I have my own rather curious ‘supergun’ tale to tell. It was early 2002 and I had loaded in Glen Rothes for Saudi Arabia. While I was clearing customs in Dover, I was asked to open up the trailer. The officer was a rather portly, commanding type of woman and once I’d flipped the backsheet onto the roof she said, ‘What’s in those shipping cases?’.
‘Pipes’, I replied.
‘We’ll need to see inside them,’ she told me.
‘Now just a minute,’ I pleaded. ‘These cases are stacked up. The only way you’re going to see inside is to completely strip this tilt, find a crane to remove the crates, have someone prise them open; then put the whole thing back together again. I could be here for two days! I was expecting this sort of hassle at the Saudi border, not at Dover!’
She looked at me scathingly, and then said, ‘Have you never heard of Super-gun?’
Well, that was it - she was serious - and I started laughing. ‘What are you laughing at?’ She asked. I told her that the Super-gun pipes had highly polished insides but my pipes didn’t. ‘How do you know?’ she demanded. I replied that I had supervised every moment of the loading from deck to crate to trailer. ‘Well if you supervised the whole thing, then that’s different,’ she said doubtfully. ‘You’d better be on your way.’ With that she sealed the load. Robert 
dieseldog6:
As Gavin said, there’s more to this than came to light, a few years after this I was given a book by the Managing Director of Matrix Churchill, a big engineering company in Coventry, opposite the old Standard Triumph, well the guy was saying how the Government was involved as Matrix were doing some of this work, when the S… hit the fan they denied all knowledge of it and the Matrix was closed down not long after. Wish I could remember the book now.
I read the book The Unlikely Spy by Paul Henderson, he was the chief man at Matrix Churchill, does that ring a bell.
Oily
nicholas:
HI EVERYONE, does anyone know what happened to the super gun trucker ? I think his name was Paul Ashwell (owner driver) got arrested in Turkey ? just before the first gulf war,just wondering if he got his truck back poor old boy!!
Wasn’t it very shortly after that an Irish truck got impounded carrying 20 tons of leather?
Apparently the customs thought it was a holster for the ‘supergun’!!
Sorry…couldn’t resist it!
petecud:
Wasn’t it very shortly after that an Irish truck got impounded carrying 20 tons of leather?
Apparently the customs thought it was a holster for the ‘supergun’!!
Sorry…couldn’t resist it!
Hahahaha!!! I’m taking that to the pub tonight.
Just for the record, the supergun contract was one that I was glad to lose, although I kicked myself at the time for being too late with the quotation. Mind you we’d have made sure all the paperwork was in order before the trucks left the UK.
We also shipped almost all the Matrix Churchill, all the 600 services and all the BSA machine tools. Everything had export licences and every truck reported to and was examined by customs at Dover. The government were absolutely aware of what was being exported and its purpose. There are photos of British officials, including a government minister, at the previous Baghdad International trade fair inspecting machines and admiring such things as the shell cases they were designed to produce.
As far as I know Paul Ashwell didn’t get either his truck or trailer back. There was a lot of inactivity by the government at the time over the incident, but Paul had a lot of support back home. Paul was a good customer of Geoff Byford and Dave Fairweather who at the time ran CDC the truck accessories company. Geof was big on the truck show scene and had organized 3 slow moving convoys to run at the same time. One was starting at the M25 A 13 Junction one form the A1 at South Minmms and the other on the M4 at Heston services. I was to run at the front of the Heston services convoy leaving at 7.30 am and heading to the houses of parliament where hopeful I would all meet Geoff and hand over a big petition, I can’t remember who was coming in from South Mimms. The main idea being to create as big a traffic jam as possible ( After all the French were doing that kind of thing all the time ). There were about 45 trucks ready to roll at 7.15 when I got a phone call from Geoff, to say that some people had turned up in black cars and advised against such things, and shortly after that we got the same deal at Heston.
A couple of days later Paul arrived back in the UK, and to make amends DAf offered him a free truck and someone also donated a new trailer. I knew a bloke that knew Paul pretty well and was told that he was back doing Spain and a bit of Italy, the gun thing was a subject was never talked about.
The question was how did the deal get so far before it was considered problematic? after all a trade minister must have signed of on the deal in the first place?
what about the company that supplied the high grade steel or the company that made the thing?
Perhaps it was better for the public to think that Paul had whittled the gun out of a bit of tube while he was sitting about in a lay-by somewhere.
Jeff…
Hiya i saw a lump of that super gun in Duxford museum, it just looked like a ingot with a hole up the middle.
i think it was 10 to 12 feet long octagon shape about a metre diameter, been a truck driver who ever sorted it
out it was part of a barrel for a gun was tipped off, i’d have just weighed it in. there was no brackets or anything
to give any idea what it was for if i remember rightly.
John
There was a program on one of the sky channels about large guns and this one was mentioned
Wasnt there another supergun trip, and they got stopped in Sofia, apparently it was a new start up with 2/3 vehicles in convoy, i think this was about 1.5 to 2 yrs ago and reported on T/Net, never did hear anymore about it, someone throw some light on it please, the original supergun story i heard about.
The “gun” was made by Forgemasters in Sheffield. The building is still there (or was). Forgemasters claim that the spec was never meant to be any kind of weapon.
Carlc:
The “gun” was made by Forgemasters in Sheffield. The building is still there (or was). Forgemasters claim that the spec was never meant to be any kind of weapon.
Forgemasters is still a going concern and turning stuff out
cheers Johnnie
Mr. Ian Rycroft RIP, of EC Transport, Poole, was indicted in the “Matrix-Churchill affair” as it became known.
His good connections in the military and his teflon armour plated defensive stance cleared him and his company of any wrong doing, despite forwarding items subject to alleged restricted movements!
HI EVERYONE, does anyone know what happened to the super gun trucker ? I think his name was Paul Ashwell (owner driver) got arrested in Turkey ? just before the first gulf war,just wondering if he got his truck back poor old boy!!
Last i heard he was running a bar in spain with his missuss malaga area.
Here you go mate,doug this one out for you. I took this at truckfest south west,pretty sure it was 1990,this was shortly after the whole super gun thing. So yeah he did get it back and by the looks of it there were two the same. I know there was also a write up in Trucking International explaning the whole story,sorry can’t remember the exact month mate. From memory the gun sections were made by a mob in Sheffield,Ben Haulage was run by Paul Ashwell’s father in-law, he was locked up and the truck impounded in Greece not Turkey. I may be wrong on some or all of those thing though.
Cheers Jamie oh yeah I like the tongue in cheek cannon on the cab door.
Hopefully this is the right way up,photo bucket is new to me
Hi I think that there was a lot more to this story than ever came out properly! I was working for DT’s at the time and they were the shippers. I can remember coming back from Istanbul and seeing an odd looking load on a Hungarian Cammion truck going into Turkey, when I got back there were all the pics in the papers and I recognized the load. The Hungarian driver was turned around in Turkey and sent back. I can’t at the moment remember any thing about the third load.
IIRC Paul Ashwell was having trouble all the way down with his paper work and when he shipped out of Italy into Greece he did not get his carnet stamped and had to go back as a passenger to get it done. IIRC he was on his first trip. This plus the fact that the Greeks wondered why he was taking such a route got their tiny little minds all excited and the **** hit the fan!I am sure that if some one puts some more info on here it will jog my memory. I was suprised that the Turks let one load come back but the Greeks wouldn’t.
I might also say that one person who worked at DT’s at that time also caused me some problems, I was asked to take a load to Split in Yugo. at about the same time, when I got to Dover I got called into an interview room and was questioned about were I was going, was I sure and so on.They then showed me the paperwork , everything showed the destination as Split except for one piece that said Baghdad 
My trailer and the load was confiscated, after a week and the intervention of DT’s managing director who said that DT’s premises were a Custom & Excise bonded yard, I collected my trailer and dumped the load in DT’s yard, it was still there years later. I never found out if it was a genuine mistake or someone trying to pull a fast one.
Gavin
Thanks for the reply chaps. I thought i remembered his name because i worked with a paul ashwell at the time,(different one). I always thought he got a rough deal, it didn’t seem like the goverment done much for him. like you say, i don’t think we got all the story, how come the press called it part of a gun when it looked like a pipe, someone must have told them.
Lost track of him many years ago – He originally came from Milton Keynes !!
His wifes father (his father-in-law) is Mick Hall who at one time ran transport out of Bletchley – Anglo Espania & Union Freight running mainly to Spain & I believe did work for Rokold ! Mick also had a big pub on the A5 at Bletchley by the turn for Simpson and I think it was/is called “The Swan” – there was talk of them going to Spain but that was many years ago !!
NZ JAMIE:
Here you go mate,doug this one out for you. I took this at truckfest south west,pretty sure it was 1990,this was shortly after the whole super gun thing. So yeah he did get it back and by the looks of it there were two the same. I know there was also a write up in Trucking International explaning the whole story,sorry can’t remember the exact month mate. From memory the gun sections were made by a mob in Sheffield,Ben Haulage was run by Paul Ashwell’s father in-law, he was locked up and the truck impounded in Greece not Turkey. I may be wrong on some or all of those thing though.
Cheers Jamie oh yeah I like the tongue in cheek cannon on the cab door.
Are you sure thats the same truck ? Could be wrong but ime pretty certain that i saw pics of the truck/trailer and the unit was a flat cab Daf 3300?