mushroomman:
Birdie4x4:
4
I used to stop here for a drink, a couple of miles down the hill from Cinovec, there were no buildings in the car park opposite back in the seventies just a slight slope up onto the road which I struggled to get out of one night with heavy snow.
Modern picture taken from Google maps.
Steve
Hi Birdie 4x4, I am really pleased that you posted that photo because about a year ago I was trying to do a bit of research on the Hotel Sport and nothing seemed to come up on Google. I also parked there on several occasions as it was a good day’s drive from Hamburg when we used to use The Prinz Line Ferries from Harwich. I think that the boats were called The Prinz Oberon and The Princess Eugenie which were both West German boats.
The Hotel Sport has certainly cleaned up well so it’s no wonder that I could never find it on Google Earth. It’s not how I remember it and I think that this photo would be more like how you remember it back in the seventies or the eighties.
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You were dead right, up until 1987 there were no buildings across the road except for a bus stop and a bit of waste ground as there was nothing but miles and miles of forest, I think that forestry must have been the main industry in that area, it probably still is. From what I remember there were often a couple of Danish or Swedish drivers in there and there was never a problem paying your bill with West German Deutsch marks which they would always greatly accept.
As it was on the main road from Berlin to Prague I could very well imagine that during the war there may have been a couple of large ■■■■ flags flying outside that hotel. That’s one of the reasons why I was interested in the place, it certainly felt like it could have been commandeered by one of Hitler’s Generals. With all the deer’s antlers and the boar’s heads mounted on the walls I always wondered if at one time it was a royal hunting lodge or something, who knows.
I want to show this photo again of my old mate Ken Singleton which was also taken in Czechoslovakia I.I.R.C. in the early eighties. The photo was taken by another Dow Freight driver called Dave Shawcross and that’s Dave’s son Robert in the photo along with Micky Tremlow and Pam from Promotors. Ken must have been in his early sixties when that photo was taken and he really was what we used to call ‘one of the old school’.
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Whenever we used the border at Furth im Wald we would travel along the old roads through Domazlice, Strakonice, Pisek, Tabor and Jilhava. This route enabled you to by pass Prague and brought you out just before Bruno. We used to go this way especially on a Friday or a Sunday when the truck driving ban was in place on the motorway. The old road was very scenic and passed through many of what could only be described as what looked like medieval villages. In lots of places long stretches of the road were cobbled and you often saw teams of horses pulling logging carts. There were a couple of laybys somewhere in this area which had these old water pumps which still worked.
1
Now I am hoping that Trucknet member Dean B is reading this as I remember a Long Distance Diary from about the late 70’s or the early 80’s which featured one of Atkins from Derby or it could have been one of Berrisford’s from Stoke who took a journalist with him on one trip and they used this route. If anyone has got a copy of it then I would love to read it again, after forty years I am sure that it will bring a few more memories for me.
Getting back to my mate Ken, I remember him taking me on my first trip to Yugoslavia in 1980 and we crossed the Iron Curtain at the West German, Waidhaus/ Rosvadov, Czech border post. We had parked up for a brew somewhere between Pilsen and Prague and I remember Ken telling me that Lidice was about four miles from where we were parked and that one day, he was going to go off route and have a look at the place. He started to tell me about Reinhard Heydrich, The Butcher of Prague and how Hitler, after Heydrich’s assassination, had given orders for the village of Lidice to be razed to the ground in reprisals and that most of the villagers were slaughtered.
Now at the time I must admit that through my ignorance I wasn’t really interested in what Ken was telling me. I knew that during the war that Ken had been in The Parachute Regiment and that his brigade had been dropped at Arnhem. He also mentioned that he and some of his mates had managed to meet up with some Americans but this story about Lidice didn’t mean anything to me and so I thought nothing more about it, until some 35 years later.
About six years ago I was watching a programme on The History Channel one night about the second world war when they mentioned the name Lidice and straight away it rang a very old rusty bell. When they also mentioned about The Butcher of Prague I thought about what Ken was trying to tell me all those years ago and with the help of Google I started to do some research. I thought that it was quite an interesting subject so I thought that I would share it with you just in case anybody else finds it interesting.
Lidice.
youtube.com/watch?v=j-V-wUkgeQw
Seven men At Daybreak.
youtube.com/watch?v=tmfVUmGENAw
Lidice - A Light Across The Sea - YouTube
youtube.com/watch?v=7E_Jd2c61E8
In 1986 or 87 I was on my way home transiting Czechoslovakia on a Sunday afternoon somewhere near the Pilsen area when a small Skoda going like the clappers over took me. We were on a long stretch of road going through the forest and I noticed that in the front passenger’s seat there was a woman who started waving something out of the window at me. I thought that it was a stick and thinking that she was going to throw it at the truck I decided to slow right down. I could see a young child stood up in the back of the car and I thought that it seemed a bit odd. The car also slowed down, he then put his right hand indicator on and pulled into a layby that was a bit further up the road. The women was by now leaning out of the window and pointing towards the layby which was partially hidden from the road by a row of trees. I didn’t think that they posed a security concern so I followed them into the layby but just to be on the safe side I locked the driver’s door from the inside and wound down the window. The women who I thought would have been in her early thirties got out of the car and walked towards me holding what now appeared to be a sword.
The man and the child got out of the car holding hands and walked towards the road. They appeared to be on the lookout for something, probably the police. The women took the sword out of the black metal scabbard and handed it up to me. I switched the engine off and opened the driver’s door as I took a closer look at what looked like a military sword. Verkaufen, ein hundred West Marks said the women, I thought one hundred Deutsch Marks, that would be about £ 27. The two things that stood out to me the most were the two red eyes on the brass lion head handle which I thought were Rubies. The other thing that I noticed was the ■■■■ insignia with the eagle.
I asked the women was it original, she looked at me a bit puzzled and then said Ja, Ja es ist origanal. I decided to take a chance, there looked like there was too much craftsmanship in the sword for somebody to be turning them out in his garage. The man and the child came walking over towards the truck, I gave the girl a 100 hundred Deutsch mark note which she handed to the man. The man lifted it up towards the sky checking to see if the note wasn’t counterfeit, he smiled, came towards me and shook my hand. Danka, he said and the three of them hurried back over to their car and quickly drove off.
I had a much better look at the sword, another thing that I noticed was the unmistakable smell of gun oil in the felt lined scabbard. Once again, I thought that if it was a reproduction then somebody might have used engine oil. It then occurred to me how was I going to get the sword out of Czecho, the border guards at Rosvadov always did a cabin control so I couldn’t tell them that I had just bought it. I did have a M.A.N. issue hanging wardrobe hung up behind the passenger seat and at the time I used to wear a brown Volvo three quarter length jacket so I decided to stand the sword up behind the jacket in the wardrobe.
At the Czech side of the border, it was a young squaddie who eventually did my cabin control and I had learnt that a good way to distract them was to leave my cassette case, which held about twelve cassettes, out on the bed where it could easily be seen. The soldier noticed it and decided to check every cassette which was in the box which was nothing unusual. I had a feeling of what was coming next, he came across one where he exclaimed “Ah, Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon”. He looked at me and said “for me, English souvenir”. I nodded disapprovingly as I said O.K. “Cabin control finished” he said as he tucked the cassette inside his shirt and quickly disappeared out of the cab. He waved to his comrade who was carrying an A.K.47 and was stood next to the barrier. He waved towards the watch tower and the barrier automatically lifted. I breathed a sigh of relief as I went down the hill, crossed over the small river and then drove up the hill to the West German border post at Waidhaus which was about a kilometre away.
Waidhaus was never a busy border, there was never a queue and the police and the customs men were usually quite lax. It was only if you had reloaded in Turkey that they made you wait for the drugs dog to arrive if he already gone home. I went into the customs post to do my paperwork and was reminded that I would not be able to drive until 10 p.m. when the Sunday driving ban had finished. I knew this and I had already planned to put a new tacho card in which would show that I had parked up and had my eight hour break so that I could do a night hit across West Germany. The customs man wasn’t interested in doing a cabin search, he seemed more interested in watching the programme on German television.
I walked back over to my truck, closed the curtains and then took the sword out of the hang up wardrobe to have a really good look at it. I was feeling really excited now as I slowly pulled the sword out of the scabbard and once again, I got a slight whiff of gun oil. I thought to myself, could they really be Rubies in the lion’s eyes and there was something else that I hadn’t noticed before. Engraved at the top of the blade near the handle were the words Waffen S.S. and as I looked at the blade there was something else that gave me a strange feeling. About a third of the way up on the edge of the shining steel blade there was something like a seven inch scuff mark which looked like somebody had tried to polish out but had failed to completely get rid of it. It looked like somebody had taken a swipe at a tree trunk and it had left the impression on the blade but it didn’t make any sense to me why somebody would use a ceremonial sword on a tree. It then occurred to me that maybe the sword had been used for something much more sinister or macabre and I just felt that I had to put it away.
Just after ten p.m. that night I set off across West Germany and headed for the West German/ Dutch border at Aachen Nord where I arrived the following day. I always enjoyed going through that border on the way home as they had a Les Routiers there and it was always my ritual to have a feed of Frikadellen, Frites and a small draught Heineken. I could have a forty five minute break showing on my tacho card and I knew that I could be in Zeebrugge or Rotterdam in one hit.
Occasionally, the German B.A.G. a.k.a. The Bundes Autobahn Gestapo would be on the German side checking your tacho to see if you had been speeding or asking to see your German road permit and it was only on very rare occasions that you would ever see a Dutch customs man standing there. But not that day, there were two Dutchman stood there and one of them, a youngish fellow looked like a trainee. The oldish guy flagged me down as I approached them so I stopped and switched the engine off. The younger guy walked around to the passenger side which made his college laugh as my truck was right hand drive. The older guy stood by my driver’s door and said “good afternoon Englishman have you anything to declare today”. I did think about saying no but then I thought if he was training the younger guy that if he wanted to do a cab search then I might have some explaining to do as he would surely find the sword.
I felt that I had to say yes and when I said a sword, he looked at me quite surprised and said can you show it to me. He walked around to the passenger side and I opened the door to let him in while his friend stood on the passenger side step. I reached over, got the sword out of the hang up and gave it to him. He studied it very carefully and he asked me where I had got it from and as I explained the story to him, I asked him if he thought that it was a genuine. Yes, he said I think that it’s an original one but there might be a problem, I shall have to go and speak to our Antiques expert, can I have your passport please. And with that the two customs men walked over to the office block with the sword and my passport.
It seemed a very long fifteen minutes before they came out and walked over towards my truck and I got out of my cab to meet them. The next thing I knew was this Dutch customs man doing the worst Zorro impression that I have ever seen, madly waving the sword about and shouting “on guard Englesman”. I had to laugh, didn’t we all love The Cloggies for their great sense of humour. He gave me back my passport and asked which port I was going to and when I told him Zeebrugge he said “look, wrap it up in a towel or a blanket, hide it away and don’t take it out to show anybody until you get to England”. I asked him how much the sword was worth and he said that his colleague had said that if I had paid 100 Deutsch Marks for it then I had got myself a bargain. I thanked him for his help and drove off through the car park. I think that it was the very few times that I didn’t go into the Les Routiers restaurant that day. Instead, I drove into the first layby in Belgium and had brew and a tacho brake. When I arrived in Dover, I just happened to forget all about the sword and as nobody offered to do a cab check I didn’t mention it to the U.K. customs.
A couple of months later, I was home for a long week end and my brother phoned me up and told me that there was a Military Antiques fair on in Oldham on the Sunday morning and asked me if I wanted to go and value the sword. So off we went with the sword which was wrapped up in a towel and we eventually found a stall which looked a bit more professional than some of the other stall holders. He looked at it very carefully and asked how much I had paid for it but without thinking I said £27. I could tell by the look on my brothers face that I shouldn’t have said that. Straight away the stall holder said “I will take it off your hands for thirty quid”. I said no thanks and we were about to walk away when he said, “O.K. forty then and that’s my last offer”. We decided not to take his offer and we walked away with a smile on our faces, we both felt that it could have been worth more than that.
Well, I had that sword up until 1998 and over the years it had spent a couple of years over the fire place where it didn’t really fit in. It then ended up on top of the bedroom wardrobe until we decided to move to Australia. We had to make a manifest of everything that we were bringing and all garden tools had to be steam cleaned, spotless and free from any soil. It was much easier to give everything that we weren’t going to bring to give it all away to our friends. We thought that we might have a problem declaring the sword so my wife decided to take it to an auction house. They said that they would keep it for a couple of weeks and then put it into the auction. We got a phone call a couple of weeks later and they said that they had sold the sword for £80.
I recently looked on Google to see if there was one like it and this came up.
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This was exactly the same sword that I had and they are now going for over £700.
And I never did find out if the lions red eyes were Rubies or if they were Garnets.
Enjoy your Bank Holiday.
Regards Steve.
Hi Steve, Thanks for posting that picture of the Hotel Sport just as I remember it, if only I had a memory like you what a great story, going over these posts and finding a few old photo’s are bringing back so many fond memories, I did Middle East between 1976 and 1978, the picture of the water pump has also refreshed my memory of them they were a common sight along with the odd fountain in the layby’s traveling through Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, a regular stop to fill water containers for cooking and washing.
Steve
