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Doc
Keeper of the Scrolls
2010 Posts
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 Posted -
17/05/2004
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12:57
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HEY FARM
Work and shop and a never diminishing overdraft rolled on and suddenly it was summer again. When we had the accounts done in Spring of 1959 father was so depressed by the results that he asked me if I would take the debts over. I did, and became proud owner of a grocery business with an overdraft bigger than the value of the asset! Father brightened up considerably because I decided he should have a wage! I also talked to him about getting out of the shop and we decided we’d look for a little farm. We had a stroke of luck immediately because a farm came up for sale in Barnoldswick.
Hey Farm, behind the Greyhound pub comprised seven acres of good grazing and a lovely 17th. Century four bedroomed house with a workshop on the end and a separate barn. We went to look at it and found it could be bought for £2000 plus £200 in goings. I went to see Mr Batkin at Burnley and he agreed to lend me the money on condition we sold the shop. So we went ahead, put the shop up for sale and bought Hey Farm off Grant Brown, I found out later that his byname was ‘Sailor’ because he had spent a lot of time at sea. Father and I agreed that if the sale of the shop and stock wiped out the overdraft it would be OK so we advertised it at a reasonable price and sold it very quickly. I think there was a small surplus but it wasn’t much. We sold the van and put the proceeds and the surplus into a second-hand short wheelbase petrol Land Rover. Mother and father were in pig heaven, they had got all the weight off their backs and father could keep some animals as a hobby. He didn’t see it as a hobby, he thought he was farming properly but in effect he had got his retirement, he’d lost his mates but he had his garden and the stock as a bonus. He was as happy as I ever saw him and it was very gratifying. Mother had less work as well. We couldn’t make money from the farm but I was earning so we were all right. Father had his state pension and the GGA pension so he was better off as regards cash than he had been at Sough. I had the responsibility of paying £15 a month to the bank out of a wage of £8-10-0 a week which wasn’t too bad. Leslie was still at home but left Ermysted’s Grammar School that summer and, armed with a reference from Les Greenwood, a local councillor, went and had a successful interview at Silentnight in Barnoldswick and started into life as a Trainee Manager.
Meanwhile, back at the dairy I had my eye on a lass called Vera Mason who worked on the bottle washers with old Percy Graham. She had a fair temper on her and I got into trouble more than once when I pulled her leg and went a bit too far. I was 22 and she was younger than me but time was moving on and in 1959 I was getting on quite well with her. I think she was 17 in 1959 when we both realised that things were getting serious. Her mother Mary Agnes had told her she couldn’t leave home before she was 21, the main reason for this was that she was earning a full wage and ‘tipping up’ at home, in other words she was giving her mother her wage and getting some pocket money in return. This was a very common state of affairs in those days but things were changing and it didn’t go down well at all. By 1960 we had decided to get married and I suppose we were skirting round Mary Agnes’s embargo. I have to admit I cracked one day and did something unilaterally about the situation.
On my first load of cans in the morning I used to pick up Horton in Craven milk and farms up the road to Marton. WMD supplied bulk milk to the Coronation Hotel at Horton and I used to deliver it every morning at about 08.45 and have a coffee and bacon buttie in the kitchen. Bunty and her husband Fred ran the place though the license was held by Bunty’s mother. I was telling Bunty about my problem with Vera’s mother and she told me I should ignore this and do something so I asked her when she next had a Saturday free for a wedding reception. She looked in the book and said November 26th so I told her to book it! When I finished work I called in at the Vicarage on my way home and asked if they could do a wedding at the Parish Church on Nov 26th., the vicar said yes and I told him to book it. Then I went home for my dinner, this was summer and I was on early turn. My mother said I looked pleased with myself and I said “What are you doing on Nov 26th.? Vera and I are getting married, would you like to come?” Mother was pleased but asked me what Mary Agnes had to say about it, I told her I didn’t know because I hadn’t told her and Vera yet! I went round to Vera’s and told her and Mary what I had done. It all went surprisingly well, Vera was happy but wanted to know where we would live and Mary Agnes gave in with good grace, I think she recognised that it was inevitable. Vera and I talked it over with my mother and father and we decided we would all live at Hey Farm and see how we went on.
I have always regarded Hey Farm, or The Hey as it is called now, as the best house in Barnoldswick. It is a typical 17th. Century farmhouse. Personally, I think it is a rebuild of an earlier timber hall but don’t have any evidence for this. Originally it was a very simple building, in essence it was three large one room up, one room down dwellings built in a row. One would be for the owner and the other two for workers or relations. For many years it was in the ownership of the Crook family. Ebor Crook who lived there in the early part of the 20th. Century was a wheelwright and under their occupancy the two cottages at the west end were converted into one house and the two rooms at the east end, nearest the road were used as a workshop. In addition there was a large lean-to shed at the back of these two rooms which was an extension of the workshop.
The house is perfectly oriented on a gentle slope which ensures good drainage and the front of the building where the main windows and doors are faces almost due south thus ensuring a sunny aspect. A short lane slopes down to the road and this continued above the farm, ending in a yard in front of a large barn. The barn had central door leading into a mow stead, on either side was a small shippon which could tie eight beasts and above each were baulks to either side for hay storage. On the east end of the barn there was a brick-built piggery of later date. Each of the shippons had a door to the front, the west end opened out on to the yard, the east end into the barn porch. There was a small croft between the yard and the road. On the west side of the yard was a gate into the field which ran away towards Bancroft and just over the wall on the barn side of the gate was a deep midden pit. The field beyond the gate was about six acres and sloped down to Gillians Beck which was the boundary. There was a spring in the field with a stone trough and this never went dry. Water cress grew around it and we often went down to pick some for tea. Sid Demain owned the land we bordered on to at the end of the field and across the beck.
The only heating in the farmhouse was a coal fire in a modern tiled grate in the kitchen and a similar grate in the front room. The first thing we did was to pull the fireplace out in the kitchen and install a Rayburn cooker which heated the hot water as well. This room had been divided at the rear to form a small scullery which had a sink and a gas cooker and beyond that, a pantry built in a small extension. There was a door leading out of the front room to stairs leading to the top floor and a cloak room on the ground floor. This and the pantry were in an extension and the upper part was the landing and a small bedroom over the scullery and pantry. This had a sloping ceiling. The upper part of the house was divided by the original wall between the cottages. This made two small bedrooms over the large front room and another, larger bedroom, over the kitchen. This end section had been divided in the same manner as below and the small room at the end of the landing was used as a bathroom.
The house had low ceilings and oak beams. The walls were two feet thick and although the whole house had been lit by mullion windows, the previous tenant had illegally removed the mullions upstairs and down in the house part and replaced them with modern windows. The mullions were intact in the workshop end. On the west end of the house was a wooden lean-to wash house and a large back garden. An unusual feature was the fact that due to the beams sagging over the years, the landing had a definite lean to the left as you went towards the bathroom. We got used to it but visitors always commented because it made you lose your balance if you weren’t used to it. It was a lovely house to live in, I don’t go overboard about these things usually but if you’ve ever lived in a house like Hey Farm you get a sneaking suspicion that when people die they might possibly leave something behind them. Hey Farm was a happy house and everyone who visited said the same.
There was room at the top of the lane to turn a wagon round and so I had my own private car park. This space was lined by garages which we rented out. These were a nice little earner all the year round and cost nothing to maintain. One of the first jobs father and I did was render the east end of the building as it was in bad condition. There were some dovecotes in the gable end and I repaired these. To finish it off father and I planted an espalier Conference pear tree on the gable end and it soon established itself. It is a mature tree now and reaches up to the top of the gable. It always fruited well but suffered from sapping by the kids on their way home from school. I used to get as mad as hell but I was only getting my own back, I had done enough when I was a lad!
At the bottom of the lane was the Greyhound Inn, always known as ‘The Dog’. Walk a quarter of a mile down the road and you were on Church street, the main street of the town. In 1960 there was every type of shop you could want in Barlick and we used to take a pride in shopping in the town. I get quite upset nowadays when I see the difference out of town shopping has made to the variety and quality of shops. All right, the big stores can offer lower prices but on the whole I think it’s a bad deal because the quality of the town’s services has definitely deteriorated. I suppose it’s inevitable because people will usually shop on price but there is a hidden tax to pay on this system in the shape of increased traffic, less amenities in the town and greater hardship for those who haven’t got a car.
There was plenty to do to get Hey Farm straight but the constant drag of the shop and the farm round with the mobile shop was gone. Life felt better and more assured. I’m not saying it was easy but we always managed and had enough. I drank a lot less and it became a pleasure to get up and go to work in a morning. We had our first Christmas at Hey Farm and it felt all right. In 1960 I made my unilateral move on the wedding so I had that to look forward to as well.
Change was on the horizon at the dairy. The milk industry was changing and the first inkling we got was when WMD bought out Townshend’s Dairy at Blackburn. This brought in some additional milk pick-ups round Rough Lee and Higherford so on the face of it , it was a good thing for Harrisons. But behind the scenes, the MMB wanted to get private hauliers out of the milk pick up and do it with their own wagons. The rates started to drop and Bill and Jack started to feel the pinch. John Garnett left and a new lad set on on the ‘Queen Mary’.
A word of explanation here about the ‘Queen Mary’ as it throws up some interesting contrasts between the regulations governing the construction and use of vehicles then and now. When I first went to WMD as a spare driver Harrisons had the contract to take one load of milk every afternoon from West Marton to Davies Dairy at Eccleshill in Bradford. This was a big load and over the years it had got too big for a normal wagon. The contract was a lucrative one because it was 26 miles to the dairy and this meant the run attracted the 50 mile radius rate which was a good increase. However, there was slightly too much milk to go on a standard flat. Harrison’s answer was to buy a standard 7 ton S Type Bedford with a 35 hp. petrol engine and put a Bayko flitch in the chassis. This was a kit which made the chassis four feet longer and was a do-it-yourself job. They also increased the tyre size to 8.50 X 20 and reckoned this would carry anything. They told Harold Stone, who was the driver, to load six crates high down the centre. After about three days they noticed that the wagon was bending in the middle so they reduced the load to five high and kept to that thereafter!
Sometime in 1958 Harold left and a new man, John Garnett took over the QM. He was the son of George Garnett who drove an eight wheeled tanker on a black oil contract out of Heysham Dock for Williamsons at Embsay near Skipton. George had driven for Harrisons on occasion and was on cans for Williamsons for years. He was a man of few words and notable for the fact he never spent his wages. He used to live on what he could make or pick up on his rounds. He brought John up and John once told me that they lived in a road menders hut on the side of the road at Elslack. He remembered George trying to cook Christmas pudding over an open fire and said it wasn’t really a success. There were lots of stories about George. They reckoned he once flit from Skipton to Carleton and carried all the furniture on his back. Round about this time I was talking to John one day and he told me his dad had surprised everyone. He had fathered a child by a lass almost forty years younger than him and they had set up house together in Skipton and were as happy as Larry!
John was a good mate and we got on well together. He was married and living in Skipton while he drove for us but I’m afraid he strayed away sometimes. On one occasion he met me at the front door of his house with the words “Admit nothing, deny nothing!” Baffled I went into the house and found that while Evangeline had been away a young lady had been seen to enter the house and leave the following morning. When taxed with this John had said that it was true, I had been visiting him and the girl had been sleeping with me in the spare room! I knew nothing about this and the next half hours conversation was surreal! I don’t think for one minute he fooled Vang’ and as I was courting Vera at the time wasn’t too pleased when I found out the truth!
John was with us about two years in which time we converted the QM to diesel by fitting one of the new Ford 6D engines. Then, one day he came and asked me what I knew about shooting and skinning crocodiles. I told him I knew nothing but I knew a man who did, my father. John came over to Barlick and asked father what he knew about it. Father asked him why he wanted to know and John said he’d heard that there was money to be made in Guiana from crocodile skins. Father told him it was bloody dangerous but advised him on what calibre rifle to use, where to shoot them and how to stop them sinking. Evidently the big problem is that a crocodile is heavier than water and as soon as they stop breathing, they sink. They talked for a long time and I remember thinking how marvellous it was to be living in Barlick and have a father who was an expert on shooting and skinning crocodiles! John was pleased, he had the information he wanted and off he went to lay his plans.
At about this time John left Evangeline and went to live with a woman in Red Lion Street in Earby. She was the daughter of somebody fairly high up in Express Dairies as I remember. Anyway, the upshot was that he left her with enough money to live on for a year and went off after the crocodiles! Years later I saw him driving an articulated wagon carrying for Bell Shipping. He told me he was working to get enough money to take flying lessons and buy a light plane. He was after diamonds now and the only way to get in for them and out was by landing on pocket-handkerchief sized air strips in the mountains. It all sounded pretty dangerous to me but after a while he vanished again and I don’t know whether he was ever seen again!
John Tweedie came as his replacement and didn’t last long. Billy took over the QM and wasn’t really fit to drive it. He came in the yard one day and said that his starter motor had burned out. When I had a look I found that his starter was all right, the problem was that he had caught the battery cage on the side of the chassis somewhere and ripped it right off, battery and all. He hadn’t noticed that all his electrics had gone as well! This problem cured itself when Billy was done for drunk driving and lost his license. Another big change at this time was that we lost all the bottle loads and did nothing but farm milk. The old days had gone and we had a mixed bunch of drivers who were always complaining. One morning we had two drivers off and when I told the other one that he and I would have to pick all the milk up he refused. I’m sorry to have to report I stuck one on him and picked up all the milk myself. I know this sounds terrible but he was a right pillock and it was a hard life. Billy could still drive in the yard and so he tipped the wagons while I picked up. I did 580 odd kits that day and we were only half an hour late finishing, I’ve often wondered if it was a world record!
It was little wonder that my back was beginning to show signs of strain. I had frequent back ache and it was sometimes so bad that Vera had to help me put my socks on in the morning. I remember one night she rubbed my back with Sloan’s liniment, very strong stuff but very effective in getting the circulation going and easing pain. I was lay on the bed and she poured a little bit into the hollow of my back before spreading it out. It was cold and I instinctively arched my back and it ran down the crack of my bum! I only have one thing to say about the reaction between Sloan’s liniment and a mild case of haemorrhoids and that is avoid it all costs! I leapt off the bed and sat in three inches of cold water in the bath until the pain subsided, I can’t remember what happened to my backache, I suspect it went out of my mind!
Father once gave me a cure for piles which went like this: You need some alum and a block of ice. Massage the affected area with the ice until it goes numb then clap the powdered alum on the spot. To quote father “The little buggers’ll creep up your arse and you’ll never see them again!” I never tried it and I don’t recommend it but it wouldn’t surprise me if it worked. Mention of piles reminds me of a bloke I worked with in later years, Paul Greenwood. He told me he got very worried once because he was sure he had a tape worm. He discovered one day that part of it was sticking out of his bum and tried to pull it out. In the end he had to go to the doctor who laughed himself silly and told him not to worry about tape worms, what he had been pulling was his piles!
Billy had bought Jack out and taken the business over himself. Jack had joined a consortium that bought Whitewell Dairy at Accrington after WMD took the bottle loads off us and we were left with nothing but cans. He went into partnership with a man who lived at Stainton house and was a representative for UDEC and another bloke, I think he was a Barlicker called Widdup. They must have known something because shortly afterwards they sold out to Asda who bought WMD as well and I have an idea Jack made a killing there. This led to one interesting job outside the normal run of things. Billy came to me one day and said he wanted me to go to Accrington the following day and pick up a UDEC bottle washer at Whitewell Dairies and take it to Sandy Jones at Bow Street near Aberystwyth.
On the day appointed I turned up at Whitewell Dairies at 0800 and up rolled Bradley’s crane. The washer was supposed to be eight tons and the crane regularly loaded heavier containers than this however, when he got hooked on and tried to lift, the crane wouldn’t have it. I should have smelt a rat then but rang Billy who arranged for Chris Millers to send a bigger crane the following day and off I went home. Next morning we tried again. It was no go, the overloads on the crane cut out and we were back to square one. I had a word with the driver and he said if we put a fiver under one of the front jacks this might cure it! I got the message, gave him a fiver and he opened up the breakers on the floor and held the overloads in with his foot while he lifted. As soon as he had it high enough I backed under the load and we lowered it on to the flat. I had loaded it with the delivery end at the front as this was the heaviest part but when the wagon took the weight the front rose in the air about a foot. It was obvious that all the weight was in the back. I asked the driver to lift it while we spun it round but he said we’d have to wait for the overload coils to cool off so we went for a cup of tea. When I came back twenty minutes later he had gone!
I now had a bit of a problem. I decided that all I could do was keep quiet and get on with it. I roped the washer down at the front, parked up and went for a meal and the local pictures. I reckoned if I was going to drive this thing to Wales I’d be better off in the dark with less traffic and fewer police about. What a journey! One thing I will say is that it was light on the steering but on the way I broke both back springs. I arrived at Bow Street in the early morning light and backed up to the concrete base where the washer was to stand, it was roughly the same height as the wagon flat. Sandy borrowed a crawler off the forestry commission and they simply dragged it off on to the standing and TWY heaved a sigh of relief and straightened her back. Just out of curiosity I opened the manhole at the back end of the washer and found it was full of scale and broken glass. I reckon it must have weighed about 11 tons! I rang Billy and asked him to get two new back springs delivered and drove home very slowly.
I think it was 1960 when we got a new wagon, 2929 WX. It was a TK Bedford with the new ergonomic cab and a 98 hp. Diesel engine. It was rated as a 7 tonner but as its unladen weight was four tons and the permitted gross weight was fourteen tons, we shoved a couple of extra leaves in the springs and put ten ton on the flat if necessary. I got the new wagon and the ‘A’ license was transferred to it. Compared with the ‘S’ type it was luxurious but dreadfully under-powered in modern terms.
We carried on at Marton as best we could but everything was going downhill. The only memorable incident at the dairy during 1960 was one day in summer when we had a violent thunderstorm at about 0900. It knocked out the electricity supply and stopped the dairy. It soon became obvious that it was going to be a long job repairing it and some temporary arrangements had to be made. Collin Barritt was under manager at that time and he got together with Bill Mills and David Peacock and they decided to bottle the milk at Townshends Dairy at Blackburn. All we had to do was tip it and tank it over there. We had a couple of tankers at that time but with no power the trick was going to be getting it into them.
Collin rigged up a tipping hopper and a three inch pipe on top of the arches at the back of the dairy. We tipped all the milk directly into the tankers and delivered dirty kits back to the farmers asking them to help us out by washing them. It was a brilliant success and was actually quicker than the normal tip. We had just finished in the afternoon when a man from the Yorkshire Electricity Board came and, using a long pole, pushed the final breaker back in on the pole opposite the dairy. Everything sprang back into life and we were back on track for the following day.
Vera and I were married at Trinity church on 26 November 1960, it was a lousy wet day and it poured down! However, it was dry enough in the Coronation and we had a wonderful reception which Bunty did for I think 7/6 a head including wine for the toast! This would be 37 1/2 pence in today’s money but look at it another way, it was two and a half hours work to pay for each guest. We spent our first night as man and wife in the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester and then went on to Rhyl for our honeymoon and whilst it wasn’t the movies, it did for us and we felt we had started married life off well.
We soon settled in at Hey Farm in the middle bedroom of the three upstairs and it all seemed to be working out OK. Vera kept her job on the bottle washers at the dairy and went to work as normal, I was driving seven days a week. It was at this time when I worked almost four years without a day off. Leslie moved out and bought a small house in Orchard Street, I think it belonged to one of the Hartley family that built the Majestic. Leslie has told me that the bathroom was panelled with wood salvaged from the Majestic, when Hartley built the leisure complex he named it after the ship which was being broken up at the time and he used a lot of fittings from it in the building and the families homes. I remember once going into another house in Barlick owned by Teresa Hartley and it was panelled with the same wood. After about two years he decided to go nursing and moved to Burnley whilst working at Calderstones. Later he went south and falls out of my story.
Early in 1961 Vera informed me we were going to have a baby in October. I think it was the happiest moment of my life. Both of us knew for certain that we wanted children and the sooner the better. One of the decisions you never regret.
Time passed and Vera was getting bigger by the day. She carried on working until a fortnight before she was due and on the 8th. Of October informed me it was time I took her to Cawder Ghyll hospital at Skipton. I loaded her into the Land Rover and took her up there and then came home. I should explain here that in those days it was unheard of for a father to be present at a birth. At least, I’d never heard of it and to tell you the truth I’m rather glad. I think I’d be the first to keel over when I saw what pain and suffering my selfish desire for offspring had caused and it would probably have put me off sex for the rest of my life! I know that this is hard to understand but remember, my life experience was totally different from that of my grandchildren.
On October 9th. Margaret was born and Vera made a good recovery. I think she was in hospital for about three or four days but then I went and brought her home. She was OK but had hated being in there and we agreed that any further children would be born at home. My mother was a great support as she was there all the time and Mary Agnes did her bit as well. It was funny seeing the two grandmas vying with each other for their turn with the new toy! We were lucky in that we had plenty of practical advice from them. Rearing a child is a complicated job and there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a lot less stressful on the mother if her mother and mother in law are about and able to give advice based in their experience. Vera soon picked it all up and was a wonderful mother, Margaret got the best of attention and went on like a house on fire. I got into trouble when I first saw her by saying she looked like a pickled walnut but on the quiet I thought she was wonderful.
After a couple of months she didn’t seem to be satisfied with just the bottle and mother said she’d had that trouble with us so she’d made sago pudding with milk and put that in with the feed. She said if Vera cut out a hole in the end of the teat big enough for the sago balls to pop through Margaret would manage. Vera tried this and it solved the problem. We did the same with the next two and I remember it wasn’t until years later that a midwife expressed horror when she heard what Vera had done. She said it was entirely the wrong diet, good job nobody told the kids, they just supped it and went on growing!
Vera stayed at home and we decided that we’d like two more, God willing. We thought that a two year gap between them would be just about right. Our weapons were abstinence (not a lot of that) and what were known as Rendell’s Pessaries. Knowing what I know now I reckon God was looking after us, I don’t think I shall be spoiling anybody’s fun if I say that we had two more beautiful daughters at, near enough, two year intervals. I remember a story that Ernie Roberts once told me about this. He was bothering with a lass in Barlick and decided that he had better get some Rendell’s Pessaries! He went in the shop but when it was his turn to be served somebody else had come in and he was embarrassed so he leaned over and whispered what he wanted to the chemist. Ernie said the chemist must have been a bit deaf because he gave him Rennies instead of Rendells! I asked him what he did and he said he just paid up and got out. This might seem strange in the times when this memoir is being read but that was how we were brought up. I would have felt just the same as Ernie and for years, anything that Vera and I needed like that was bought by mail order to save the embarrassment of asking somebody directly for what we wanted.
I had a Lakeland cross terrier at this time and he was vicious. Tip only understood one thing and that was killing. In the end he took to killing ducks and had to be put down but he lasted many years. He was so unpredictable that during the day while I was at work he was shut in the workshop and my first job when I came home was to let him out. When free, his first port of call was the barn, he hated cats and we had a lot about. When you keep animals in a town you are a target for all the mice in the district and the only sure cure is to have plenty of mousing cats about. Our cats were almost feral and lived in the barn. They knew they would have a daily visitation from Tip and used to be waiting for him up on the baulks where they knew they were safe. They used to peep over the edge at him as he went berserk in the bottom of the mow stead trying to get at them.
One day I had half a load of hay delivered at the Farm during the day. I told the driver to throw the bales down in the mow stead under cover and I would deal with them when I got back home. I got home that night and let Tip out as usual forgetting about the bales in the barn. He ran up to the barn, shot straight up the bales on to the baulks and proceeded to kill cats. By the time he had finished there were three dead cats and the rest were long gone. It was slaughter! Father played hell with me, he thought I’d done it on purpose but it was a pure accident. I shrugged it off and went for Ted Lawson, he, Vera and myself sorted the hay out after tea.
We were now without cats and something had to be done. I was at Ernie Dawson’s at Marton Hall Farm one day and I asked him if he had any spare cats about. He said there were plenty and did I want a few. He gave me a sack and told me to hold it over the end of the drainpipe coming out of the bottom of the wall at the back of one of the stables near the house. I did so and he went round the front and hammered on the door. Thornton Hall cats were almost wild and when they heard the noise they all bolted through the drain pipe. All I had to do was hold the bag in place and count the impacts into it. I thought I’d got five but in the end it turned out there were seven!
I was in the Neville conversion which had a big square cab and I put the sack with it’s neck tied up in the near side footwell and started off for home. Before I had gone far the cats had escaped, they were doing the wall of death round the interior, pulling out electrical wiring and generally making life difficult! When I got home I blew the horn until Vera came out and got her to put some milk in saucers in the barn and then we let the cats go and Vera frightened them through the door. They settled down in the barn and we were well catted again.
Things were really falling to bits back at Marton at this time as far as Harrison’s work was concerned and it’s probably time I described how we ran our job there, it will make a fascinating contrast for anyone who has anything to do with the modern industry.
There was virtually no day to day regulation of the way we ran the fleet. We wore tyres until the canvas showed, Jack said they were just coming into profit then. We robbed old wagons for spares. We had a couple of ex-army Bedford 15cwt. Chassis’ up in the quarry at Smearber Farm where Jack lived and mined them for any parts we needed. I remember one day we were trying to get a right hand front wheel off the little ‘J’ type. We had tried everything and were just about to get Wallace’s oxy-acetylene cutter when Cecil Southwell walked up the yard with a gun under his arm. He worked for Gledstone Estate and was on his way out to shoot a rabbit or two. He stopped and watched us for a while and then proffered a bit of advice. “They sometimes undo the opposite way tha knows!” Billy and I looked at him and restrained ourselves. Give Billy his due, he kept his temper and said that we knew that, wagon wheel studs were always left hand thread on the left hand side and right hand on the other to stop them loosening themselves because of the rotation of the wheels. Then he looked at me and said we’d better try it just in case. They all came loose straight away! Cecil nodded knowingly and went on his way well satisfied. Of course, being a right hand wheel the studs should have been right-hand thread but we came to the conclusion that Jack must have put a left-hand hub on at some time as a replacement and never said anything.
We had no garage or equipment and very few tools but we managed to decarbonise engines after the days work and have them running for tea-time, fit new core plugs when the old ones rotted, adjust tappets and cure quite complicated electrical problems. Billy was impervious to electrical shock. One of his favourite tricks was to put one finger on a spark plug terminal while the engine was ticking over and ask someone to pass him a spanner. As soon as the spanner touched his hand the donor got 10,000 volts right up his arm! I’ve seen Billy stop a revving engine by earthing all six plugs at once with his fingers. He said it did him good! One thing that would surprise a modern driver is that the electrical system of the ‘J’ type was only six volts! There was a small battery and a large starting handle. You soon learned never to park with the nose of the vehicle right up against the wall, you needed room to get the starting handle in. In winter, we always used the starting handle first thing in the morning to turn the engine over and free the bearings from the initial stickiness of the cold oil.
The worst job we had was getting worn tyres off the rims. They were on so long that the constant bathing in cow muck and water on farm lanes and country roads used to build up rust under the beads and the tyres were effectively glued on. The final resort was to set the wheel on fire and burn the tyre off. I suppose it good in that it annealed the wheels, less chance of cracks!
One day, Harold Stone came in with a collapsed rear wheel bearing. We got him unloaded and backed into the bottle dock and we changed the bearing while he was loading for Bradford. Off he went down the road but Billy must have forgotten to knock the tabs over on the retaining washer and just as Harold was approaching Niffany Bridge at Skipton his off-side back wheels overtook him! Jack and Billy went out and after a bit of educated filing of threads managed to get it all back together again and it never ailed a thing afterwards.
John Garnett had a funny do with the Queen Mary one day. He had set off for Bradford and was held up at Crickle Farm on the low side of East Marton by road works controlled by a lollipop man. When he was given the go-ahead John set off forward and was too polite to ask the man to step back, he thought he could get through without. Unfortunately the side of the road was soft and very slowly the QM broke through the surface and rolled over gently on its side. The bottles were sheeted but the crates rolled off in a body on to the grass verge. I was up at the dairy when John came walking up the yard. Jack looked at him and asked him what the bloody hell he was doing here, and where was his wagon. John broke the news and Jack’s face was a picture. Harrisons got a better rate than usual because they stood any breakages. We went off in a body with two wagons and retrieved all the bottles and took them back to Marton. Surprisingly enough there were hardly any broken, the main problem was that the foil tops were bulged. We hosed them off, ran them through the bottling plant and re-capped the lot then loaded them on to the wagon and sent them to Bradford, two hours late but still in profit.
I had a funny incident while Billy was driving the QM. He came in one day and complained that he couldn’t get any right hand lock on the steering. He was in a bad way then and I told him to tip my last load while I had a look at it. I looked underneath and the drag link was bent. I assumed that Billy had hit something but was saying nothing. When we had tipped the wagon I took the drag link off and went across to Jimmy Thompson in the forge under the arch across the road, he was the local blacksmith. I got him to straighten the drag link and then went back and refitted it. I went out for a test run and couldn’t even turn out of the dairy entrance on to the road! Smelling a rat I went and had a look at the other ‘S’ type’s drag link and found it ought to be bent! Back to Jimmies and another trip into the fire for the offending link. Jimmy put two nifty little bends in it and I re-fitted it. Another test run and it was perfect. Billy said the following day that whatever I had done was great, it steered a lot better now! I had to conclude that there was nothing wrong in the first place!
It was a good training ground, we soon learned that the way to extinguish a carburettor fire was to put your foot hard down so that it sucked the flames out, a broken clutch rod wasn’t the end of the world, you could manage to change gear without a clutch if you got the revs just right and a three eighths inch ball was just the right size to blank off a broken brake pipe! We did our own repairs and built our own flats, it had to be something really serious before we went into Ferrands at Skipton our local Bedford dealer. I was in their one day and was tightening up the ‘U’ bolts on a rear spring when the spanner broke. I hit my head on the chassis and was unconscious for about ten minutes. I carried on and put up with the headache for six weeks! Years later I found out that it was in fact a serious injury but at the time I just had to carry on. (I had fractured my skull across the occipital ridge!)
Eventually things got that bad at the dairy that we lost the can contract. As far as I can remember, this was in early 1960. We could have kept it longer but the wagons were so bad, the old ones anyway and Billy had completely lost his grip. He had been bothering with a young lass and at the same time his wife Fran had been doing the same with the chef at Broughton Bull. Fran found out first and left him to live in Morecambe. I don’t know what the settlement was but it hurt Billy, worst of all he lost his son, John. Anyway, the upshot was that I took TWY and WX and Billy’s car home and we scrapped the other two wagons. We were general hauliers now and my wage, which had reached £18 a week, dropped back to £8-10-0.
GENERAL HAULAGE
We had no contract now, no regular work and we had to build up from nothing. Billy was still banned from driving and the only way he could keep his business going was to keep me on and look for work. We weren’t on the phone at the time and the only way Billy could contact me was to send me a telegram and I would go on to Thornton in his car. I should explain that in the days before everyone had a phone, the standard method of transmitting a message quickly was to dictate a short message over the phone or at a Post Office. This was sent by telegraph to the nearest Post Office with the necessary equipment and was printed out and delivered immediately by hand. There used to be thousands of young boys all over the country doing nothing but deliver telegrams on bicycles.
The most regular job I had was to take Billy to Morecambe every weekend to see John, I used to drive him there and back and he wanted the Cresta to be driven flat out all the way! I used to oblige. Slowly we started to get work, carting hay and straw for farmers, grain in sacks for local feed mills and the occasional funny job like wool in bales for local mills. Harold Green from Fence, who always got called ‘The Colonel’ because he looked like Nasser, gave us odd jobs when he was busy and short of a wagon. I once carted ten tons of raw angora fleece in to Westfield Mill in Barnoldswick for him. It was worth 3/6 a pound in the raw state which came to just under £4,000 for the load, probably the most valuable load I ever carried.
One day Harold sent me to the Blind Workshops up Manchester Road in Burnley. They repaired baskets and skips for the mills and I was to deliver the repaired ones and collect the damaged ones for repair. There were a lot of drops and so they sent a bloke with me who knew where all the mills were. It wasn’t until we had done about four mills that I realised he was blind! It turned out he was a wagon driver who had gone blind after a fall. I went back two years later to do the same job and he wasn’t to be seen. I enquired and it transpired he had fallen again about six months earlier, banged his head and regained his sight! What a wonderful thing that must have been.
Our main source of income in those days was carting for the local farmers. There was a demand in the Craven area for hay and straw out of the East Riding and I would spend weeks in summer on this work. Carrying hay and straw in bales was probably the most demanding load of the lot. You had to be able to stack straight and bond the successive courses so that all the joints were crossed. This was a very skilled job and the only way to learn was by doing it. I always used to start with a base course of bales on edge with the cut side facing upwards, this gave a very good grip for the next course. The next trick was to always start loading at the back of the flat, the back end was the part of the load that slipped first so you wanted that right. When you got to the front you could force the bales in between the load and the headboard to get a total fill of the flat but you couldn’t do this at the back. Another trick which I always used was to put three ropes on across the load at four courses high. This ensured that the middle of the load couldn’t shift and virtually you started loading again at four courses on a flat made of bales. On top of this you put four courses and then roped the whole lot front to back and four ropes across. I often used to put another rope on across the near side back corner, it took two minutes and didn’t half do a good job when you were on a sharp camber!
I remember going to a farm at Ripon one beautiful summer morning for a load of straw. Another wagon had pulled in the yard just in front of me and the two farm labourers were helping him to load. I pulled in on the other side of the stack and started to load by myself, quietly away. An old bloke, he must have been well on the way to eighty years old, came out of a nearby cottage and, climbing on the rick, started to give me a hand. He was a retired farm worker and liked to make himself useful. At four courses I called a halt and roped down. The old bloke liked this and was telling me so when the other driver came round the corner. They had finished loading and he was enjoying taking the piss out of me for being too careful. I told him I’d rather spend ten minutes more in the yard than three hours on the road and away he went. Me and the old bloke refused any help and went on until we had eight courses, straight and well roped.
He went and brewed up and we leaned on the gate looking down the field and I pulled my pipe out, filled it and offered him my tobacco because I knew he smoked a pipe. He pulled out a pipe with the biggest bowl I have ever seen and stuffed it with Condor. After about half a dozen matches and a lot of sucking and gurgling he got it lit. He turned to me and said, “Smoking isn’t what it used to be. The problem nowadays is if you’re smoking your own, all you can think of is the price, and if you’re smoking somebody else’s, you can’t get your pipe to draw!” I agreed but pointed out that if he’d shove less in the pipe he would get on better! We had a laugh about this, finished our smoke and off I went with a tight load and a smile on my face.
As I came down to the roundabout about three miles down the road towards Harrogate I came across a nasty sight, bales all over the road and my tormentor trying to re-load on his own. This is a terrible job because bales get broken and mis-shaped when they come off. I slowed down and he came across to me. “Give us a hand will you mate?” Note that I was his mate now! I have to report that, contrary to my statements littered through this piece about how we always used to help each other, I told him to piss off and rope at half way the next time. All right, it was hard, but how the hell was he ever going to learn if someone pulled him out of the shit every time he screwed up? An entirely disconnected memory comes back, about half a mile down the road I saw a pair of scissors on the white line. I pulled up and retrieved them and have them in my toolbox to this day.
We often found stuff on the road especially early in the morning and as we were on old roads and doing a reasonable speed, always stopped and picked them up. I got a full set of chimney-sweeps rods and a brush one day at Doncaster and two bags of spuds at Elland. I got very excited one morning whilst on my way out to Grimsby when I picked up half a cab full of paper parcels between Broughton Road end and Niffany Bridge. There was no by-pass round Skipton in those days so we went through the centre of the town. When I got to the Post Office corner I saw a laundry van stopped outside the cleaners on the corner and a man was stood there holding a clip board and scratching his head. I asked him if there was a problem and he told me he had forgotten to close his back door properly after his last drop in Clitheroe and he was deficient a large amount of laundry! I told him I thought I might have the answer and we unloaded my cab. He was so grateful he gave me a couple of parcels. When I opened them they were full of stained tablecloths that, even though freshly laundered, still stunk of Indian curry! I still have some about to this day, they have come in handy over the years as dust sheets and cleaning rags!
One more load of hay story for you. I had a regular job at one time carting hay from Cawood near York. A farmer at Colne (Heir’s House) had bought a full stack and the arrangement was that I went whenever I had a spare day and brought a load back for him. I said I would be there on the Monday of the following week and asked for the address of the farm. The bloke gave it me but said it was bad to find and that I should look out for a chip shop on the left hand side of the road as I went towards the toll bridge where there would be a bloke waiting for me who would show me the way to the farm. Unfortunately I didn’t get round to going for the first load until the following Friday when I found myself empty near Cawood so I went to see if I could find the farm. As I passed the chip shop I saw this old bloke leaning against the shop window cill and thought he would be as good a bloke to enquire directions off as any so I pulled up. He opened the cab door, climbed in and said “Where the bloody hell have you been!” My face must have been a picture! “Have you been waiting for me then!” “Of course I have, what kept you!” It turned out that he was a retired farm worker and had Farmer’s Lung, a respiratory disease caused by the spores off mouldy hay. His breathing was so bad the only place he was comfortable was in the open air. He lived next to the chip shop and the cill was just the right height to lean on so he spent most of his time there anyway!
This story reminds me of another fresh air tale. I was always fascinated by a cottage in Long Preston on the right hand side of the road just as you were leaving the village on the Settle Road. Even at five in the morning in the middle of winter, the door would be wide open and you could see the fire burning in the grate inside. I found out later that this was an old lady who liked fresh air and never closed her door unless she was in bed. It was nice seeing the fire through the door, you knew someone else was up. Funnily enough you saw another one a bit further up the road at the signal box on the railway line.
These jobs helped but we couldn’t really make money. I was talking to a bloke from Kelbrook Metal Products one day and he told me they were getting very bad service from their hauliers and were ready for a change. I went down to see them and we started that week and never looked back. This was the start of my serious long-distance career.
How it worked was that KMP gave me a load and told me when they needed me next. I went off and delivered for them anywhere in the country and then, wherever I ended up, I went and looked for a load to take me back or at least, to keep me occupied until KMP wanted me again. Sometimes you could get work from the place you had delivered at if they were manufacturing, failing this, you had to go to what were known as ‘clearing houses’. A clearing house was usually an office that provided transport services for their customers but instead of running their own wagons, used blokes like me who were said to be ‘on the tramp’. However, some of the clearing houses were run by haulage companies who soaked up their surplus work or really bad loads by using tramp hauliers. They kept the cream for their own wagons and farmed out the dross. The trick, as far as the tramp driver was concerned was to get established as a reliable haulier with one or two independent clearing houses scattered around the country and eventually, after proving your worth, you’d start getting decent loads. I should say at this point that tramp drivers weren’t looked down on by the rest of the industry, on the contrary, many of them were owner drivers and all of them were prepared to take on any load. They were recognised as being the better end of the profession because they had to do the business and find their own work.
Mention of the word ‘tramps’ brings to mind the fact that we never see them nowadays and that my grandchildren won’t have the faintest idea what I am talking about. Tramps, or “Gentlemen of the Road” as they were often called were always men, at least, I never saw a woman tramp. They were homeless and only happy when on the move. Always shabbily dressed, they carried all their belongings with them and slept wherever they could at night, in a barn or a haystack or even a railway wagon. Anywhere they could find that gave shelter and perhaps some bedding material. They would beg from door to door for food or ask for work, anything to get a bit of grub. They usually had a smoke blackened tin in their swag which was used for brewing tea or cooking any food they begged or poached. On the whole they harmed nobody and lots of people rather liked to see them about and would help them. If things got bad they could get to a town and ask the Salvation Army for help or shelter and were never refused. There used to be a hostel on the side of the old road between Penrith and Carlisle where they could call in and stay for a couple of days. It was run by social services I think. There they could get a bath, a choice of second-hand clothes, a medical check-up and a couple of days lodging to feed them up and get them set up for the road again. Sometime in the late 60’s the place closed and for months afterwards you could see occasional tramps hanging about the place as if they expected it to open up again. I thought it was sad and felt sorry for the old cocks.
My first trip for KMP was on the first of March 1961, I took a load of flashings to West Burton Power Station at Retford and brought ten tons of proven (short for ‘provender’ the old-fashioned name for cattle feed.) back to Joe Roberts at Greens Ltd, Gargrave mill. Looking back at my load books I am struck by how quickly I sorted my contacts out and settled down to what was almost a regular run, a typical start was to go up to Scotland for KMP, load out of Glasgow for the south and get a load there to bring me back north ready to start on KMP again on the Monday. It didn’t always work out like this of course but in general, I was getting lots of work and making a decent wage. Probably the important point to stress here is that the wage depended solely on the number of hours you put in. By law, you were restricted to 11 hours driving a day. The standard week was 44 hours and after that you went on to an increased rate, I think it was time and a half. So, 6 days gave you 66 hours, 44 at normal rate and 22 overtime. This gave 77 hours at standard wage, just under £14 for the week. In practice we broke the law and aimed for over 90 hours which gave a living wage.
The downside of all this was that when I left home Vera never knew when she would see me back at home. It was hard for me, I drove all the hours I could and fiddled the log book all the time but in many ways it was even harder for Vera. She had mother and father for company and of course was busy looking after Margaret but I’m sure it wasn’t easy. She never complained to me, I suspect because she knew I was doing my best, but my daughters have told me since that there was friction between my mother and her and she had a very unhappy time. In a strange way, even though I was working such long hours and in what were often miserable conditions I had no complications in my life, just hard grind and even this was alleviated by the fact that I knew exactly why I was doing it, to keep my wife and child.
It’s probably about time I gave some sort of description of the life. There are so many differences between road haulage then and now that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps a good place would be the wagons.
Anybody who is used to the sight of modern wagons would be very surprised if they could go back 40 years to the late 50’s and 60’s. There were very few articulated wagons in those days. The standard large wagon was the eight wheeler, a rigid wagon with 4 axles, it could be loaded to 24 tons gross, about 16 tons payload, then there were six wheelers and ordinary wagons like mine. The only regulations that governed us were that a two axled wagon could load to 14 tons gross. WX weighed 4 tons empty and so could legally carry 10 tons on the flat. Very often I had a lot more than that on but I was never, in all my years on the road, pulled in for a check weigh. The engine in WX was the Bedford six cylinder diesel and developed 98 hp. if you were lucky. That gives you 6 hp. per ton. A typical eight wheeler would have a Gardner 6LX engine which gave 150 hp. That works out at just over 6 hp. a ton. Compare this with the modern articulated vehicle and they have double this ratio of hp. to weight.
Another disadvantage we had was simple gearboxes, the majority of wagons had four forward and one reverse gear. Later I had the luxury of six gears and then twelve and this on much better roads. The first part of the M1 was opened in 1961 and the Preston by-pass shortly before but the majority of long distance traffic was still using roads which apart from better surfaces and being a bit wider, hadn’t changed since the days of the stage-coach. For instance, the road north out of Settle climbed Buckhaw Brow. The last nip at the top was the steepest piece of road between Barlick and Scotland, if you could climb that you were OK the rest of the way. I was going up there early one morning with a load of asbestos sheets on and I knew I wasn’t going to make it. I suppose I had about twelve tons on the flat. I had slowed right down at the bottom of the nip and got into low gear in plenty of time but I could feel the engine dying on me as I slogged up the hill. Just as things were looking really serious, the engine suddenly picked up and I sailed over the top. I had seen a wagon behind me and pulled into the side of the road. It was one of P&S Contracts Mack artics which they had imported specially from the States to carry steel from Glasgow to Warrington and back in one shift of eleven hours. When they first started the Commissioners followed them for a week but they were running legal, they were as fast up hills as they were down! They had a huge bumper on the front with ‘King of the Road’ painted on it. The driver had seen my predicament and nosed his bumper up against the back of the flat and given me just enough help to get over the top. The ironic bit about this load was that we never got paid for it, the clearing house ignored our invoices and it wasn’t worth pursuing the claim. We didn’t often get caught like this but the practice was widespread and you had to make some pretty quick assessments when you went into a strange hauliers for a load.
Another time I had loaded a concrete building in Ware, Hertfordshire and was taking it to a farm near Wirksworth in Derbyshire. All went well until I turned off the main road and got to within half a mile of the farm, I might as we’ll have been a hundred miles away. I was faced with a hill so steep I couldn’t climb it. I even turned round and tried in reverse but had no joy. I looked at the map and worked out another route which was about ten miles further but which would bring me into the farm from the opposite direction. Off I went and managed all right. I got to the farm gate just as an AEC Matador with a 9.6 litre engine and a crane mounted on the back came growling up the hill I couldn’t climb. He was the bloke who was going to erect the barn, if he’d got up a bit earlier he could have saved me a lot of trouble!
Shap Fell on the A6 was a long drag going North. You started pulling as you came out of Kendal and never got out of the collar properly until you gained the summit. The last nip was particularly bad. Today’s motorway cowboys wouldn’t believe their eyes if they saw the last pull up to the summit in those days. Wagons were climbing nose to tail most of the day and the speed was that of the slowest because the road was too narrow for anyone to overtake even if they had the power. With ten tons I could just about manage in second gear but would be doing only ten miles an hour if that. Some wagons were even slower, you had to be patient, have a cup of coffee, look at the view, whatever, but the thing you never did was lose your temper. The bloke in front was doing his best and it had to be endured. Nowadays there would be tailgating, headlights flashing and road rage. In those days there was no point and it was far less stressful. Even when we were travelling at night and sometimes fairly lightly loaded you still had the problem of a heavily loaded wagon in front of you on a narrow road and all you could do was sit in and be patient. We used to help each other a lot in those days, you always gave a bloke a chance to pass if he had caught up with you even if it slowed you down a bit.
There was much correspondence in the motoring press in those days about wagon drivers having secret codes of light signals. It always reminded me of the occasional pieces that appeared in magazines like ‘Boys Own’, or in later years, ‘The Eagle’ which reported the code of signs left by tramps for other ‘gentlemen of the road’. These were supposed to indicate whether a house was good for a brew of tea and a sandwich, where there was a savage guard dog and other essential intelligence. I suspect that these articles were written by ex-scouters or hopeless romantics. You have to remember that 50 years ago wagon drivers weren’t regarded as polluters, nobody ever used the term ‘juggernaut’. It was quite common to see them referred to as ‘Knights of the Road’, the romance was still there and secretly, many car drivers were envious of long-distance wagon drivers who were seen to epitomise the freedom of the ‘open road’. I know it takes some believing now but attitudes were completely different then. Car drivers noted the fact that wagons used to flash their headlights at each other and were intrigued. What could these knights of the road be up to? Obviously it was a secret code known only to the fraternity and ‘experts’ wrote in the motoring press and gave their interpretation which as far as I ever saw, was hopelessly complicated and wrong.
What was actually going on was very simple. If you were driving along in daylight and you recognised a mate coming in the opposite direction you would flash your lights to attract his attention and then give him a wave. Once you had his attention you could pass other information, one thumb down meant slow down, either for an obstruction or a police car. There was no Citizen’s Band in those days. At night it got a bit complicated. Suppose you were tramming along heavy loaded and another vehicle caught up with you. It was obvious he was faster than you and so you wanted to help him get past. Remember we are talking about single track roads, even dual-carriageways were a rarity. If you saw the road was clear you just flicked your tail lights off and then back on. The bloke behind knew then it was safe to pull out and have a look ahead, to aid him in this you put your lights up on to main beam and he overtook you. When he was clear, you switched your headlights off and back on again on dipped beam so as not to blind him in the mirrors. He pulled in, flicked his tail lights to thank you and the pattern was re-established as he slowly drew away from you. In daylight you followed the same procedure but of course no headlights were used to help a bloke on. When he had passed you one quick flick of the side lights was all that was needed by an experienced driver to let him know he could pull in and it was a sort of compliment that you had showed him that you knew that this was sufficient.
Another common signal was that if there was an obstruction which closed down one side of the road you could stop, give a quick flash and the oncoming traffic knew you had given them the right of way. This happened if you were going down hill, it was a lot easier for you to pull up and start again than a heavily loaded wagon slogging his way uphill. This was the first signal that was taken over by the car drivers, it happened in the late 60’s and funnily enough, coincided with the start of the anti-wagon movement and the motorways. Car drivers very soon forgot that the primary purpose of the new roads wasn’t to give them faster roads but to aid the transport of essential freight around the country. A good example of this shift in thinking is the fact that the first services that opened on the new roads always had a separate drivers café, a sort of up-market transport café and prices were often cheaper. It wasn’t long before these were done away with and HGV drivers were expected to pay the same prices as everyone else.
I realise that I haven’t said anything about the greasy spoons. I might mention the Jungle every now and again but this was by no means the only famous café. I’m not going to bore you with a list, indeed, there were many I didn’t go into. Instead, I’ll just mention a few of my favourites. There was a good one at Ingleton run by Mr and Mrs Walker. I’ve called in there many a time coming South when I was hungry but had no money. Jack or his missus would always stand me a breakfast and trust me to pay next time I passed, try that in a motorway services! They were famous at one time amongst their regulars for their cars. Jack had a Bentley which he never washed, Mrs Walker had an Austin Healey 3000, a serious sports car in those days and the lads had a Messerschmitt three wheeler apiece. We always thought that this was a sign what a profitable café it was but then scandal struck! There was a regular trunk between Bradford and Hawick run by Harrison and Paige from Bradford, they carried yarn up the country and high class worsted suiting back to Bradford. One day the headlines proclaimed that Jack had been prosecuted for receiving stolen cloth, I think they were only done for one theft but it seemed obvious to us that it had been going on for a while and might explain the flash cars. This was a serious matter because shortly afterwards H&P lost the contract and another firm took over, they still have it.
The Lodge Café at Talke near Newcastle-under-Lyne had the dirtiest toilets I’ve ever seen but sold the best bacon sandwich on the way to London. It was my first stop on Sunday nights as I went down for an early tip in London. The Busy Bee on the Watford by-pass was a favourite of mine but only when heading north. It was staffed by Koreans mainly and was notable in my mind because a cup of tea there heading north meant that you were getting out of the Smoke, my least favourite city. The Boot and Shoe at Selby road end on the A1 was handy when I was carting hay, straw and grain out of the East Riding. An early start from home meant it was ideally placed for a good breakfast for 3/6, that’s about 17p in today’s money. 3/6 then was what you could earn in an hour so you can convert to your own currency. There was a notice on the wall in the Boot and Shoe which said “In case of fire, lift this flap.” If you did lift it out of boredom while waiting to be served you found another notice underneath which said “Not yet you silly bugger!”
The Jungle on Shap was special because the main reason for its existence was as a refuge from the storm. This is why it wasn’t on the summit but sheltered in a disused quarry on the south side. It did a good trade 24 hours a day but really came into its own when there was bad weather. It was a godsend if you were travelling north and the snow came down and blocked the road. If you could get to the Jungle you knew you would be safe, warm and well-fed and this could be a lifeline.
Shap Fell had was a wonderful piece of road and had its own set of rules. It was bad going north but coming South, it was even worse. Most of us didn’t have the luxury of good brakes. I know it sounds incredible these days but I have driven wagons which were impossible to stop quickly. You always had to drive accordingly and this wasn’t the cause of many accidents. Coming down Shap we would drop down the box until we were in the same gear that we came up in. Then you let the engine act as a brake and just helped it with the footbrake. Even this wasn’t foolproof, old crash boxes when they got worn had a distressing habit of jumping out of gear on the overrun. You used to physically hold the gear lever in gear all the way down. Nowadays you would have flashing lights and God knows what sort of complaint from behind but everybody was in the same boat and most drivers understood the problems.
As I have said, the motorways were just starting to come into use and not many people now realise that there were no speed limits for anybody. The M1 in its early days was quite literally a race track. I have been passed in the early hours of the morning by AC sports cars on test doing over 200 mph.! I used to do a steady 60 with WX even in those days once I had got it wound up. Marley Tiles had to ban their drivers from the M1 because their old AEC and Leyland eight leggers wouldn’t stand being driven flat out for 50 miles even though they only did 40 mph. One firm from Northampton called Phipps had a Bedford five ton van which had started out in life with the same engine as WX but when it blew up they put a Mercedes engine in it and it must have been the fastest wagon in Britain. I talked to the driver one day and he said it would do well over 90 mph. on the flat.
On the whole though, even though I had a bottom of the range wagon, I could load my ten tons and take it just about anywhere in the country so things could have been worse!
The other bane of our lives, and the one thing the Traffic Commissioners were very hot on was log books and drivers hours. We were only supposed to do 11 hours in the day with one half hour rest in the middle. We got round this by booking the hours we spent on the road while loaded but omitting to book anything for time spent waiting or loading. Turn round times were often long so I could drive to London, spend all day unloading, finding a load and loading up again and then booking on and driving all night back up north. I’d stop when I felt tired and have a kip stretched across the seats in the cab. The cold usually woke you up and then you’d set off again and perhaps stop in a café and have a coffee. Where this cunning plan came to grief was in places like Stirling where there was only one way through the town. The Traffic Commissioners used to have a room above a tobacconist shop in the middle of the town and I used to book on the log sheet to just beyond Stirling and then book on there again on the way down. It was a safe bet there wouldn’t be a ‘silent check’ as they were called in the remoter parts of the Highlands. I never once got caught so I must have been doing something right.
You might be asking why I was doing hours like these, simple, the wage was only 3/6 an hour, seventeen and a half pence in modern money. If you didn’t get the hours in your family went hungry. Jobs were thin on the ground and many drivers were worse off then me. There was a firm at Otley, they ran green wagons and I can’t remember the name, who paid their drivers something like a penny halfpenny a mile loaded but nothing when they were light. If their weekly wage was less than the legal minimum, they paid the statutory wage but if they paid statutory for two weeks on the trot they sacked the driver. Nice people!
After one or two false starts with clearing houses which gave good work but forgot to pay I settled down with two main sources of work, Jimmy McCall at 268 Clyde Street Glasgow and Toby Transport, Rippleway, Barking. I used lots of other houses of course in different parts of the country but these two were my main men and they got to know me and how I ran. They were both honest dealers and it was in their interest to cultivate good drivers like me, it did their business good. I never got on really intimate terms with Toby as I didn’t go into the office very often but rang them and got instructions over the phone. It was a very different picture at Jimmy McCall’s, his drivers were part of the family.
Jimmy had an office in a converted shop in Clyde Street, Glasgow. It was on the side of the river and only a stone’s throw from Enoch Square. There were two desks, one for Jimmy and the other for his clerk, Norman Crerar. In the shop window were two easy chairs and a sofa and the drivers used to lounge in these while waiting for their loads. This was a place for stories, arguments about politics and general good humour. It was the best social club in Scotland without a doubt. I will now have to bore you with some clearing house stories.
Jimmy had his favoured drivers and I soon became one of them. He would always find me a load, I don’t think I ever went away without at least enough work to pay the expenses to get down the country. My favourite load was from the Arran Barytes Company in Dalintober Street, just across the river. The factory was buried in a sprawl of workers houses and the only way in was a low ginnel which I could just get the wagon reversed into. The material we carted out of there was powdered, calcined barytes which was used whenever an inert filler material was needed for a product. It was used in paints, tyres and plastics but most of their production went to Cooke’s Explosives, Penrhyndeudrath in Wales where it was used as a filler in the manufacture of gelignite. This was one of my regular loads and I used to enjoy it.
I always loaded ten tons of the stuff in paper bags. It was very heavy and ten tons was a compact well sheeted load when you’d got it on. No problems about slipping loads or loose ropes. It was very dusty and I used to give the lads in the works 5/- to load the wagon for me. I went into a bar next to the ginnel, the Pop Inn and had a beer while they were seeing to me. This bar was run by a lad from Doncaster who had been in Glasgow for so long that the locals called him ‘Jock’! There was always something going on in there, on one occasion I walked in and there was a fight in progress. I sat at the bar and watched for a minute and then asked Jock if we shouldn’t stop it. He looked at me and said “How long is it since you saw two hunchbacks fighting?” I took a closer look and saw he was right so we settled back to watch what was probably a unique occasion. Another day an old biddy came in with a trolley made out of a soap box on wheels and proceeded to fill it with every spirit you can imagine. Jock told me she was minder for a poker school in one of the houses down the road. He reckoned the game started just before the end of WWII and was still running. Shades of Damon Runyan!
One of the most memorable incidents I ever saw in the Pop Inn was when a very small docker was harassed by another bloke who must have weighed about sixteen stone. The little bloke took it for a while but eventually he reached the end of his rope. He took his cap off and laid it on the bar, removed his false teeth and placed them in the cap and turned to the big man. “You! Outside!” and off they went. We sat in the bar looking at each other in awe and almost immediately, the little fellow came back in, replaced his teeth and his hat and drank not only his own beer but the one the big bloke had left as well. Nobody said a word!
Once loaded I would set off down the country. I always liked to have some weight. Jimmy had a good load out of Sterne’s refrigeration which was always to Sterne’s depot in London, it was a capacity load, that is the goods were so light that you couldn’t get more than two and a half tons on the flat but got paid by capacity. A ‘cap’ load for 18 ft of flat was eight and a half tons. This actually paid more than the ten tons of barytes because you burned less fuel and it was a longer distance but I would always take the barytes, it felt better when you were hammering up the hills!
I usually left Glasgow with this load at about 1600 and it would take me six hours to get home. I’d have a night in Barlick and get away first thing in the morning and be at Cookes by lunchtime. By the time I was unloaded it would be late afternoon and if I hadn’t got a load out of KMP the following day I would stay in Penrhyndeudrath for the night. I always stayed with a widow who’s husband had been a sea captain, the house was full of strange objects from all over the world. There were only two bedrooms and her daughter was a nurse on night shift. She used to get up to have a meal and go to work and I used to climb into her warm bed! She used to get back in time to have breakfast with us in the morning and she would always pull my leg about the state the bed was in. She once told me that it never bothered her sharing the sheets with me, I recognise now that this was some sort of compliment but at the time never gave it a thought. Small things like this reinforce my conviction that so many things have changed. I can’t imagine doing this now.
Cookes Explosives was part of ICI but ran as an independent firm. The processes were incredibly simple and wonderfully dangerous. When I went in the works I had to give up my matches and wasn’t allowed to run the engine, the battery was removed and an industrial tractor which had been flame proofed towed me to where I had to be. You had to wear rubber soled boots and all the tools they used were made out of copper. The nitro was brewed up in big copper vats and the barytes was mixed in by hand to make a paste, this was then packed in paper cases to make the individual cartridges. All the stock was kept in a magazine in a quarry on top of a hill inside the factory. There was only one place in the works where you could have a smoke, this was in a compartment made of glass bricks in the canteen. There was a permanent gas jet in there for a light.
One day while I was in there a signwriter came in and started to work on an addition to the painted safety record which was on a large panel behind the serving counter. He was painting a thin red line across the board. When I asked him why he pointed out through the window to a large crater in the ground about 100 yards away. This had been one of the filling rooms until about a fortnight before. For some unknown reason the hut had gone up killing two female workers. For safety reasons the dangerous work like filling cartridges or detonators was done in wooden huts surrounded by high earth banks. The theory was that if there was an explosion the blast was directed upwards by the surrounding bank and the damage restricted to just one section of the works. The red line signified the end of a long run of accident free days.
Jimmy was the best source I ever found for work but even he had his dry spells. Very occasionally there would be no work, this was often at a holiday time. I had the decision as to whether I waited for a back load or went home empty. As there was always a good chance of a load the following day and I would be first on, I usually stayed the night in Glasgow. I used to park the wagon in the Old Cattle Market in Gallowgate, there wasn’t any official charge but as soon as you drew in and parked up a group of urchins would come up to you and offer to ‘mind your wagon for twa bawbee’. You paid with a smile because if you didn’t you would find a couple of flat tyres when you came in the following morning. It was a rough area and they were doing the best they could. It was all good natured and very well controlled, the price was always the same and the wagons were perfectly safe.
Near the parking place was a working man’s hotel called the Belle Grove. It fronted on to Gallowgate and you could get a room for ten shillings with clean sheets. In the morning when you handed your key in you could either have two shillings back or a hot breakfast. I used to take the breakfast which was always the same, a thick lump of sliced sausage, a fried egg, two big pieces of toast and a pot of strong tea. It was a cheap and nourishing start to the day.
Entertainment was no problem on Gallowgate, it was lined with bars, pawn shops and butcher’s supply merchants. If you wanted a drink, a woman or a good knife this was the place to go. I couldn’t afford the bars or the women and so led an exemplary life during my stays in the city but I used to hang about on the street round about chucking out time and watch the night life. The Scots as an race seemed to count an evening in a bar wasted unless they got completely legless! There were songs and arguments and occasional fights, it was an interesting way of spending some quality time studying homo sapiens at his most entertaining!
Sometimes when loads got scarce Jimmy had to stitch a lot of small consignments together to make one viable load. We took turns in accepting these. It came my turn one Glasgow Fair and I finished up with a right old rag-bag. There was a pallet of soap for a colliery in Nottingham, some sacks for a place in North London, two bundles of steel for the Dartford Tunnel which was being built at that time and a spiral staircase for the Heinz factory in Hayes, Kent. It took me all day to pick the stuff up and then I set off for Nottingham. From there I went to London, dropped the sacks and set off for the north side of the river at Dartford where the first bundle of steel had to be delivered. It turned out that these were two identical bundles, one was for the ventilating tower on the north side of the river and one for the tower on the south side. They were waiting for this material and were glad to see me. I wasn’t too pleased because I had to go all the way back into London to cross the Thames by the Blackwall Tunnel in order to get to the south side of the river.
We got the first bundle off and the foreman asked me to wait while he made a phone call. He came back with a big grin on his face and asked me if I’d like to be the first wagon through the tunnel! Evidently they had just finished the temporary deck through the tunnel that morning and he wanted to go through. We set off under the river and, apart from having to move some tackle here and there, had an uneventful journey to the other side. I delivered the steel there and set off to find the Heinz factory in Hayes, well pleased with the time I’d saved. I got to Hayes, trailed all round the town and couldn’t find the Heinz factory anywhere. I asked one old bloke and he beckoned me to follow him. We went into a grocer’s shop and he asked for a tin of beans and handed it to me, “How often have you read one of those labels?” I looked and he was right, I’d seen the words Heinz, Hayes, Middlesex hundreds of times. My notes were wrong! They had the wrong county on them! I had to go all the way back into London, through the Blackwall and off to the correct Hayes. It could have been worse because I got a load of canned food out of there for Glasgow so all turned out well in the end.
One of the problems with tramping was that you never knew what you would be carrying. The essence of wagon driving with a flat is keeping the load on! Roping and sheeting was an art and had to be adapted to each load. The loads themselves had their own peculiarities and dangers. Reels of paper weighing a couple of tons each had to be very securely chocked, if you didn’t do this, and pulled up quickly, you could get your load down the back of your neck! Sheet steel was dangerous, I have seen it shear straight through the headboard, cab, engine and driver. I once saw one of Charlie Alexander’s drivers from Inverness have a narrow escape in Carlisle. He was carrying one steel shaft about six inches in diameter. He pulled up quickly and it slid straight through the headboard, cab and windscreen missing him by a couple of inches. I can’t remember ever having a problem with bad loading, I was always very careful and gave a lot of thought to security. I think the main reason was because you were so much easier in your mind whilst you were driving. Even so, I was always on tenterhooks when I had a dangerous load on, the consequences of a mistake were never far from my mind.
A regular load for me was high quality timber from Gliksten’s in Stratford, East London. I remember well it was right next to Yardley’s factory and the scents that wafted over Stratford were almost tropical at times. The yard foreman at Gliksten’s was a sod and when I went in for timber the first time I found that everyone hated and feared him. I hadn’t any real idea about loading the timber and asked his advice. I think he was genuinely taken aback and to my surprise gave me a crash course in loading, lashing and sheeting timber. The essence of it was to rope, or better still, chain the load at halfway up then load the rest on top and lash it in such a way as to bundle it as well as hold it down. This was very similar to the way I treated loads of hay and straw bales so it all made sense. He must have done a good job because I never had any trouble. The first thing I did when I got back home was get Jimmy Thompson to make me a couple of chain tighteners and find me two fifty foot lengths of chain. I used to load to half way and then just lay the chains across the load. When the rest of the timber was on I passed each end of the chain up and over the load until it hung down on the other side. When pulled tight with the tensioners the effect was that it bound the top course together and pulled the whole lot down hard on the bottom section of the load. As long as the chains held the load couldn’t shift, it would take the wagon with it. The loads were top weight and very high. In those days you had to go through the middle of Mill Hill on the way out of London and there was a roundabout with a very bad reverse camber. The flat and springs used to crack and bang as the wagon heeled over but I never had a load shift. As for the foreman, he always looked after me when I went in. Much later he told me that it was the first time a driver had admitted to him that he needed help.
I once went into Twentieth Century Transport in Newport and they asked me if I could load shooks. I said yes of course even though I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about and they sent me to a yard at Briton Ferry. All I can remember about the place is that it looked interesting because they were breaking ships there, mostly quite small, old tramp steamers. I’ll bet it would have been an interesting place to rummage round in but I had other fish to fry. I drove into the yard and asked where the shooks were, the old bloke who was in charge looked at me as though I was daft and asked me if I knew what they were. I decided the best thing to do was tell him the truth. He took me across to what looked like a big pile of firewood. I soon found that shooks were wooden barrels knocked down into their constituent parts and bundled with string. They were the most awkward shape I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t see how to stack them. I offered the old bloke 5/- to show me and he refused it, he said he’d show me for nowt. I soon saw there was an art to it. We stacked away and I roped at regular intervals as we progressed and in the end I had a respectable load on which the office bloke said qualified as ten ton cap. I thanked the old bloke and off we went. I forget where I took the shooks to, it was in Scotland somewhere but when I got there the manager came out, looked at the load and said he’d never seen shooks loaded better. He brought two of his drivers to see it and told them that was how he wanted them to do it. I wasn’t very popular with them but it wasn’t down to me, it was because I’d asked the old bloke in Wales..
Another time I was in Newcastle on Tyne and when I went into J&H Transport they said there was a load of greaves for Paisley. Right up my street, it got me back to Jimmy’s in Glasgow. The bloke in charge said “have you got an old sheet?” I said yes, that was no problem and off I went to the address he had given me. Now there are always areas in a city which normally you wouldn’t want to go into and this was one of them. As I proceeded downstream along the south bank of the Tyne I passed a succession of scrap yards, car breakers, rubbish tips and the like. I came to the place I was to pick up the load and saw a terrible sight, there were huge piles of what I later found out was butcher’s offal which was partially cooked and then left to rot. This broke down the fibres and made fat extraction easier. My load was already bagged and the smell was awful. It wasn’t a violent smell but was corrupt and insidious and you couldn’t get rid of it. The place was riddled with rats as well, they were running over the bags as we loaded them. I couldn’t get rid of the smell until one day I was at a chemical works and they dipped the sheet for me in a tank of hot water and bleach. It fell to bits afterwards but at least the smell went.
When I got to Paisley I found that the greaves were rendered down and the fat was ‘refined’ and made into lard for cooking! I back-loaded out of that place with what was described on the notes as ‘Best No. 1 Scotch Pale Skin Oil’ for Crossfields at Warrington. I asked what it was used for when I got there and they said either toilet soap or margarine! The thing that struck me was that the walls of the yard at Paisley were covered with notices warning you against the danger of contracting anthrax! One thing that sticks in my mind about Paisley was the fact that there are some lousy jobs in this world. The place where I tipped the greaves was a large concrete apron partially protected from the weather by a steel frame carrying an asbestos roof. It was a large area, there was no problem driving a wagon in and turning in one lock. All round the outside were the lids of large pressure cookers which were installed in the basement below, each of which was used to render down a certain kind of offal. There was a man on the floor who loaded the different cookers and when he had identified what you were carrying he directed you to the correct cooker and loaded the material in through the lid. A lot of the stuff came in on tipper wagons, they would drop their load and he would sort it out with a large rake. Rops (intestines) would go in one hole, bones in another and so on. I thought it must be the worst job in the world and asked him how long he had been doing it, he told me he had been on the rendering floor for eight years! I was beginning to realise that society is supported by a large number of unsung heroes who, for various reasons, do jobs that nobody in their right minds would want to touch with a barge pole.
Greaves weren’t the only animal by-products we carried. At various times I have carried deep litter chicken muck in bags, hoof and horn meal, bone meal and ‘protein granules’, the latter being any animal remains that can’t be dealt with in any other way than reducing them to a dry powder which is compressed into pellets. I have carted all these at one time or another into Preston Farmers for incorporation in animal feeds. At the end of the century we have realised the dangers of doing this but as early as the 50’s all this offal was going into feed for cattle. As long as the laboratory analysis of the protein and mineral content was correct, it went in. We are told now that this was the root of the introduction of BSE to cattle and great efforts have been made to ensure that it can’t happen again. Great stuff, but just ask yourself, where is that offal going now? The answer to this question fifty years later is that most of it goes into pet food. How long before we have the equivalent of BSE in pets?
One of the constant themes of conversation at Jimmy’s was traffic. By this we didn’t mean volume of vehicles on the road but what we were carrying and where the traffic was moving. It strikes me as I write this that sex and football hardly ever figured in the conversation. This is not true in my experience of almost every other work situation I have been in. I don’t know whether it was Jimmy’s influence but it never happened. What did happen was that some marvellous tales were told. This was before the days of mass TV and we had to have ways of making our own entertainment. Sometimes we manufactured the tales ourselves, we made them happen.
We were sat there one morning in Jimmy’s having a cup of tea and a bacon buttie from the Church Army restaurant down the road when a bloke came in and said that Gassy Gascarth had been killed on Shap. Gassy was one of the club, an owner driver, he had a six wheeled Seddon and we all liked him. There was a stunned silence and then another owner driver called Taffy Hughes who lived near Gassy suggested we have a collection, get a wreath and he would take it back down with him. Everyone chipped in and Taffy went out and bought a wreath. He did very well and we were all sat there with this enormous floral tribute when the door opened, Gassy walked in, took one look at the wreath and asked who had died! We were in shock and all started talking at once. It turned out that the wagon that had gone off the road on Shap was exactly the same as Gassy’s so the mistake was explained. There remained the question of the wreath! Taffy took it back to where he had bought it from and tried to sell it back to them but they weren’t having any. He came back and Gassy said that he knew what to do with it. We climbed on the back of his wagon, with the wreath, and drove off to the Necropolis, the big cemetery in Glasgow. We parked near the gates and waited for the first funeral that came down the road. Gassy waved the hearse down and placed the wreath on the roof. The startled undertaker jumped out but by that time Gassy was back in the cab and we were moving off. “Floral tribute from his mates” he shouted through the window. As he drove away we could hear the undertaker shouting “It’s a bloody woman and she didn’t want any flowers!” But, by this time we were long gone.
Clyde Street is, or rather, was, because it seems to have been redeveloped and blown away now, in the middle of Glasgow. We had a problem with parking, we wanted our wagons handy so we would lose no time when a load came in but the whole street was restricted parking. I don’t know what the others did about it but I had an arrangement with a big bobby called Jock who was always on point duty at the junction of Pitt Street and Clyde Street or else on beat in the area. He imported travelling clocks and watches and my job was to go round the clearing houses and cafes selling these clocks while Jock enforced law and order. In return, Jock used to let me park my wagon on Clyde Street as long as I moved it every now and again. I should explain that point duty was when a bobby stood in the road at a junction and directed traffic. A sort of human set of traffic lights. Jock was close to retirement and he used to sit in Jimmy’s for his lunch. If you triggered him off he would tell the most amazing stories about Glasgow in the 30’s when the gang wars were going on. There used to be pitched battles between rival gangs armed with razors, knives, axes and even swords! Jock said the police used to block up each end of the street where the fight was going on and leave the gangs to it. When things quietened down they would go in and tidy up the mess. He told me about a book; ‘No Mean City’ which he said was very accurate as a lot of the incidents had actually happened even though the characters were fictitious. I got the book and read it and still have it to this day.
There were other occasional entertainments. I was sat in Jimmy’s one day on my own. Everyone had got a load except me but there was a chance of one from Arran Barytes later in the day so I was taking it easy. Norman wasn’t in the office that day, there was only Jimmy and me. The door opened and a little dark man in a black overcoat with velvet facings on the collar and a black homburg hat came into the room followed by two enormous uglies in black Crombie overcoats and bowler hats.
Jimmy evidently knew him because they threw themselves on one another like long lost brothers. When they had calmed down, the little bloke asked Jimmy to come out for a beer and, looking at me, asked if I was a driver and if so I should come too. Off we went, Jimmy and the little bloke, the two minders close behind and me trailing at the back. We went into a little bar under the bridge and Jimmy pulled out a white Linen Bank fiver and ordered beers all round. The little bloke picked up the fiver, looked at it and said it was a long time since he had seen one. They were like the old English fivers, big, white and printed on one side only. Jimmy said of course he could have it and the little bloke turned to one of the minders and said “Fix him!” At this point I was weighing up the fastest route to the door. The minder unbuttoned his overcoat, reached inside and pulled a fiver out of the top inside pocket and gave it to Jimmy. I say ‘top’ because I saw that there were four pockets and they all seemed to be full of money. We had the beer, went back to the office and after saying his goodbyes, the little bloke and the minders left.
As soon as they were gone I asked Jimmy what was going on and told him what I had seen when the minder opened his coat. Jimmy laughed and told me I was lucky, I had just had a drink with a legend, it was Sammy Davis. Now this wasn’t the Hollywood Sammy Davis, this was one half of a pair called Davis Brothers, the other being Jimmy. They were, amongst other things, haulage contractors in London. Like a lot of other private hauliers they had been nationalised after the war but bought back their business when it was privatised again. They were chiefly famous for overloading, running without log-books and generally acting like marauding Vikings. On one memorable occasion the Traffic Commissioners issued a report which said that they weren’t fit to hold a license for a dog, let alone a haulage business.
Sammy was a dog fancier and was in Glasgow to run a dog at Powder Hall the big greyhound racing track. Jimmy reckoned they would have been running a ‘ringer’, that is a dog which looked exactly like another, better dog and had the same tattoo in its ear. The ringer was run in a few races and did nothing which took the price way out because the bookies knew it had no chance. The sting came when the real dog was run in a race which it was odds on to win. The two minders were carrying the stake money and how they worked it was that they had a network of punters all over the city who, if given money, would put it on just before the off at their local betting shop. As the money went on late there was no time for the reports to get back to the track and lower the odds, so the dog started at long odds but with a lot of money riding on it. As soon as the race was over the punters collected the money immediately and waited for the minders to come round, collect the winnings and pay them their commission. By the time the bookies realised they had been had, the lads were on the train and going back to London. Jimmy said he couldn’t be sure of this but he was almost certain that this was what was going on.
One day Jimmy came into the office resplendent in full highland dress. He looked absolutely magnificent in buckled shoes, kilt, white jabot and a black jacket. I complimented him on his outfit and the upshot of the conversation was that I went round to Paisley’s in Jamaica Street and bought Margaret a kilt. I have an idea I got one later for Susan. It was a properly made kilt with a bodice to hold it up. The lady in the shop told me the size didn’t matter as it was wrap round and the bodice could be gathered up at the waistband until the waistband was up under her arms, that way it would fit her for years. It cost £7-10-0 and was a bargain. When Margaret wore it in public the sight of her little bum swinging the kilt was a crowd-stopper and she was the subject of universal attention. The nice thing about this for me was that Jimmy told me I could put it on his account but as it happened I was carrying and could afford it.
Back at the farm we were gradually getting in shape. The garden was tidy and father was happy as a sand boy looking after the stock. We did a lot of decorating and re-painting and everything was looking tidy. I was making enough money to pay the mortgage and keep the wolf from the door but there was nothing left over for luxuries. I used to give Vera my pay packet unopened each week. She gave me a little bit of pocket money and bought enough fags to let me have about 15 a day. I know this sounds terrible but it was the way we went on and we didn’t have any problem. The truth was that Vera was far better with money than I was and this was the best arrangement. At the end of each month we used to reckon up what I had earned and knock out the mortgage money. What was left was reduced further by knocking out the regular payments we knew we had to pay for rates, utilities etc. There was a small surplus and this was for everything else, I don’t know how Vera managed but there was always just enough and never a wrong word about money.
Apart from the cruel hours my work got easier as I gained more experience. Billy had enough sense to leave me alone, I was the goose that laid the golden egg as far as he was concerned and to all intents and purposes I was my own boss. The only real hassle I had was aggravations on the road. These were mainly in London.
London was not my favourite place. Too much traffic, everyone rushing round and getting bad-tempered and a palpably hostile attitude from most people I encountered as soon as they heard a northern accent. Don’t ever tell me that the north/south divide doesn’t exist. We all felt the same and there was a common saying that the only good thing about the Smoke was the Watford by-pass, it was the way out!
The biggest problem was the docks both in London and elsewhere. In those days the old system of casual labour was still in force. The prospective workers gathered outside the shipping offices at the docks every morning and the foreman stevedores came out and picked their gang for the day. Merit had nothing to do with it, the foreman picked his relations, mates, boozing partners or those that had slipped him a backhander. It was a closed shop, they all belonged to the union and in effect, ran the system. Each morning was a cattle market and many men never knew from day to day whether they had a job or not.
I don’t blame the dockers for the fact that this state of affairs existed. It was a collective response to a set of conditions imposed by the dock operators which actively encouraged corruption and favouritism. However, once the system was in place the only people really agitating for a change were those who were adversely affected by it and on the whole, they had no power. Like it or not, this was what I and every other driver had to contend with.
There were two kinds of traffic into the docks, heavy lift and handball. Anything that was too heavy to be manhandled was heavy lift and went to the cranes, all other loads were taken off the wagon by hand. Sometimes they were craned in nets or groups in a slung load off the flat and directly into the ship but often would simply be off-loaded on to the ground and craned up from there. The driver had to get all the load to the edge of the wagon if it was going on to the floor and into the area where the slingers were working if craning in direct. My loads were usually heavy lift because it was usually cases of export goods from KMP.
No matter what you were carrying, your first job was to get to the dock and join the queue of wagons waiting for your ship. Sometimes there would only be a few, other times hundreds. You stayed in this queue until you got unloaded and this could be days. You weren’t paid any demurrage while waiting, demurrage was an agreed sum paid for waiting time attributable to delay caused by the firm you were delivering to. Dock work came under Act of God and while you were there it was costing you money and your boss. The length of the queue depended on the size of the ship, how much pressure the shipping companies were under to get loaded and whether or not there were any industrial disputes.
Industrial disputes were the bane of our lives. The unions had got the bit between their teeth during the war when labour was worth its weight in gold and many bad practices in management needed altering. Most of these changes were necessary, and union power driving the speed of change raised standards of living and in many cases, increased efficiency in the industries. However, there were other disputes which were nothing more than opportunism and guerrilla warfare and it seemed to me that the disputes on the docks generally came under this heading. There was a scale of rates paid for the handling of different cargoes. Usually this was allowed through by the dockers on the nod. They would simply adjust their work rate to stretch the job out so they were getting time rate and bonus. Another ploy was to go slow until the management saw the chance of the boat missing a tide and therefore holding up the berthing of another boat, at this point they would offer the dockers a bonus as an incentive to work harder and get the ship loaded on time. A favourite reason for calling for the shipping company’s representative and stopping work until he arrived was to claim ‘dirt money’. This was an increase in rate to reflect the fact that there was a dust problem or the cargo was smelly or soiled their overalls. I even saw them stop once for ‘embarrassment money’! They were loading lavatory pedestals and claimed they suffered embarrassment as a consequence. I don’t think that one was successful.
During my time on the tramp the private docks started to become a force in the industry. One of the first was Felixstowe and I remember on one occasion being practically dragged into a clearing house, getting a bundle of notes shoved into my hand and being told to get to Felixstowe as soon as possible for a load of potatoes in sacks for Warrington. I went down there and joined a huge queue of wagons waiting for the ship.
While we were waiting for the ship to dock we got the story from the other drivers. This boat had loaded a cargo of Egyptian spuds destined for the Golden Wonder potato crisp factory at Warrington. The shipper was a Covent Garden merchant and he routed the boat in via Liverpool, a heavily unionised port. When the cargo got there they found it was infested with scorpions and the dockers refused to touch it. Eventually they got Felixstowe to agree to handle it if they got the cargo gassed before it arrived for handling. This was done and after much delay the boat sailed round the coast from Liverpool to Felixstowe. By the time it arrived the contract with Golden Wonder was running out. The spuds had to be delivered by a certain date in order to qualify for the price agreed. The word was that Golden Wonder had already got a reduction because of the infestation.
I’ve never seen a boat unloaded quicker than that one. The dockers were on a good rate and they tore the cargo out of her. We were allowed any weight we wanted and seeing as it was a fairly flat journey from Felixstowe to Warrington many of us went a bit over the limit. I took twelve tons, roped up, sheeted down and set off for Warrington overnight. It was like a cavalry charge because we all knew that the faster we got there the higher up the queue we would be. I arrived at the plant in the early hours of the morning and joined the queue which wound round every road in the industrial estate where the crisp plant was located. The factory started unloading us but it soon became evident that we were not going to get unloaded before the contract ran out. Of course, it was in the factory’s interest to have as many of us waiting as possible when the contract finished because there would then have to be a re-negotiation of the price. The days wore by and we got to the stage where the WVS were coming round and giving us tea and sandwiches. In addition we could go into the factory and have as many crisps as we liked directly out of the continuous fryers. The first few helpings were delicious but they soon palled!
Eventually the contract was agreed and we got unloaded, It was rumoured that the potatoes were bought for 5/- a ton. We all expected a problem with payment for the haulage but Billy said we got our money in the normal time.
There was another problem with dock work. The dockers were the biggest thieves under the sun. I have seen agricultural tractors being stolen and taken out of the dock gates under the noses of the Dock Police. I always said that if the gates were wide enough they would have pinched the ships! It was an accepted fact that there was a percentage allowed for the pilferage rate. This varied with the cargo but spirits, tobacco and small manufactured goods were high on the list. One blow-back from this was a danger for drivers. If you upset the dockers and gave them some lip you had to be very careful because there was a chance that you would be stopped at the dock gate on the way out for a ‘rummage’ as it was called. The police would search your wagon and lo and behold, they’d find a crate of whisky under the sheet that you knew nothing about. The dockers had taught you a lesson and the Dock Police had massaged their detection rate.
I only ever had one good experience on a dock and that was at Liverpool. I joined the queue and, because I was by now an old hand, gave my keys to the lad in front of me so he could move my wagon if needed and walked down to the ‘wet’ canteen which was a bar on the docks. I went in and was sat there drinking a beer and talking to a couple of lads I knew when I spotted a bloke over the other side of the room and thought “I know him!” I went across and it was Ronnie Dean who I had last seen in Berlin. It turned out he was a foreman stevedore on the dock and when he heard what I was doing there asked for my notes and sent a lad off with them while we sat and had a couple of beers. 30 minutes later the lad came back, put the notes and the keys in my hand and told me that my wagon was parked outside the canteen, empty! I bought Ronnie another beer and went on my merry way.
Later, when my spell with Billy was coming to an end my last load was into one of the London docks. When I had unloaded I cleared the flat and roped my sheets down in the carrier on top of the cab and then went into the dockers ‘cubby hole’ where they were having a spell. I told them it was my last day and also that I had a warning for them. I told the assembled company that they had been kings of the castle for long enough. Times were changing and if they didn’t get their act together, in ten years there wouldn’t be a boat in the Pool of London over 2000 tons. Funnily enough they took it quietly, they weren’t daft and knew this themselves. I went out and drove out of the dock after a quick shuftie in the spare wheel and other hiding places, they weren’t going to catch me out on my last day. No problem, I sailed through the dock gates and gained my freedom!
Actually I was wrong in my estimation of the time it would take to change the system. New docks were being built down-river to handle container ships and within five years the industry was changed forever. The dockers took industrial action not against the new system but against the practise of ‘stuffing’ containers at depots away from the docks. Their argument was that this was dockers work and they tried to enlist the help of the other unions in ‘blacking’ such centres. They failed and I always said that the only reason they fought was that it was at these depots where the plunder was, a sealed container on a dock is far less liable to pilferage. This wasn’t the absolute end of the casual system, it still exists in different forms today but not on anything like the scale it operated on in the old days. A major result was the change in the old ports of Liverpool and London. In the 50’s the stretch of water in front of the Liver Building at Liverpool was a mass of ships as was the Pool of London. To my eye it seems strange to see them now, a large ship is a curiosity, in the old days it was totally different. Manchester is the same, I doubt if any traffic at all comes up the Ship Canal. I can remember when the docks at Salford were full of ocean-going ships.
Gliksten’s traffic out of London could be interesting. It was always high grade timber, hardwoods and veneers. I soon found out who was using it, it was mainly shop and bar-fitting. The only time I ever took any to a furniture factory was to Remploy, the government organisation that specialised in re-training the disabled. I think this particular factory was in Leicester. I arrived their with ten tons of high grade red hardwood, teak, meranti and mahogany, all in small lengths, they were almost like off cuts. The foreman came out, weighed the job up and called all the workforce out to unload me. I have never seen such a motley crew in my life, they all had something missing or damaged. There were both men and women and no matter what their disability, they all took what they could manage and unloaded me very quickly. I came away with a feeling that there was some sort of message I should be recognising.
One day I loaded four inch thick boards out of Gliksten’s for a boat yard on the side of Lake Windermere. When I got there I asked what they used such thick boards for and the bloke laughed at me. It turned out they sawed the boards down into four inch boards as they needed them.
There was another skill I perfected in those days on the tramp. I found out that you could make free telephone calls from any box in the country. This was before Subscriber Trunk Dialling, the old telephone boxes just had two buttons, ‘A’ to drop the money and make the call once you had a connection and ‘B’ to get your money back. All you had to do to make a call was tap out the number on the receiver rest, it worked like a charm as long as you were somewhere near the recipient of the call. Only a small thing but pennies counted in those days. When STD first came in, many of the old coin boxes were still in use and you could ring anywhere in the country for nothing, very handy when funds were low! Another trick we perfected was if we were short of money and near a busy tube or train station was to go and shove rolled up toilet paper up the returned money slide of the coin boxes. Pop off and have a cup of tea and come back in half an hour and pull out the tissue to harvest the money. It was all pennies but could buy you a breakfast if things were bad! All this was totally illegal of course but in my defence, times were hard and we had to make a bob wherever we could. The results didn’t go in booze and women but down the throats of the kids at home.
Round about July 1963 Vera and I decided we could afford a holiday. I had a word with Billy and arranged to do a load for KMP to London. I then loaded Vera, heavily pregnant with the little bundle that was to be Susan, Margaret and our luggage. We went down to London, tipped the load, found a nice bed and breakfast where I could park the wagon and stayed in London for a week using the wagon as personal transport! We went to all the sights and had a really good time. Two memories spring to mind, one is of Margaret shoving a spoonful of mustard into her mouth in Lyons Corner Café in Piccadilly while we weren’t looking, her scream brought every mother in the place across to our table! The other is of going to St Paul’s Cathedral and paying to climb up to the lantern right at the top of the dome. When we got up there the final stage was up a vertical iron ladder about twenty feet high. Several people got to this point and then jibbed at the climb but not Vera! She had paid her two bob and was going to get everything due to her. She went up the ladder with me in close attendance, my head up her bum actually! I carried Margaret and we all looked out on the rooftops of London. Susan swears blind she saw the view through Vera’s belly button! Knowing her, she probably did and all.
In October 1963, looking at my load book it was the 25th., I was in Newport looking for a load. I went to Cyprien Fox and they sent me into Armco to load culvert pipes for the north of Scotland. I had a word with them in the office and asked what degree of urgency there was for the delivery as I had a wife at home ready to drop to bits and would like to hang about for the birth. They said there was no rush and as long as they were there in a week or ten days it would be OK. I put six three feet diameter culvert pipes, twenty feet long, on the flat, roped them on and set off for Barlick. A good rate, only about three tons weight but eight tons cap. All was well.
I arrived back home the following day and settled down to enjoy the birth of our second child. Vera was in wonderful condition and very happy because she was having the baby at home. We waited…..and waited and waited. By the 28th. We had decided that as long as I was there Vera was going to hang back, we really believed that me being there was some sort of pressure to perform so I said I’d make a dash for the north, get tipped and loaded back and be home as soon as I could. I set off at about 1800 and by 0300 the following morning I was making my way along the single track road between Lairg and Kylescu on the west coast. It was lonely and bleak, I remember being surprised when I rounded a bend on that deserted road and saw what looked like a replica of the Midland Hotel in Manchester sat in the middle of the wilderness. I found out later that this surreal vision was the Altnacelagh Hotel and was a deer shooting lodge. A bit further along the road I decided I wanted to pee so I stopped and went round to the nearside of the wagon. I was happily relieving myself when suddenly a lion roared right behind me! I’ve never been as frightened in my life, still making water, I couldn’t stop, I dashed round to the driving side, finished my job and leapt into the seat and locked the door. The roaring went on at intervals but I couldn’t see anything. I decided that the best thing to do was to carry on.
At first light I was near Kylescu and had found the site where the road-building gang had their headquarters. They gave me breakfast and I told them about the lions. They nearly fell off their perch laughing at me, what I had heard was a stag in rut and according to them it was probably a quarter of a mile away. I’ve heard them since and it still makes me laugh.
When I had dropped the pipes I drove back to Charles Alexander’s at Inverness and they loaded me with ten tons of seed potatoes for Buckingham. By late afternoon I was loaded and set off back to Barlick. We didn’t have the phone at home in those days but I stopped and rang the Greyhound Hotel, I knew there would be somebody in there who knew Vera and would pop up the lane to find what the state of play was. Try as I might I couldn’t get through, there was no STD in those days, all calls went through the operators. I explained what my problem was and they were very good, they told me where the next phone box was and said they would keep trying and I was to ring them when I could. After two abortive calls I finally reached the top of a hill on a lonely road in the pitch black and the pouring rain. For some reason there was a box right on top of the hill. I got the operator and she gave me the news that I had a baby girl and Vera was doing fine. They couldn’t get back to the Dog so I retired to the cab and had a cup of tea and a smoke as I pondered on life. My main feeling was anger, what the bloody hell was I doing on a mountain top in the north of Scotland in the pouring rain when I should have been in Barlick at the birth of our second daughter. I got out of the cab, made a reverse call charge to Billy, getting him out of bed in the process and told him he had better look for another driver as I was fed up and was going to look for a job which would keep me closer to home. I was fed up with tramping, long hours and sleeping rough.
One of the things that was influencing me was the fact that we were just coming into winter again. The job was rough enough in good weather but when the winter set in all you could be certain of was that things were going to get worse and more dangerous. During the winter of 1962 to 1963 we had an iron frost that lasted for about six weeks over virtually the whole of the country, it thawed at the end of February eventually. In those days there wasn’t such a thing as winter diesel and in very cold weather the wax would start to separate out of the fuel in flakes and block the fuel filters. Actually, a lot of the problems put down to wax were caused by water in filters that hadn’t been cleaned out for ages, particularly the primary sediment filter which was usually mounted on the chassis in the coldest place possible. I had my own remedy for this problem, in really cold weather I used to put one gallon of petrol to ten of diesel and this stopped the problem. I used to stay with an old woman in a cottage on the High Street in Stilton on the A1 and I’ve seen the water frozen on the wash basin in the bed room when you got up in the morning! It was here that I saw the consequences of bad maintenance and frozen filters one morning.
I never had any problem starting but others did and it was standard practise to help your mates get a start. We used to go down to the park and start the wagons before breakfast and leave them running for an hour to warm up properly. I had a diverter on the exhaust where it went under the fuel tank and this blew some hot gas on to the bottom of the tank. It made a lot of greasy muck but I always had warm diesel! If someone had a flat battery I would give them a tow and we used to be busy for about half an hour getting everyone started up. This particular morning there was a furniture wagon which we couldn’t get started, we flamed the intake with a petrol soaked rag and tried everything we knew but couldn’t get a start. The batteries were OK so we put it down to frozen fuel lines and left him to it. When we came back from breakfast the fire brigade was there putting out the remains of the wagon. The young lad had resorted to desperate measures and lit a fire under the wagon, he warmed it up all right but lost the wagon and no doubt his job in the process.
I’ll tell you some snow stories later on but just want to mention fog. Nobody today knows what a real pea-souper fog is. Levels of air pollution have dropped wonderfully since the Clean Air acts came into force and it was this pollution mixed with condensing conditions that used to produce the thick industrial fogs that could literally bring an area to a standstill. Stockport, Manchester, London and Glasgow were all famous for their fogs but the worst place I knew was Rotherham and Sheffield. The furnaces in those days were belching out smoke, flame and fumes 24 hrs. a day, seven days a week. If you drive over Tinsley viaduct now you can see dereliction on all sides but in those days it was one of the steel centres of the world. It was like a vision from hell on a clear night but if there was any fog about you couldn’t see a thing. I have seen it so bad that there was only one sensible thing to do and that was stop and wait for it to lift. The prospect of another winter of freezing cold, snow and fog wasn’t attractive and no doubt had a part in my thinking at that time. Of course, I wasn’t going to avoid it completely but there’s a lot of difference between bad weather when you know you will be home, warm and in your own bed that night and the same conditions when your nose is pointed away from home and you know there is no comfort waiting for you.
Mentioning fog has reminded me of a story Dorothy told me the other day which I had forgotten. One day while we were at Norris Avenue, mother went out to post a letter on the main road and lost her way in the fog. She was wandering about following walls which she thought she recognised and it was half an hour before she found her way home again. While I was in the army the family went to Rochdale one day and Dorothy had to walk in front of the car for most of the way back because the fog was so thick. I know this is difficult to believe nowadays but I have seen it so bad that when night was falling you couldn’t even see the end of your arm! The trams were a good thing in fog. When it got really bad in Stockport the conductor used to walk in front with an oil flare, this was like a large cast iron teapot with a piece of rope stuck down the spout for a wick. Oil was poured into the pot itself and was sucked up the rope by capillary attraction. When lit they gave a large orange flame which showed up well in fog but made a lot of smoke as well! These same flares were always used to mark road works and were tended by the night watchman who was always on duty with his coke brazier and small wooden hut like a sentry box.
The last load I have in my book was November 23rd. 1963. It must have been at about that time that I went to see Bill Mills who was manager at WMD and asked him if there was anything doing. He asked me to call the dairy the following day and when I did, he told me that David Peacock had told him to find a job for me. I was back at Marton driving for the dairy.
This was the end of my days on tramp and general haulage, I was to be a driver for another ten years but I never had it so rough again. If I was asked to sum up this period of my life in one sentence it would be interesting work but not enough sleep. I had been working on average 90/100 hours a week and taking every load that was given to me. Looking back it was marvellous experience and I could handle everything that was thrown at me. I can tell you what the hardest work was, it was a toss up between loading sugar beet pulp at Brigg and Plate Maize at Hull. The beet pulp from Brigg was a regular event during the autumn which was when the sugar factories were dealing with the beet harvest, they used to call it ‘The Campaign’. When the beet had been shredded and boiled to extract the sugar, the residue was dried and bagged and then sold for animal feed. You drew into an enormous warehouse and back up under a big elevator. As soon as you got there they started to drop sacks on the conveyor for you. The beet was hot from the drier and fine grit and sugar sifted out of them as you loaded them. The trick was to have a bag over your head to keep the worst of the muck off you and to work as fast as you could because the bags came at a hell of a rate and you needed to catch them off the elevator, otherwise you were lifting them off the floor. There was a panic button on the elevator which would stop it if you got into real trouble but it was a point of honour not to use it.
It was bloody hard work but at least it was over quickly, you soon had your ten tons on and could draw away and let the next candidate for torture in to the elevator. I remember one day watching a splendidly professional driver put his boiler suit on, button it to the neck and wrap a scarf round his neck. Then he put on a large pair of gloves and collapsed half way through loading with heat exhaustion! We loaded his wagon for him and sent him on his way.
The episode with the plate maize was strange. I had gone to Hull for a load of maize for Cyril Richardson. The bags were what we called ‘catch weight’, they weren’t any specific weight, the whole load was weighed when you left the dock. (The empty wagon was weighed on arrival, this was the ‘tare’ weight and it was this deducted from the ‘gross’ weigh when you left and that gave the ‘net’.) There were no more wagons about but the dockers kept me waiting all day, don’t ask me why and it was no use complaining. Eventually, at about four o’clock they called me in and I drew alongside the dock. It was unusually high, being about a foot over my head. They bagged the maize at the back of the dock and wheeled it across to the edge on a sack truck. The dockers didn’t look to see whether I was ready, they just wheeled the truck to the edge and tipped the sack over. They were Gopsill Brown hire sacks and held about 300 lbs. each. Realising what the game was I just grabbed the bags, ran down the flat and dropped them in position then ran back just in time to get the next. It got easier the further back I came and I was putting my ‘riders’ on top as I went along. I have never loaded a wagon as fast by hand in my life. I can’t tell you how long it was but it was bloody quick. When the last bag dropped I drew out into the yard, took a quick breather and then started to rope and sheet. A bloke came out and said “Well done mate” and shoved a ten bob note in my hand. I asked him what was going on and he said they had put a double gang on and run a book on whether I could keep up with them. He had been one of the winners and they’d all thrown 2/- in the kitty for me. Deep joy!
There was another reason why I wanted out of the tramp. Billy was having a hard time, he had a bad accident I think it would be at the beginning of 1963. He was drinking after hours in the Thornton Manor Hotel and sometime in the morning they were all filing out through a passage to be let out of the back door. As the column of drunks reached the back door the landlord opened it and everyone had to take a pace backwards as it opened inwards. Billy realised what was happening and instead of stepping backwards, sensed a space to his left and went sideways instead. He fell down the cellar steps and fractured his skull so badly that he was on the operating table at Preston for nine hours! He was never the same after that and used to have fits and exhibited some very strange behaviour. He came at me with a knife one night when I called for my wage and on more than one occasion I found him having a fit. Arthur Morrison was his doctor and he showed me how to inject Billy if I found him like that and couldn’t get hold of him. I went in one night and he was in one of these fits, he had worked himself into a corner and his heels had worn through the carpet and made depressions in the floorboards as they drummed on the floor. God knows how long he had been there. I gave him an injection and got him into bed but then the problem was that someone had to be there when he woke because he was disoriented. I went to Barlick, told Vera what I was doing and then went back to sit with him. This happened several times and on one occasion John, his son, was visiting him, I took him to Barlick and Vera looked after him while I brought his dad round. All this was good Christian stuff but wearing and helped me come to the decision that I wanted out. Billy sold TWY which was still parked up at Hey Farm, it went to Ernie Dawson at Thornton Hall Farm where it was used for carting hay in from the fields. I left WX with Billy, drew my final wage and walked away. I can’t remember anything about what happened to the haulage business after that, it didn’t concern me, I had done my bit.
So, at the end of 1963 I was back at the Dairy, home every night and plenty of free milk for our two daughters. The wage was better as well so, all told, we had a good Christmas.
25485 words
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BarrowfordJohn
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Posted - 24/05/2004 : 15:39
Excellent - so readable that I missed my favourite TV programme!
Never trust an electrician with no eyebrows!
www.barrowfordpress.co.uk  |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 24/05/2004 : 17:08
John, you have no idea what a glow I get when someone says they have enjoyed reading something I've written. Thanks for taking the trouble. Now all you have to do is get writing..... Remember, all goes in the archive and you have lots to tell.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
mporter
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Posted - 09/06/2004 : 07:56
Excuse me.....I was born on the 9th of October in Skipton General Hospital.......Mags
Margaret Porter
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 09/06/2004 : 08:03
Isn't communication wonderful...... All right, we'll ask Doc to edit it! I have already edited the base files. Forty years on and the kids are still leaning over my shoulders and criticising (in the firm's time too!!)
Isn't it wonderful....
Love Dad XXX
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
mporter
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Posted - 09/06/2004 : 08:08
I am at home....supposed to be working, but Katie is sick with tonsillitis on top of everything else. You can ring me if you like.....
Love Mags
Margaret Porter
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Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 09/06/2004 : 12:26
See, the Old Fart got it wrong again.....
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Stevie
Mad Woman of Thornton
834 Posts
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Posted - 09/06/2004 : 23:52
Oh this warms my heart!
You two remind me so much of the relationship I share with my own Dad .... he too remembers things at times very differently to how I remember them!
Its like watching a double act .... long may it continue! |
Stanley
Local Historian & Old Fart
36804 Posts
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Posted - 10/06/2004 : 05:24
One small correction, this isn't a dounle act, it's me getting mugged by three women!! Don't forget that the other two are on to me as well..... They have a saying between themselves, if one of them is doing something that they think is regressive or wrong they accuse each other of sounding like Stanley...
Stanley Challenger Graham
Barlick View
stanley at barnoldswick.freeserve.co.uk |
Stevie
Mad Woman of Thornton
834 Posts
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Posted - 10/06/2004 : 23:10
Now thats exactly what myself and my brothers do regarding our Dad .... Admit it Stanley, you love it when they gang up, it proves you raised them to have spirit and fire .... and I do wonder where they got that from! :-) |
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HEY FARM
