The van in the centre in Barrett’s Oak tree livery started life identical to its sister to the left, A Bedford KF Vanplan pantechnicon painted in our cream and brown livery.
In the early 1980s we were approached by Barrett’s the housebuilder, who although one of the nation’s largest housebuilders head office was in Newcastle, where it had been established by Sir Laurie Barrett. They had several schemes to help sell homes including part exchange, free legal fees and they had decided to look into the possibility of offering free home removals. We were in the fortunate possition that we had vans returning empty almost daily from every area of the UK to our Spennymoor base, and therefore were able to bring a removal back into the North East for almost as cheaply as we could offer a local removal from say one area of Newcastle to another. I therefore was able to offer a standard price for removals into any of their building sites based all around the North East. It was further helped that many home buyers were first time buyers and so had very little to move. Also they were often attracted by the layout and furnishing of the ‘Show Houses’ so Barretts also agreed that we store a range of new furniture that was used in the show houses, so we clicked a little extra warehousing & delivering this furniture to the new buyers.
It was agreed in with the price we would paint one of our vans in the Barrett livery which would be used almost exclusively into the new Barrett homes, but of course the biggest glut of removals was carried out using our normal W.H.Williams liveried vans.
So a van was chosen to be re-painted in Barrett’s livery. A Bedford-Vanplan. Full credit must be given to the Late Peter Butler who signwrote most of our vehicles in being able to create in perfection their Oak tree trademark and the first duty of the van was to attend a film shot where it was used in a television advert which was widely shown on Tyne Tees Television to promote this new scheme and also be used in the literature given out at the show houses.
Somme three years or so later the Barrett bedford vanplan suffered an accident that seriously damaged the front of the luton and cab. Bringing it back to Spennymoor we decided it would be uneconomic to return it to Vanplan and get them to replace the front end, which was moulded in one piece, particularly as we were very busy at the time and needed the van on the road. The alternative carried out in our workshops over a weekend was to cut the front of the van away & rebuilt the body as a box-van and fit a standard cab front. The result seen in the picture. Our painters painted and Peter Butler sign wrote together with another Oak tree on the front on the Sunday and after returning to us on a Thursday night was back on the road, looking very different on the Monday morning.
Strange as it seemed a few years ago a photo turned up of it in its final years with only the Hatcher cab roof-light, still written as it had been by Peter Butler to give away its orriginal identity.
