How I became a Truck Driver....with acknowledgements to Jazz

UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUMS OLD TIME LORRIES, COMPANIES AND DRIVERS (INTERACT
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Evening Gentlemen, the idea for this thread belongs to our friend Jazzandy, but it is a cracking idea, and I have taken the liberty of starting it!

Well, we have all done it, some of us are still doing it, others (like me), look into a current gear lever less cab with no desire to jump behind the wheel at all. But something started us off, what was it, and why. Please share it with us all, and where it took you, both in life, and in your careers. On these forums we have such a mix of ages and experiences, lets share them.

Me, Im told that my fate was sealed when I had a pedal car…looked like a 1930s Brooklands Racing car, but I went everywhere…backwards. Always putting bricks from Bomb sites out as entrance markers to reverse into! My Grandfather told my mom, “he will be a lorry driver”, she was horrified…but I was, and loved it!

Over to you, Cheerio for now.

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For me it was hereditary, my dad was a lorry driver starting at the tender age of 14 way back in 1940 and although I cannot truly claim to be a lorry driver myself (Did a HGV apprenticeship) I have driven a number of different lorries over the years I was taught to drive in a Dodge Commando but I learnt to drive in S80 Foden & Guy big J (not with an eight cylinder Gardner but a Six cylinder ■■■■■■■■ and I can make a reasonable job of roping and sheeting.

Regards

Spud

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A lad who I went to school with, his father drove an old 8 leg Leyland and in the school holidays he took us all over the place, I thought then…this is for me,
I did 47 years at it and enjoyed it. As in all life, there were good days and there were bad days but I had a good working life.

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Hereditary, too. Spent too many Saturdays & school holidays “helping” my old chap and his workmates. At the time it seemed like a “proper” man’s job- a bit macho- and I was always fascinated with things mechanical. I took a special delight in getting the best out of any item of iron, be it bicycle, pedal car, motorbike, car, tractor or lorry. When I started lorry driving legally- i.e. having attained my 21st birthday- it came as a bit of a shock to realise that not all drivers had the same dedication or interest in the work as the chaps I had been mingling with up until then.

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:laughing: my dad was a driver and his dad was he drove one of the first BP tankers in Hull.they moved to Leeds and my dad was an apprentice tailor untill he got called up for the war and drove all over Europe and Egypt.When he got demobbed he got a job at West Yorkshire Foundrys on the shop floor,One day there driver did not turn in and my dad was asked if he could drive it .that started his career in the transport industry.he ended up at A.One Transport and worked there for 30 odd years before having to finish at 63 with a dodgy heart.I worked there for a while as an apprentice mechanic but left to work at Tate Trucks as an apprentice.I worked as a HGV mechanic until the firm I worked for relocated that’s when I hit the road .I am 62 now and cant work myself 46 years of hard graft have taken its toll.I still would not change a thing the comradeship of the driving fraturnaty is second to none.The one thing I did miss is my two daughters growing up but that comes with the job as we all know.Keep on trucking chaps and chapesses all the best Jeff.

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same old story , dad and both uncles were drivers , started off as an apprentice mechanic but all i really wanted was to drive lorries , better bending them than mending them , and i could earn more money driving . did 42 years on the road , all types of lorries , always something new about the lorries or the loads . packed in at62 with the dodgy ticker thing , sent the license back to swansea and never touch one since , good life while it lasted , cheers , dave

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Did you bend Turners j reg ERF at symonds yat Rigsby Dave ?

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Same with me,my Dad was a lorry driver all of his working life including WW2. My lorry driving ended after a bad RTA,but I am still involved as a part-time TM for three operators. Would go back to lorry driving tomorrow if I could.
Cheers Dave.

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Thanks for starting this thread Saviem. I’m sure it will prove extremely interesting.

For myself, I was known as a truck and bus ‘nut’ at school as evidenced by my constant scribbling in the margins of my exercise books. I used to write to the various manufacturers expressing my interests and received back loads of information including from continental companies such as Berliet, Unic and Hanomag. My study wall was plastered with pictures from their brochures and for my sins I was a particular fan of Leyland with their comets, super comets, octopuses etc., and of course their state of the art Atlantean, the prototype of which had its exhaust outlet at the rear end of the roof which I thought very ■■■■ indeed.

At college I had spent the summers working on the British Rail ferries between Dover and Boulogne and when I left, instead of going into teaching, for which I had spent three gloriously carefree years training, I continued working on the ferries and when laid off during the winter months drove taxis. The next summer, no sooner had I been signed on to the ferries than there was a huge seaman’s strike. Rather than report to the dole office, I decided to take a driving job with East Kent Road Car. This involved two weeks of concentrated driving instruction on a Guy Arab 111 with a five pot Gardner and crash box and then my test in Canterbury which was notable for the examiner running the length of the bus to shout that I couldn’t get in between the two vehicles I was relentlessly heading for. However by the time he had thumped me between the shoulder blades I was already there and had proved him wrong! Needless to say I passed the test and obtained my PSV licence. The training at East Kent was very thorough and I learnt how to change down double-declutching as the revs dropped going uphill and more importantly to do the same while going downhill. This involved putting on the handbrake and judiciously using the footbrake to slow the vehicle down while double declutching down through the gears without hurling the top deck passengers out of the front windows. ‘Never never never go down a hill in a higher gear than you would use to go up it,’ was one of the mantras drummed into us. There then followed a week of route and vehicle familiarisation. So I enjoyed driving a range of buses from AEC Regents and Reliances to Dennis Lancet service buses and what the drivers referred to as spaceships which were Dennis Lancets with Park Royal luxury coach bodies but with the most peculiar gearbox which featured first at bottom right and second at top left. We travelled all over east Kent at our leisure it seemed from depot to depot in each of which we patronised the company tea rooms and I became well versed on all the inter-town routes between Maidstone, Ashford, Canterbury, Thanet, Folkestone and the home depot at Dover. We also spent a day traversing all of the Dover town services and then I was ready for my first shift. One thing I will say is that East Kent made the job interesting in that your roster for the day contained a mix of routes so you would for example start with a couple of runs between the market square and the suburb of Maxton. Then you’d take an 87 to Ramsgate and back followed by another local and then you’d finish off with a 15 to Canterbury and back.

I stuck at this for a good two weeks and the strike was over. Unfortunately the call of the sea with its duty frees and assistant purser’s uniform with the gold braid was too attractive to resist and the pay overwhelmingly better. So I rather shamefacedly informed the depot manager that the job was not for me and handed in my uniform. That is one episode of my life of which I am not particularly proud in that East Kent had treated me extremely well and had invested a considerable effort in my training. I often think that if I’d stayed I could have been a multi-millionaire like Brian Souter but that’s what dreams are made of.

After that long summer on the Lord Warden car ferry I couldn’t face another winter of taxiing so I became a supply teacher for a short while but then drifted into being a manager for Avis rent a car in Dover. Their truck rental department had just started at Euston road in London and one day I received a call from them asking if I could collect an AEC Mandator which had been abandoned at a Dover filling station. I duly turned up thinking, this is bigger than I thought and then had to put on a show that I knew what I was doing The largest commercials I’d driven to date apart from the buses were Ford Transit’s and one of my first cars at college which was in fact a Morris J2 van although I had driven old TVO Fordson major’s on an uncle’s farm and newer diesel majors on a friend’s farm so I wasn’t entirely without ‘commercial experience’! One thing I had learnt at the age of about fourteen was never to allow a tractor to roll out of gear. I’d done that once with a full load of hay on the back and my diesel major on a steep field was gathering speed at an alarming rate. Luckily one of the farmer’s sons was with me on the tractor and managed to bring us to a halt alongside the hedge at the bottom without turning the whole caboodle over. I was shaking all over but it taught me an invaluable lesson.

Once behind the wheel of the Mandator, I surveyed the steering wheel with its smart red and blue embossed AEC badge and the instrument binnacle. I marvelled at the window winding mechanism and tried the gear lever positions, I think it was a six speed, before starting her up. Tractor only she was quite sprightly and I rapidly learnt that you did not need to start off in crawler as I sidled out of the filing station and onto the main A2. I managed to nurse her back to our own depot and proudly parked up and made a professional job of jumping out and locking up. When I entered the office there was a message asking if I could drive it up to London! This was a no brainer and the trucking bug and the call of the open road was irretrievably inside me.

Later I became manager of the Euston depot and, whenever I could, deputised myself to collect new F88’s and FB88’s from Volvo at Irvine after having experienced the luxury of the night sleeper up to Glasgow. As time went by we were renting tractors to most of the pop groups for European tours, and increasingly to continental transporters including Astran and I discovered that the drivers were earning a lot more than I was so I became an agency driver one summer for Industrial Overload, that led to car transporters and then on to continental work. The rot had truly set in!

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i didn’t really bend it dan , i destroyed it , even bent the trailer chassis . i hated that motor , they swapped the diff with anu 126g and it would only do 52mph , it did60+ before they nicked the diff , cheers , dave

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I think I have already done this but it wont hurt to refresh my memory. I was brought up in a pub on the old A63 long before the M62 was built or even planned. At around 4.30 the lorries were rolling out of Hull Fish dock on the night trunk to London. In those days the drivers would call in for a couple of pints and I spent time either sat in the cabs or talking to the drivers who became regulars. I had a bad leg even in those days so I got quite a lot of sympathy and presents.
Across the road was a National Benzole garage who used me to fuel the lorries up, especially during a power cut where I had to wind the handle to pump the diesel. I remember Willi Betz lorries stopping for fuel in long nose Mercedes and Hanomags. this was around 1965/66. Also just up the road was a family haulage business and I got to know the boss, his daughters and some of the drivers. By the time I was 11 I was almost full time, fueling lorries, driving the forklift, relining brakes with the fitter and another driver. I taught myself to drive and could reverse a 33’ trailer into the workshops by the time I was 12. My mind was made up and as soon as I could I would be driving, as it was i went out with most of the drivers to far flung places like Prescot, Walsall, Derby and Crook. Sometimes it would be Liverpool or on rare times I went to Montrose.

My driving career came to a dead stop when I had to earn some money and the haulier didnt pay me enough. (story of my life) I went back to work in the garage opposite the pub, building lorry bodies, refurbishing sea containers and building & operating pneumatic blowers for IFF (UBC) the boss also did caravan transport and boat transport so my first trip anywhere was to Germany to pick up a new caravan. It wasnt lorry driving but a brand new Datsun 1ton pickup was my pride and joy. Sometimes my pick up went out on the back of a lorry with me as passenger, when we got into Europe the driver let me take over to the factory. I then came back with my Datsun or occasionally with my bosses car. Rover SD1. The bug was firmly implanted and I was on the look out for a fulltime driving job. I went to work for a local cowboy and had more visits from the village policeman with court summons in one year than I have had in the last 35 or so.

The policeman had finally had enough and he arranged an interview with United Carriers, the boss was an ex driver who used to use my dads pub when I was about 5. I am now turned 18 and there is an awful lot of bridges to cross and water to flow under them before we get back to 2013 :stuck_out_tongue:

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I was born a lorry driver, my Dad was a lorry driver, my Granddad was a lorry driver and my Great Grandad ‘drove’ a Horse and Cart :sunglasses:

My Mum reckons I learned to read from the badges on the front of lorries :laughing: and I was out with my Dad the day I came out of nappies. The only toys I had were lorries and a bike, which I pretended was a lorry :laughing:

I romped through junior school and passed my 11+ with a 100% score, which got me into a highly respected Grammar School and there I became a hooligan, my thought process was if I actually did the work I would end up working in an office somewhere, so, as my school reports indicated, I was dertermined to fail, I didn’t and got decent O level results, but I tried bloody hard not too :laughing:

After school I went straight into the traffic office at a clearing house in Catford, it was a proper old desk and two phones place and soon I was on my own all day running the show, then I passed my driving test and got a job driving a Transit. We shared a yard with an owner driver and I started backing his artic in the yard off the main road, my guvnor had taken over a skip hire business and I was at age 17 the driver of a Leyland Clydesdale, I still backed the artic in the yard every chance I got and pretty soon I was doing the odd night job for him and then he bought another unit (an old beat up ex M/E 111 Scania) and I was a full time lorry driver now, even going over the water every now and then. The 111 gave way to a Seddon Atki 400 and it was in that where it all went horribly wrong, I got pulled into Keele Services with a flat trailer full of steel pipe, I got away ok, but got a producer, the problem was, as you may have noticed, I hadn’t passed my class one, the fact that I was only 19 had a big part in that :open_mouth: I got found out and went to Court in Newcastle under Lyme and got a month’s ban and 600 quid fine, it had dragged on a bit, so I was 20 by the time it went to court (I continued to drive the Sed Ak) I got my licence back a month before my 21st birthday and had to appear before the commissioner and beg for a provisional HGV licence, I got it and passed my test a few days after my 21st, which was on a Friday, much to my displeasure as it meant I had to wait over the weekend before I could start :cry:

All legal now, I stayed with the owner driver +1 for a bit before I was tempted away by a job running to Italy (the first trip has been told on here, well half of it anyway as Jelliot reminded me :blush: ) since then I’ve driven a lorry to or through every country and principality in mainland Europe, a few islands, a couple of trips to Nth Africa, crossed the Bosphorus a handful of times, been an owner driver, small fleet owner, transport manager, road tester/journalist at TRUCK & sister publications, been a truck salesman and now I’m sitting in a truckstop in British Columbia in a Peterbilt that I’ve put over 800,000miles on :sunglasses:

I think it’s safe to assume that I’ve got diesel running through my veins :wink:

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i think it would be safe to assume that you need a whiff of easy start to get you going in a morning , some career !

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I echo jazzandy’s thanks for kicking off this thread. For some reason I assumed it had already been done and the fact I couldn’t find it was down to my ineptitude at searching stuff on here.

I think it started when I was a kid, when Dad used to drive us from Pompey to London to see family and I can still remember one night being stopped somewhere on the A3 near Devil’s Punchbowl and hearing the sound of Slate & Tile’s ‘Mickey Mouse’ Fodens. Some years later (late 70s) my first paid job was as a garage hand at Hall & Co in Worthing; though it didn’t last long I was fascinated by the noise and hubbub, and the distinctive sound of TK and KM brakes. Also at that time I worked in Mum & Dad’s shop in Worthing (Southdown territory), and I knew the different bus types that were about to arrive just by the sounds (Leyland National, Bristol VR, Daimler Fleetline, Leyland PD3 and Leopard). I knew when Geoff Pink’s TK had arrived with greengrocery for the old man’s shop.

When my family moved in about 1979 to the West Country I got a job as a driver’s mate with an antiques shipping and restorers. I can clearly remember one job where we’d stopped at Knutsford early one morning just before dawn, and while the driver (George) went and had a jimmy riddle I sat and watched one wagon after another pound past on the M6, one wagon after another with headlights and marker lights and engine noise and diff noise and presence. It looked somehow exciting and even a bit glamorous (though I know it’s not now), and I must’ve thought to my self “I’m going to have me some of that”. And within a year, I did, starting on non-HGV 7.5 tonners, then getting my Class 1 in 1985.

When I left to come over Down Under on a working visa, I did all sorts of odd jobs, but what paid the rent was driving (particularly removals, which I knew a bit about). I spent some years driving here, but got offers to take quite different work which I did for well over 15 years (including running my own business for 12 years). But of late, the business has run its course and mutatis mutandis, comme ci comme ca, I’ve gone back to driving for a living.

I don’t glamourise the job at all - although I’ve been away from driving for some time I’ve had too much experience to believe that it’s anything other than hard, often dangerous graft for not enough reward (and in my experience it hasn’t got any better in the time I’ve been away). Nonetheless, I have a suspicion the “diesel in your veins” cliche may have some truth in it. It’s taken me less than a week to “get back into it” and in all the time when I wasn’t employed as a driver, I still looked and watched trucks, still knew how to behave around them.

I don’t know how long I’ll last this time around, but because these days I’ve lost that “there’s got to be something better” nag and for all the right royal pain in the arris the job can be, I just take it as it comes. And there are many worse ways of earning a crust punting a lorry about the place - after all, while most of my friends get paid better, none of them has an office that moves around and sees different things every day.

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I think I am going to be the first that wasn’t born to be a trucker.

I joined the RN at 16, following in the footsteps of my stepdad. I didn’t take my car test until I was 21, and went on to do more than 25 years in the “andrew”. When I left the RN, my wife and I moved to France (in 2006) and by the end of 2007 I became a volunteer firefighter here. In 2010 my fire chief suggested I might like to learn to drive HGVs, so thanks to the pompiers at the end of 2010 I passed cat C. I was still running my own business, so I only drove our large vehicles on an occasional basis. Then at the end of 2011 I decided to close our business and become a HGV driver as a profession. Last year I managed to get funding both for the FIMO(DCPC) and the Cat C+E. These were both passed by the end of December last year and I have successfully found work via agencies here (only on rigids for the mo), and I love it. :smiley:

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Evening all, so while I was busy reversing pedal cars around the latest bomb sites, my mothers family were running old Austins collecting milk in churns for the Levedale Dairy in Wolverhampton. When I was not at school, (a frequent ocourance), I was off with my little greaseproof paper pack of “sauce sanwiches”, (red or brown, it really did not matter), on churn collection. When we were back, well I had “my” oil can, and tool kit, to help keep them going!

I must have been 12, or 13, when I used to go out to start the engines, and soon was a dab hand at catching them with just a whif of choke! Then it was “just shift that one”, and by about 14 I was quite reasonable at reversing, and manouvering, and the odd illicit drive in the quiet grass centred lanes between farms! Then of course was the touch up painting, folding sheets, coiling ropes, brushing out cabs and bodies…

Few years later, the little family operation had changed, it now had moved into Shropshire, and now ran some diesels, Foden DGs, and S18s, as well as O type Bedfords, and a couple of their Birmingham Cousins. Traffic had expanded, and prospects were rosy! Me, well I had embarked on a career as a Watch Maker, (to which I was singularly unsuited)! still hankered after lorries, but had discovered both motor cycles and girls. One of the jobs that trainee watch makers were given, was to ease rings that had become tight for a customer to wear, by means of a cone and roller set up. Quite a nice earner, for little effort.

It would have been about May time, and a rather large lady entered the shop, proffering a rather small ring, for enlargement. Straightening my three piece suit, (told you I had discovered girls), I checked the lady`s true ring size, and having seated her, retired upstairs to do the deed. Now the apparatus was situated on a workbench beneath a large skylight in our Victorian building, and at that precise hour was flooded with warm sunlight. Now I have always been a day dreamer, that day no better, no worse than any other, but the TT was soon to be run, and of course mentally I was chasing Geoff Duke at full chat along the Mountain Road…the sun suddenly was obscured, and I came down to earth with a bump…the ring on the cone was not quite enlarged, oh no, it was the size of a small bracelet…and of course all hell broke out…the following week I was a lorry driver in Shropshire!

Quite driven me to drink that memory…The Bollinger beckons, Cheerio for now.

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hello saviem ,this is the begining i,ll think ,some you can se in drawings from past to future trad, and rest is history ,still going,cheersbenkku

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my dad was a lorry driver too,after leaving the Royal Navy.he worked for Redland Aggregates (think they were originally Greenline),at the quarry at the bottom of the hill near our house…i can still hear them Commer 2-strokes screaming up the hill :smiley: …but when i left school i joined a hippy commune in Glastonbury,then Cornwall :sunglasses: after that episode i came home and got labouring jobs.that was hard work,so i thought i’d better get a HGV licence.my grandad gave me the money,passed my Class 1 in 1979,and still doing it now :slight_smile:

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Yet another driver’s son here! :unamused: Rode with my dad in Foden, Bedford, BMC, Seddon etc back in the fifties and early sixties and working with lorries was all I wanted to do. Left school at 15 and a bit to take an apprenticeship with a BMC commercial dealer in Reading and when I wed and moved north worked at the quarry on mainly Fodens. They put me through my class 2 in 1976 and a few years later I transferred to driving for them. The old man told me that I was mad to give mechanics up and no longer took any interest in my work, I wasn’t a ‘proper driver’ as I “only drove tipper’s” and “the lorries virtually drive themselves these days” (we are talking Foden S39/S40/S80, Haulmaster and Sed Ak 400’s here! :confused: ) so whenever I phoned him to tell him where I had been etc he wouldn’t listen and continued in that vein until his dying day. :frowning:

Packed it all in in 2002 to be a carer for my missus but miss it a lot as (like Dave the Renegade) my career finished prematurely, but for a totally different reason of course. Still have my license so never say never! :wink:

Pete.

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I’m sure that all of us had a myriad of influences which pointed us in the direction of driving trucks. One of mine was history lessons at school where I learnt that transportation workers, wagon masters if you like were some of the freest of the serfs in the Middle Ages. They were the only ones, apart from the lords and masters who could easily move from village to village.

Another influence on me was a friend of my father’s who regaled me with tales of his time in the army during the war when he drove a Diamond T tank transporter. I was already hooked at age six!