Any old promotor drivers around

Morning Steve. Just read through all the Frank White posts via the link you gave. Much of them over ten years ago. Very interesting they are to. Certainly Colin posted a lot in those days. Frank has been identified as one of the drivers amongst the group waiting to get into Iraq at the Habur crossing and this kind of completes my story, or should I say puts a few more things in place in my fading memory, of an event that happened a few hours after that photo was taken. I have recounted in an earlier post a couple of years ago of an incident that happened as we attempted to get out of the Turkish customs compound at Habur and cross into the Iraq side of the border. I will repeat it for those who may not have read it at that time but have not added the photos as mentioned in the story.

I’ve been trying for a while to remember the sequence of events leading up to an incident that happened at Habur in the early 80’s and where the photos I have fit into the story. There is a possibility that the incident and photos are of 2 separate events and if this is the case, I apologise now for any confusion.

In the first photo there is a queue of lorries and I think there are 3 M & C, one behind the other. Are they Mervin King’s lorries and did he drive one of them? It certainly seemed the lead driver was the boss.

There are some other British lorries in the queue including an Astran. Now one of the other drivers (not M & C or Astran) was one of those chaps who should never have been on the road. Excitable was understating his temperament by a country mile. We didn’t know the term “Road Rage” then but I’m sure it all started with him. The young Turkish kids would try to sell us water or Coke or whatever and ask us if we would like our lorries washed. One of the boys asked this driver and was told in no uncertain terms to “go away”. Later, though, the boy started to wash the back of this drivers trailer and thats when we saw the “red mist” descend for the first time. The driver flew out of his cab, ran to the rear, and grabbed the bucket and flung it out into the scrub as far as possible, the broom was next and that went in the opposite direction. I think we were all wondering in which direction the petrified boy would be going. Luckily the “red mist” abated slightly and he was told to “p-ss off”.

A few hours after the incident we all pulled into the customs compound at Harbour. We did the Turkish side and then the Iraqi side and all was going smoothly. We had all returned to our lorries to be on our way. As usual there was plenty of jostling in the lorry park as we tried to extricate ourselves. At this point, and I’m fairly sure it was one of the M & C lorries who was slightly to one side of me and a trailers length ahead, was dealt a glancing blow from a Turkish lorry. No real harm was done but from our excitable driver the “red mist” descended again. He was out of his lorry in a flash, raced up to the Turkish lorry, jumped up on the step and was raining blows upon the driver through the open window. Give him his due, the Turk was attempting to fight back but the British driver had the advantage of more room to manoeuvre. Of course, there was a great commotion going on. A load of other Turkish drivers came over to help their man but one of the other British drivers kept them at bay with a good bit of aggression and a stool. I notice the M & C driver (if it was M & C) was leaning over his steering wheel head bowed, no doubt thinking like the rest of us “what is this idiot doing here”.

It did all calm down eventually but I can only think that this driver put back Turkish/British relations by twenty years.

The red mist man was ken Ward and I mentioned above that ‘one of the other British drivers kept them at bay with a good bit of aggression and a stool’. That man was Frank White.