bestbooties:
John West:
Only just found this site. I hope this is of interest.
After doing overland for a year in 1976, I stayed in Saudi doing internals. I had worked for Douglas Freight, but bought Paul Kerr’s day cab Scania from him when he upgraded to a Transcon.
I Pulled for Sea Land at first, but that started to go quiet when they brought in their own trucks from the States & employed Philippino drivers. I was offered the chance to pull a car transporter by Pat Conway, who I knew from Dunderdale & Yates in Preston. The rate was lower than Sea Land, 1500 Riyals a trip to Riyadh from Toyota at Al Khobar, but it was still £250 and I could comfortably do 4 or 5 trips a week. Pat and another lad called Dave, then also Ted Thomas and another guy who looked like Alvin Stardust, but whose name I can’t remember worked for John Lancaster, formerly of Howlan International. They sent him £1000 per week home and he used the money to set up a very successful conservatory business.
When that job finished, all of us ex Sea Land subbies were offered work by Alan Newhouse and Ali Al Ghoson, pulling for their joint venture Behring/Caravan. This would be about 1978, but I can’t give exact dates because I didn’t keep a diary.
The details are a bit fuzzy, but I think Jeff Litwin must have already somehow been involved because Caravan employed a Transport Manager called Joe (can’t remember his surname) who had worked for Jeff in the UK, and I remember meeting Jeff when he visited the yard. Joe’s family were with him, living in a flat above Caravan’s Dammam office.
There were rumours that Joe had been the guy Jeff sent to collect his debts, he was certainly big and hard enough. I don’t think Jeffeun had sent any trucks down at that point, and Behring had shiploads of stuff coming in, so I think we were just meant to be a stopgap. I remember Joe saying ‘ I’m going to have units lined across there’ waving his arm across the expanse of the Dammam yard. Since we were already doing the work, we really didn’t want Jeffeun sending 50 or 60 trucks, but it was presented as a done deal.
Joe’s ‘company car’ was a big American crew cab Chevy pick up. We were in Dammam and he said ‘come on, I’ll take you up to Al Khobar’ I can’t remember what for. So Eric Collins and myself got in. Luckily Eric got in the front and I got in the back. We were quickly doing at least 90 and I was petrified. He was madder than any Arab. I was certain he was going to roll it. He just laughed. I got down onto the floor and braced myself. Where the railway lines crossed the road at an angle the truck swayed and bucked. Again, Joe just laughed. We finally got to Khobar and stopped. I was shaking as I got out. When we’d finished looking at whatever it was we’d come to see, Joe said ‘Come on, back to Dammam.’ Eric and I both declined. We got a taxi back and I refused to ever get in a vehicle with Joe again.
Fred Topham was around at that time too. I think he was working on insurance fraud or some such, but he had some association with Jeff Litwin — again, exactly what, I don’t remember.
I think the first driver to arrive was Black John. I seem to remember about 5 of those standard orange colour DAFs, probably 3200s arriving, but I don’t remember any drivers except John. Maybe Jeff came down in a Range Rover pulling a caravan and John came with him, again, fuzzy on detail.
I came back from a trip to see this caravan in the yard and Geoff Collins, Eric’s brother, rushed across to my cab & said, ‘John, come and look at this’. We went round the side of the caravan and two of the biggest feet I’d ever seen were sticking about a foot out of an open window. Geoff was howling with laughter and went across and tickled them. Black John came out having just been woken up. You could see why his feet had been sticking out, he looked about 7’ tall!
He introduced himself as Black John, but I wasn’t very comfortable with that and just called him John, although he did say, ‘you might as well call me Black John, everybody else does’. Unlike Joe, John didn’t have a menacing presence, he was a big likeable guy. He did used to complain that ‘all the f****** locals start to rabbit on to me in f****** Arabic before I stop them’. John spoke with a strong London accent.
I’d forgotten about his arrest and subsequent release — I guess that didn’t help Jeffeun’s credibility with Behring Caravan.
Joe had a likeable side, but he scared me with his unpredictability. He really wasn’t that popular with us subbies. He would dish the work out without any consideration of whose turn it was, and wasn’t interested if you said anything about it.
After a 3 month stint we would fly home for about 3 weeks R & R. I happened to get on the same plane as Alan Newhouse and by chance sat next to him. I asked him about Joe, but he said, ‘well, I’ve given him the job, so I have to give him the chance to do it.’
Joe’s unpredictability was his downfall. He must have had some blazing row with Jeff Litwin. He came down to the yard one evening and proceeded to use the forklift to completely trash all 5 Jeffeun trucks. We were still living in our cabs at the time and watched open mouthed as he put the forks through windscreens and I think tore one cab from its mountings.
He got the sack next morning. I guess he didn’t work for Jeff again either. I got a letter a month or two later, asking if I would give him a reference.
I think that was the end of Jeffeun’s involvement with Caravan too. Peter Best became transport manager and started buying ERF’s from Star Commercials. When Peter left I stopped driving and took over as transport manager.I met Fred Topham briefly when I was working for Jeff, in the yard at Hackney.
I was working for Litcor in Stoke, the firm that Jeff Litwin and Jack Corrie started from the remnants of Chapman and Ball.
I had flown out to rescue an F12 from Italy after the driver broke his ankle and finished up in hospital. When I got home Jeff said you might as well keep the motor, so I did, and was running it from Stoke for some time.
Fred was indeed an ex Met copper, specialising in insurance fraud, and he spent a lot of time travelling the m/e looking for dumped or stolen units and trailers. Likewise, I don’t know what his association was with Jeff.
No one was more surprised than me when I met up with Fred again at the Middle East re union at Gaydon last weekend. I asked him if he had see Jeff lately, and he said he hadn’t seen him for a long time.
I knew Jeff from his days running his skip firm Docklands waste. I bumped in to him about a month ago in a petrol station in Woodfood. He hasnt changed and was keeping well.
Robert
