Foden 46 barry crewe

Hi John, I don’t know when you started at Beisty’s but the first driving job that Barry had was for a company called Falks Electrical which was just a bit further along Rochdale Road near the junction of Miller Street. He travelled all over delivering electrical equipment in an Austin LD van and he took me on a trip to Newcastle once in the school holidays. If you remember the Gould street Gas works, well the first car that Barry bought was an old Austin 10 van which was an ex North Western Gas Board. If you remember the Gas Board had a fleet of red ones along with the G.P.O.(mail). G.P.O. (telephones) had a fleet of bottle green ones and the North Western Electricity Board had a fleet of blue ones. I can’t remember how much he paid for it but hey it was a car and it went (well most of the time). I can remember watching Children’s Hour on the black and white telly between 5-6 p.m. every night and at about 5.30 my mam would get up and say “here’s Barry I had better get his tea out of the oven” and less than five minutes later in would walk Barry. I used to think that my mother had some kind of super natural powers as she could always predict when Barry was just about to come home.
About twenty years later I asked her one day how she knew when Barry was about to walk into the house all those years ago. She replied “it was that old red van that he had, whenever he was at the top of the street the television used to crackle and show wavy lines on the screen”. :unamused: I realised then that it must of been electrical interference from Barry’s van. The next time that I saw him I mentioned this story to him and he said “oh yes the bloke next door was always saying when are you going to get a (z.b.) suppresser on your coil.” :blush: