The year was late 1969 the place London ! I was a 22 year old owner Driver with an “A” licenced D1000 flat. For the previous almost 18 months I had re-loaded off J & W Watts London Colney office more-or-less twice a week with everything they had( and were given by various other hauliers in the London area) for the Barrow/Lancaster/Kendal areas and believe me I used to bend over backwards to clear everything that was asked of me, being young and keen like 
And I used to get some tremendous payloads on board at times believe me but I never let anyone down as neither Watts or the Cockney hauliers wanted to deliver bits and pieces into what is now South ■■■■■■■■ A Cockney traffic clerk once said to me “Westmorland” ! where the ■■■■■■■ hell is “W-e-s-t -m-o-r-f-u-c-k-I-n-g-l-a-n-d” 
! However this particular day in around November '69 I rang into Watts office and their Manager says OK Bewick I’ve got a number of “Terrapin” mobile buildings for Campbletown so you can load one, here is the address of where to load ! So I says “Do you mean Campbletown in Scotland” Harold ? Yes he says that’s the place ! Well I quickly fired back " Your having a ■■■■■■■ laugh aren’t you" that’s no good to me and you know it Harold I’ve got to get back home and my own customer who will expect me to-morrow. So Harold gives me the “hard word” and says he has taken this job on and he has something like 20 of these buildings to move and as far as he is concerned I as a regular subbie of Watts I will have to do one or else ! Or else what I says to him ! as far as I’m concerned he could stick the Terrapins as far up his arse as they would go ! I’d be better off going straight home m/t than taking on a job to ■■■■■■■ Campbletown !! Have you ever looked on the map ! your nearly in ■■■■■■■ N Ireland at Campbletown, what a ■■■■■■■ goat track as well. Anyway, at that precise moment my continued subbing for Watts came to an abrupt end and there was no way was I going to run home 250 miles to Kendal m/t either 
If anyone is interested I will conclude the tale of what happened next to-morrow and I never looked back Cheers Bewick.
so how was the climb up the rest and be thankfull then? easier on the way back?? 
I had a d1000 for a year…cant remember what engine it had,but it was the most powerfull one available,went like stink to the extent I had to argue I wasn’t flogging the diesel .that lasted till I got the boss to 2nd man me…flat to the mat and 2 days later,he changed his mind and just said I was a nutter…i still made the both of us plenty though.then a year later, gt demoted and he bought me a new marathon unit… 
Looking forward to hearing what you did next Dennis. There are so many crossroads in our lives and you always had the ability to see which road to take!
John
John West:
Looking forward to hearing what you did next Dennis. There are so many crossroads in our lives and you always had the ability to see which road to take!John
+1 Bring it on Mr Smith!
If it’s as good as the one about the horse at the M.O.T. station Dennis then we are all chomping at the bit to hear it.
Regards Steve.
More Bewick. 
As above Dennis , more and more please. Jim.
Did you load paper out of St Albans for the mills ?
Time to publish that book, Bewick. I could be available to translate it into English at the right price.
Retired Old ■■■■:
Time to publish that book, Bewick. I could be available to translate it into English at the right price.
Act 2 scene 1 ! So here I was in Aldgate one morning having tipped at Wiggins Teape with paper from Milnthorpe and I’d told Watts manager at L/Colney to “stick” his load to C/town ! At 22years old I had developed a solid traffic flow to the London area from two great Blue Chip customers in Milnthorpe, Henry Cooke Ltd and Libby McNeill & Libby, so much so that they had both helped me to vary my “A” licence to carry their goods and they continued to support my future applications in the Traffic Court later on in 1970. Anyway here was I in about November '69 with my D1000 and with a new 18 ton carrying capacity artic also on order for delivery at the end of the year to start work out of the Mill in Jan '70. So being young and “fearless” as we all are at that age I thought this little set back isn’t going to phase me but I had come to the conclusion that the ultimate objective was for me to source some regular “direct” traffic from the London area which was easier said than done. However, I recalled that during the previous months Watts had sent me into Laporte Industries in Ilford to collect a few 45 gal drums for British Cellophane in Barrow and the Despatch manager at Laportes had asked a couple of times if I was ever looking for a load back to the Manchester area but I didn’t show a lot of interest as I was fully committed to loading off Watts right back to my own area. So without further ado I give Laportes a ring that morning and I gets hold of the despatch manager a bloke called Ron Hubbard ( same name as that American Cult leader) and straight off he remembered me and says it’s your lucky day if you can get in to us now I will load you for Nicholls Vimto in Man/cr with 30 odd drums IIRC but can you have it Man/cr ASAP to-day,so I says get me loaded by mid morning and I’ll have it there before finish to-day, which I did and they paid me extra for obliging IIRC. Anyway, I thought this will do for me, Laportes were a big Chemical Co again blue chip and although I did a few more loads for them plus my new artic did a couple of full loads to Donald McPhersons at Bury ? Laportes just didn’t have enough regular volume for us so I continued to do the odd couple of tractors for SOM and Inter City which were ■■■■ rates but a flying load ! When the new artic started we had got to know a firm called Ellisons from Portsmouth ? but at their depot at Purfleet and their Manager, a very decent bloke, used to fix the artic up with loads of reels off Purfleet Wharf for Lancashire. So for the first 3 months of 1970 we had bags of good traffic down to the South East but I wasn’t content as I was still wanting to find a direct source of traffic back North and little did I know this was exactly about to happen as a result of the Paper Mill starting to supply a new customer with Crepe paper coils, tons of it and on pallets. Our whole operation was about to take a massive up turn big style, as we now secured more traffic than we could handle coming North and at our own quoted rates and again for a Blue chip customer. Enough for to-night, more to-morrow possibly. Cheers Bewick.
Keep it coming please Dennis,Cheers Pete
Dennis,
Here Here, cant wait for the next installment , enjoyed reading about your Humble beginings, and above all it is great to read material that a certain member from here can’t hijack with his disagreeing and rubishing theory!
E.W.
P.S.
If you want all this translated into welsh i’m your man
Bewick:
The year was late 1969 the place London ! I was a 22 year old owner Driver with an “A” licenced D1000 flat. For the previous almost 18 months I had re-loaded off J & W Watts London Colney office more-or-less twice a week with everything they had( and were given by various other hauliers in the London area) for the Barrow/Lancaster/Kendal areas and believe me I used to bend over backwards to clear everything that was asked of me, being young and keen like
Dennis your a Star, Keep this story going, Regards Larry.
a real guid read,real self made men!.
Brilliant, Horatio Alger stuff Dennis. Keep writing
John.
hi dennis
i always wondered how you started,please keep the stories coming its a dam good read.
regards
sm1
Go for it Bewick, very interesting, shows what could be done.
Evening Dennis,
Great reading, I used to love to see your red and white livery, seemed so smart on the road, and always well driven. When I saw the name Bewick…seemed so substantial,yet I never knew who was behind the name.
Strange, by 1969, I was hanging up my spurs on driving, thousands of miles through Europe, mainly in Fodens, (perhaps that was why I had enough)!, and the family seemed hell bent in joining the “race to the bottom” that was general haulage back then…so I was off in a different direction altogether.
Looking forward to hearing how you bucked the trend…boy how I would have loved to have the opportunity to drive anything as powerful as a D1000…mind you I was later to learn all about that blooming handbrake!
Keep on writing, we are all with you…
Cheerio for now.
Now then where was I, oh aye early 1970 operating a D1000 16 ton flat, a BMC Mastiff 26 ton artic and oh! not forgetting a new 10 ton GVW Bedford KE I bought for my young Brother who had turned 17 in the December, past his test and was raring to go ! The new source of traffic I secured was at a Paper sack manufacturer on the Esplanade in Rochester Kent formerly called Palfreys but they had been bought out by Dickinson Robinson Group and Henry Cooke were major suppliers of MG Kraft paper to DRG in Bristol so after the takeover of Palfreys, Robinsons Sacks as the name was changed to began buying the coils of coloured crepe which were used to stitch the closed end of the sack, all kinds of colour which denoted the size of the sack. Well we started to deliver the pallets of this crepe to Rochester and not missing a trick like the Despatch office at Rochester asked if we were interested in re-loading back North, as much as we wanted ! I put our rate schedule in which was accepted and off we were, up and running and loading all our three motors back to mainly the big mail order firms around Bradford/Leeds and Manchester. The form was when we tipped at R/Chester and the office gave the driver a list of maybe 7 or 8 drops and also would say we could do with those two sending and then we would pick another two or three built around the two they’d wanted for delivering for defo! Also at this time we were getting busier with London traffic out of the Mill as well so even if we were in the East end or even on the West side we were still better flying down to Rochester for a load out of the Sack factory. DRG Group were a Blue Chip Co so I had cast iron customers at each end of our operation and it wasn’t long into 1970 that I added an little Albion 4 wheeler and also applied for another artic “A” licence, this time a new 28 ton Leyland Mastiff and a couple of new York trailers, I also bought a secondhand 33ft York EP30 tandem the extra trailers gave us that much more flexibility as we could shunt them in the Mill and when the artics came back to Milnthorpe late afternoon or early evening there was a couple of trailers ready to go South again next morning. We now had a smooth operation and the Mill at Beetham were pressing us to do more for them as I got on great with the senior management and they were such a super customer to work for so I reasoned I couldn’t go wrong as long as we maintained the service levels and reliability, which we did 100%.Our luck improved even further in early '71 as I got friendly with the Chief buyer at the Mill,an absolute Gentleman called Wilf Robinson and now we had the artics he said “how do you fancy bringing me the odd 100ton parcel of woodpulp from Tilbury straight back to the Mill”,(Is the Pope a Catholic or what!) So we duly started bringing in Pulp at the rate of two or three loads per week on the artics but of course this cut down our work out of the sack works but it wasn’t such a great loss as at this time when Operator licencing came in there was a surge of all kinds of new small operators starting up down in Kent and Robinsons even started loading W.H.Smith vans as they had piled into third party haulage as did a few ex “C” licenced operators, though many of them found out quickly that haulage wasn’t the “easy” money they thought it was . So, from early '71 our traffic patterns were transforming again and in August '71 I shifted the fleet up another notch and was looking at hauling all the pulp we could manage right back to Home base, Luvverly Jubberly. Anyway enough for to-night,the next instalment becomes more interesting I hope ! But as an aside the Mill Buyer, Wilf Robinson, I spoke about turned out to be a great supporter of Bewick Transport who we dealt with for about 14 years until he retired but I continued to visit him every Christmas after he retired to give him a bottle of Gin right up when he passed away in the mid 90’s(You must never forget your friends that helped you along the way), he always gave me a bloody great salmon out of his deep freeze being like he was a dedicated fisherman, he really was a super bloke to deal with honest and straight the like of which have died out nowadays, literally. Cheers Bewick.