Toddy2:
Driver-Once-More:
Roy Strawbridge
didn’t he or his family run a boat around the uk recently on tv doing a cookery programme?
No - you’re thinking of ■■■■ Strawbridge - bit of a TV personality, cook, engineer with a big bushy moustache
that’s him!
Own-account wagon, but who hasn’t heard of Percy Dalton’s 
Hays Wharf Cartage.
1 hp
adr:
1 hp
hiya,
ADR great pictures, but your on the wrong thread this one is about the large
company now extinct called “London Carriers” a firm I actually (put my name
down) hoping for a start about forty five years ago never heard from them. 
thanks harry, long retired.
adr:
1 hp
W J Sims worked for J Sainsbury.
harry_gill:
adr:
1 hphiya,
ADR great pictures, but your on the wrong thread this one is about the large
company now extinct called “London Carriers” a firm I actually (put my name
down) hoping for a start about forty five years ago never heard from them.
thanks harry, long retired.
Hi Harry,
You know, you are right 
, I been chatting on the phone to 1 of my daughters & talking to my son who keeps popping his head round the door while I been doing this, & I meant to be putting these on “Old London Firms” .
Regards Chris
Here’s an example of a London Carriers drawbar outfit in the later livery complete with streamlining. The picture was taken by Arthur Ingram.
Toddy2:
Pretty sure this was an ex London Carriers Leyland Steer,they had a few of these early on0
Hi, This was indeed a London Carriers Steer new in 1959, one of ten my Father (Sid Ricketts ) drove one for a while when new and we actually believe it may have been this one sadly he is not around anymore to confirm it. WVB 887 is also in use again now after restoration. I have a photo of one of them when new if anyone is interested. Regards Steve (littlesid)
shrubby:
Hi I worked at london carriers from 1968 to 1979 in the workshops at beddington lane, do remember lots of the drivers including Mick Whelan, Bill Hall & my brother Brian Shrubb who all did shop deliverys. Also remember Eric Salmon & les Deadman.
Regards to you all
Hi Glynn, I remember you very well when i was an apprentice at Beddington Lane along with many others it was a great place to work and what I learnt stood me in good stead for later years when I had my own garage.I also remember some the old drivers like Dicky West and Tom Kelly as my dad often used to take me out and about when I was little, He(Sid) retired in 1982 and then came and worked part time in my garage from 87 to 93. Hope you keep well Regards Steve (littlesid) Ricketts.
Hi Steve
Remember you well & your father.Your father stood me in good stead for when i left London Carriers in 1979 i carried on driving artics until i retired early due to having a good pension!.Do you hear from any of the other fitters.I now live in Cornwall near St Austell & enjoy riding my two motorcycles on days out with my mates.Hope to hear from you again.
Regards Glyn.
shrubby:
Hi Steve
Remember you well & your father.Your father stood me in good stead for when i left London Carriers in 1979 i carried on driving artics until i retired early due to having a good pension!.Do you hear from any of the other fitters.I now live in Cornwall near St Austell & enjoy riding my two motorcycles on days out with my mates.Hope to hear from you again.
Regards Glyn.
Hi Glynn I am in touch with Vic Allen but I live in lincoln and have lost touch with the others in the years I have been away, but was good to see a familiar name on this site would be good to keep in touch do you have email? Have some old photos re LCL trucks going back to the fifties if you are interested.Regards Steve.
Hi Steve
Yes it would be great to see some old photo’s. E-mail adress is debbie_keen@yahoo.co.uk.
Regards Glyn.
bowser:
does anyone remember a company called london carriers based in either heywood ind est or pilsworth ind est in bury …? they had a phillips contract and where painted in thier colours , blue and grey as i remember . they ran alot of sed atki’s . an old family friend worked for them for years doing night trunk’s , i later worked for him driving coaches for a while while i took my c.p.c for wagons as he had a plan to buy a couple and put them to work . it would be nice to see some pictures if possible .
cheers …
My ex wife’s Grandad whose name was Frank Humphries ran London Carries Croydon depot in the 50s and early 60s
Until he moved north to Nottingham and ran their Nottingham depot on Glaidsdale Road in Bilborough until ill health forced him to retire
Hi everyone. I’m new on this thread and got involved for a very strange reason. I have two of the 1977 Golden Anniversary goblets which have been in my loft for well over thirty years, and it’s time to downsize and de-clutter, so I thought I’d look and see if anyone had ever sold one and if they were worth anything. I’m a mercenary so and so! Why have I got two? Probably because the design was my idea, but I’ll go back a few years…
I’m not a driver (so probably here a bit fraudulently?) but joined LCL as a clerk in 1970 in Transport Operations under Joe Poole at Beddington Farm Road (better known as Croydon Unit). I got to go to Sywell a number of times, Heywood (once), and also Livingstone on a three week study of the factory’s needs which involved flying from Gatwick to Edinburgh and back each Monday and Friday. I loved that - before I joined LCL, I had worked at an aviation museum and loved flying!
From there I was transferred to Surrey House to the new Planning Department to work on computer modelling (no training!) to decide the best storage and distribution network for the company. Having come up with a solution based on the data available, we produced an illuminated map with all the centres and depots on it and used this in our presentation to the board, only to be told that it didn’t actually back up what they had already decided! Never mind, as a model-maker it honed my skills at the company’s expense.
From Surrey House, I moved to Vehicle Control at Beddington Lane, primarily concerned with looking after the company cars and light vans, but also taxing and scheduling the MOT’s for the lorries. This brought me into close contact with the workshops, and two names who I see mentioned on this thread ring bells - Vic Allen and Les Deadman. If Les is on this forum, he’ll remember the trip we did to North Wales one weekend, borrowing a Ford D600 tractor and 27ft drop frame box trailer to take a load of stuff up to the Festiniog Railway, of which I was (and still am) a member. That unit wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, and I gained a whole new respect for HGV drivers on the road, especially where selfish car drivers were concerned. I like to think I’m a better driver for that experience.
One of the advantages of being at Beddington Lane meant that I could get access to the workshop in the evenings, and I rebuilt my MGB GT there following a minor shunt which revealed that the usual British Leyland tin-worm had gained a serious hold on the sills. I shall be forever grateful to all the fitters who so generously gave either of their time or knowledge to this relative novice. Having rebuilt the MG, I then sold it and built a kit car, so I must have learned enough.
Presumably because of the map in the Planning Department, and the fact that my model railway hobby was also known about, when it came to the Golden Jubilee, I was taken aside and asked if I could come up with any ideas for the celebration goblet they were proposing. From memory, they had received ideas from Coulport, but they weren’t quite what they wanted. My idea was to represent the company as a worldwide shipper, hence the globe, in the original LCL green livery and font on one side, and the new grey and blue corporate livery on the other to span the fifty years. My sketches were passed to Coulport and their design people tidied them up. Having spent a considerable amount of my own time on the project, I was a bit miffed that no kind of thanks were offered, so when a spare goblet came up, I grabbed it. I watch the “Antiques Road Show” - a pair is always more valuable than a single item!
Almost as soon as the Jubilee was over, LCL as such ceased to exist as a separate entity, and the haulage was then outsourced (like so much else in Philips). There was also a lot of dubious practices uncovered at Beddington Lane which may have helped it’s demise, but I stayed with the Fleet Department as it became known through various moves to Mitcham and then City House, each one seeming to extend my commute from East Grinstead, till I was driving about three hours a day just to get to and from work. I was mighty pleased when I was offered redundancy in 1998, although I still had to find a job - the pay off wasn’t that good for a mere clerk despite 28 years service.
Nevertheless, overall I enjoyed my time with LCL, later Philips, and have fond memories of the places and people I worked with.
Hiya Guys. I worked for Dutton Transport, Whalley, Lancashire in the late sixties and we worked for London Carriers out of Simonstone about four miles outside of Burnley. We had to run to there times carrying TV Tubes from Mullards Simonstone to Plymouth. I got 10 hours to run to Exeter then 10 hours Exeter to Plymouth, tip and load then back to Exeter, 10 hours back to Simonstone, two trips a week, no motorways hardly then, easy work as I usually did a 14/15 hour day back then. Sorry no pics.
Thanks Slatetrain for your interesting post.
I remember London carriers for their understated graphics. A small ‘London Carriers’ logo on a massive van trailer, pulled in 1969, by a Guy Invincible, and then and later of course, by Big 'J’s. They often stopped at the Jungle on Shap.
I phoned them that year. I was looking for a unit to replace my 4 wheeler Leyland Comet for something bigger, and had noticed that they seemed to replace their tractor units at ten years old. I loved the look of the Invincible, and knew that W Keith from Flookburgh operated them. The chap I spoke to was a mine of information and confirmed that they did sell them at ten years old. However, he did dissuade me from buying one ( no telephone recordings then) he said that although they were well maintained, they were ‘at the end of their working life’, a nice way of saying knackered!
A year or two later, as a ‘subbie’ to Pritchetts, I occasionally loaded from Sywell, Northampton, usually to the North, with televisions, and as said on here before, remember one very foggy night, with a van full of brand new colour TVs, knowing that I needed to renew my goods in transit insurance! However, as through my life, I was lucky!
John.
My first job was with a company called West Cornwall Storage & Distribution (1988).
One of the jobs they did was backload from London Carriers in Avonmouth with electrical goods.
Once back at the yard the loads would be sorted off the artics and delivered around Cornwall on 3.5t and 7.5t vehicles.
I drove a Merc 307D van from 17yrs old and did a lot of this work, mostly Phillips electrical products.
Slatetrain:
Hi everyone. I’m new on this thread and got involved for a very strange reason. I have two of the 1977 Golden Anniversary goblets which have been in my loft for well over thirty years, and it’s time to downsize and de-clutter, so I thought I’d look and see if anyone had ever sold one and if they were worth anything. I’m a mercenary so and so! Why have I got two? Probably because the design was my idea, but I’ll go back a few years…I’m not a driver (so probably here a bit fraudulently?) but joined LCL as a clerk in 1970 in Transport Operations under Joe Poole at Beddington Farm Road (better known as Croydon Unit). I got to go to Sywell a number of times, Heywood (once), and also Livingstone on a three week study of the factory’s needs which involved flying from Gatwick to Edinburgh and back each Monday and Friday. I loved that - before I joined LCL, I had worked at an aviation museum and loved flying!
From there I was transferred to Surrey House to the new Planning Department to work on computer modelling (no training!) to decide the best storage and distribution network for the company. Having come up with a solution based on the data available, we produced an illuminated map with all the centres and depots on it and used this in our presentation to the board, only to be told that it didn’t actually back up what they had already decided! Never mind, as a model-maker it honed my skills at the company’s expense.
From Surrey House, I moved to Vehicle Control at Beddington Lane, primarily concerned with looking after the company cars and light vans, but also taxing and scheduling the MOT’s for the lorries. This brought me into close contact with the workshops, and two names who I see mentioned on this thread ring bells - Vic Allen and Les Deadman. If Les is on this forum, he’ll remember the trip we did to North Wales one weekend, borrowing a Ford D600 tractor and 27ft drop frame box trailer to take a load of stuff up to the Festiniog Railway, of which I was (and still am) a member. That unit wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding, and I gained a whole new respect for HGV drivers on the road, especially where selfish car drivers were concerned. I like to think I’m a better driver for that experience.
One of the advantages of being at Beddington Lane meant that I could get access to the workshop in the evenings, and I rebuilt my MGB GT there following a minor shunt which revealed that the usual British Leyland tin-worm had gained a serious hold on the sills. I shall be forever grateful to all the fitters who so generously gave either of their time or knowledge to this relative novice. Having rebuilt the MG, I then sold it and built a kit car, so I must have learned enough.
Presumably because of the map in the Planning Department, and the fact that my model railway hobby was also known about, when it came to the Golden Jubilee, I was taken aside and asked if I could come up with any ideas for the celebration goblet they were proposing. From memory, they had received ideas from Coulport, but they weren’t quite what they wanted. My idea was to represent the company as a worldwide shipper, hence the globe, in the original LCL green livery and font on one side, and the new grey and blue corporate livery on the other to span the fifty years. My sketches were passed to Coulport and their design people tidied them up. Having spent a considerable amount of my own time on the project, I was a bit miffed that no kind of thanks were offered, so when a spare goblet came up, I grabbed it. I watch the “Antiques Road Show” - a pair is always more valuable than a single item!
Almost as soon as the Jubilee was over, LCL as such ceased to exist as a separate entity, and the haulage was then outsourced (like so much else in Philips). There was also a lot of dubious practices uncovered at Beddington Lane which may have helped it’s demise, but I stayed with the Fleet Department as it became known through various moves to Mitcham and then City House, each one seeming to extend my commute from East Grinstead, till I was driving about three hours a day just to get to and from work. I was mighty pleased when I was offered redundancy in 1998, although I still had to find a job - the pay off wasn’t that good for a mere clerk despite 28 years service.
Nevertheless, overall I enjoyed my time with LCL, later Philips, and have fond memories of the places and people I worked with.
Hi , I guess as you were at Beddington lane you probably came across my Dad Sid Ricketts, and I started in the workshops in 1969 at the same time as Vic Allen. With regards Steve Ricketts ( little sid )
