girlfriend was named Frederika. United S was his company also and the office was in Munich.
When he made me opewrations manager I quickly found out that the company was a shambles, mnost down to the way he rean it. All the tractors were on private card road fund licences, so all export loads had to be atken to Dover, by the three small mack bulldog trucks that he had taxed for this purpose and of course to tip and load trailers in the UK.
Drivers ran solo to Dover, picked up their trailer and shipped out. The problem was that as he would not service in Rainham the Turkish drivers could always be found at Van Hoves, in Belgium waiting to get repairs done. Once done they would make their way to Munich, usually cvia the Train, where they would fill up, collect enough money to get them to Istanbul, then go out and buy all sorts of goodies that they could trade with on the way down.
Once a turk hit Istanbul they would park the trucks in Erciyes yard which was just before the Londra, switch the fridges of and go home for a few days. No matter that chocolate was almost certainly going to melt as they would do a quick cool down at the border to firm it up again. I am sure that the Kuwaiti’s think that Maltezers are white and come in bunches. How we never got a claim I shall never know.
This level of performance meant that each truck was ponly doing six middle east loads a year, which is disgraceful, but if he paid them then perhaps they might have performed better. The English drivers were no better, because they were always waiting for either money or diesel.
OHS is a book on its own and I could go on and on and on about the shables that it was. It was only their size that kept them the contracts that thery had with Mars and Rowntrees.
Every morning at 1100hrs all the managers had to be in his office to give him the position with their department. I had a sheet of paper with all 75 tractors and 135 trailers and he wanted to know where every bit of the equipment was. I used to call it the daily liar as i knew ■■■■ well that there were probabl;y six trucks in the yard, another dozen waiting for rrpairs in Belgium, probably another twenty waiting for money and diesel in Munich, at least a dozen parked upin Istanbul and if we really lucky probably about ten trucks actually moving.
At one of these meetings, the phone rings and he puts the call on speakerphone as it is one of the English drivers, Reg Cook, phoning from Istanbul:
Sertel - Good morning Reg, you have a problem.
Reg- Yes MrSertel, I need diesel.
Sertel - What do you need diesel for Reg.
Reg - Truck runs on diesel, Mr Sertel.
Sertel - Reg, I don’t know why you don’t use your initiative.
Reg - Mr Sertel, truck runs on diesel, not initiative.
This should give you an insight as to how the man carried on.
Like I said I have so many stories I could relate in respect of working for Sooty.
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