Photos come out fine cannonhaul. Looking forward to your stories and photos even if nothing to do with Promotor. Followers of this thread are, I am sure, getting a bit bored with my little anecdotes. Supercube and nottsnortherner are certainly from your era. I hope they are both well as haven’t heard from them for a while. Micky Twemlow and Efes are from my time with the company but its the early days that interest me most. Steve Lacey who for some reason has taken umbridge and won’t post on here any more may have been around during your time.
i found these photos, I believe they are of Roger Oakley’s truck, how he managed to survive I will never know. Some more names that I had forgotten but never the less the force behind promotor at that time, they were John Bishop, John Evans, Karl Kendricks, Geoff Douglas (who still has my photograph albums with all my pictures in) unfortunately all I have is the negatives, which is why my photos are not so good. When I joined Promotor he only had 4 trucks and as you all know the office in Shawfield Park, we were using ICS trailers but it wasn’t very long after he started getting more tractors and his own trailers. When he got his 140 Scania he also got a Brockhaus trailer, specifically for his heavy stuff. Peter was dead set on going to Africa with his vehicles and so after a while he set up Afro Camion, and the well known Yugo express. By now he had about a dozen trucks and quite a few subbies.
I have read ,I think, all of your great stories but I don’t think there was any mention of a back load from Pirot in Yugo, where we used to load many times, Tigar tyres, they were delivered to a firm in Dublin, one time I then had to reload 20 ton of winkles from Cork and deliver to Santander in Spain, having to stop every couple of hours to spray the load so that it didn’t dry out. A lot of our work, of course being Trade Fairs, meant that we had some very good work but there were times when we had some rough, especially with the Yugo side of the job, in those days there were not very many roads, and the ones there were, were not very good. the first time I went to Yugo thought I had taken the wrong turning, on the map it read as a motorway between Zagreb and Beograd but I just couldn’t find no motorway as you will see in the picture.
The mainroad down through Yugoslavia I first experienced in January 1979 en route to Baghdad (my first overseas trip in a lorry)… No wonder they called it “the death road”… It was mostly two way traffic with traffic moving very slowly indeed and everyone trying to overtake everyone else (including me in a right hand drive Fiat)… Overtaking was hard because there was a relentless stream of oncoming traffic and when you went past a lorry he was so close up behind the one in front of him there wasn’t always place to get back in lane safely…
All the German registered “Z plate” Mercedes cars heavily overloaded with cases and boxes strapped on their roofs and the entire family crammed in - all wildly overtaking and not always making it… There were accidents left right and centre. The road side was littered with wooden crosses with photographs of the recently deceased and ragged bunches of flowers attached. I have never seen the like… In every layby there would be a VW bus with a partially dismantled engine next to a large family group of Turks patiently waiting father and his boys replaced the gearbox, engine or whatever…
Parts of the mainroad were cobbled and there were huge pot holes. This added complexity to overtaking because, having a right hand drive vehicle, you had first to safely move out into the road to see if it was safe to pass, worry about a lunatic Turk car driver behind who would try to beat you to it, check whether there was space to slot into as you passed the truck in front and then become aware of an enormous pot hole in the slot infront of the lorry you were passing.
Greece was much nicer - no Turkish Z cars - that is until it rained when the road would transform itself into a skating rink.
Then over the wobbling bridge at Ipsala and drive through snow to park up at the Istanbul lorry park on the opposite side of the road from the Londra. I had my first open air shower (luke warm water only) while it snowed. The Londra was almost empty - literally 4 or 5 trucks - as we drove past because at this time there was no diesel available in Turkey and we were relying on a belly full of red to get through… It was also becoming rather dangerous in Turkey (but i hadn’t known that at the time).
Arriving in Birecik - where Tamerlaine slaughtered the inhabitants in the 14th C and the Turks slaughtered the Armenians in 1895 - I stopped to eat and bought some fine hand made kitchen knives which I still have today. I was more than slightly disconcerted when a man brandishing a meat cleaver came to my table to sell them…
I had a really rather good meal - good food in Turkey that’s for sure - and was relaxing when I became aware of a large noisy crowd around the lorry… Tractors has appeared from nowhere and men waving petrol cans were agressively demanding fuel… It was case of leaving immediately before things really got out of control… A rather frightening experience to be honest. A few miles up the road a Tonka overtook and slammed into the cab to knock the Fiat off the road and the truck left the road over a drop of about 1 foot… Had the Tonka attacked a few yards further on the drop was several feet down. A slightly damaged cab but, other than being shaken, all was well. Needless to say I hurried on to the border as fast as I could stopping very rarely.
That was the year I met all the drivers coming back from being stuck in 6ft of snow for 3 months - with no diesel to keep warm - on the border Turkey with Iran which had just had its revolution.
Shortly in 1980 afterwards the army took control of Turkey and improved the security massively
If people in the only knew what these places we visited were like…
A couple of great posts yesterday from cannonhaul and Efes of times long gone. If you are producing those pictures from negatives cannonhaul then you are doing a great job but you must get your photo album back. As for the smashed up truck! Yes, how did anyone emerge alive from that. You mentioned you had a long story to tell of a trip to Tehran. Not sure if you know this but you don’t have to write it down all at once. You can write a bit today then save it to draft and add some more text later. Don’t think you can add attachments/photos though. They have to be added just before you post your narrative. Great picture of your Transcon. Pity there are so few photos of the one Promotor had.
Efes. Your description of what it was like driving through Yugo and onward years ago was great. One bit missing though was the rhythmic k-boomd, k-boomd, k-boomb as you drove down the concrete strip to Belgrade. Each section of concrete was exactly the same length as the previous one and the sound k-boomb was made as you hit the join which was always slightly different in height to the one before. Bit like the sound of dripping water driving you mad. If I was bored (always) driving that section of road and there was little traffic about I used to have a bit of fun. As you said it was not an easy road to overtake on if you had a right ■■■■■■. I would sometimes pull out a little to see if anything was coming towards me. Often a Turk or Bulgy lorry would be a mile or two ahead coming towards me. They would see me a give a quick flash of there headlights to let me know they were there. I would pull back in then a few seconds later pull out again. I would then get a longer warning flash from the approaching lorry. I would keep doing this until the Turk or Bulgy driver was only a few hundred metres ahead. By then headlights were on full beam and I could imagine the driver sitting in a wet seat as he hurtled by me. No doubt shaking his fist and shouting something obscene in Turkish or Bulgarian.
Welcome to the Old Timers Forum cannonhaul and I for one can’t wait to see some more of your great photos. 
If you look on Page 9 of this thread then you will see that I mentioned Tiger Tyres in Pirot, you might even remember seeing that white wooden policeman who was always stood in front of the tunnel on the way down. 
Hi Efes, who could forget all those Zoll platers or “The Zoomies” as they were sometimes referred to, on their way down to Turkey or to Baghdad. And I wonder how many of those cars ended their journey in the customs compound at Kapikule because the driver could not afford to pay the import duty. 
Hello Sandway, I mentioned that my first trip to Izmir was one that will always stay with me so I would like to share it with you or anybody else who may be interested, so here it is. 
It was probably the first week in November in 1980, I had been home for four days and phoned the office to see if they had anything for me. I was told to come into the yard in Stockport the following morning to pick up my paperwork and then I had to go and load a trailer in North Wales for Turkey. I was also told that after I had loaded that I was to make my way down to Dover and to phone our agent in Istanbul when I had cleared customs at the Turkish border at Kapikule.
The following day I went down to the yard in Stockport where I was given a short briefing on what I had to do. I picked up my truck along with a tilt trailer and collected all my paperwork which I checked to make sure that it was all in order. We usually received £500 running money back then which should have been plenty to get me there and back with a bit to spare.
After I had arrived at the Courtaulds factory in Greenfield near Flint, I was told by the man in the gatehouse to open up the back of the tilt and to reverse straight onto the loading bay. I was loaded within the hour and I climbed into the back of the tilt to make sure that the load was secure. The load consisted of bales of cloth and if I remember correctly each bale weighed between 250kg to 300kg so there would have been sixty bales stacked three high.
The last four bales that were loaded were marked with a large black cross to show that they had to be delivered to Istanbul, the rest of the load was for Izmir on the Aegean Sea coast. After I had laced up the tilt I headed off down to Dover and managed to make the 01.30 freighter the following morning over to Zeebrugge.
The trip down through Europe and through the Communist Block was as far as I can remember uneventful but that’s not to say that it probably wasn’t interesting as every trip was different. It’s just that I can’t remember every thing in detail about every trip that I did and I think that it probably took me five days to get to the Turkish border as five to six days was usually about normal.
I arrived at Kap Andreveo which was the Bulgarian side of the border late in the afternoon so it was the following day by the time that I had completed my paperwork at Kapicule which was on the Turkish side.
It must of been mid afternoon on the following day after I had arrived at Kapikule, by the time that I had finished doing my Turkish customs. The seal on my trailer, which had been put on in Dover was broken by the Turkish customs man, I unlaced the back of the tilt and a scruffy looking kid in a large old dirty boiler suit climbed into the back to have a rummage around for anything that looked illegal. The usual obligatory payment for this was two packets of Marlboro cigarettes before the customs man would usually reseal me but on this occasion the customs man didn’t ask so I didn’t offer.
This was probably because there were two Turkish Military Policeman watching him as Turkey had been involved in a coup detat only two months before and the army seemed to be everywhere.
The M.P.’s wearing their white steel helmets were clearly visible throughout the customs compound and appeared to be at most of the major road junctions and bridges at the time. In my opinion, the army certainly improved the customs procedures at Kapikule for a while but when they were returned to their barracks the corruption in the customs went back to normal.
Doing your customs at Kapikule was always a hassle and it was much easier and a lot quicker if you used the local agent who was called Young Turk who only charged about three or four quid for his services.
There wasn’t usually a problem if you were going home empty, you just
had to queue in a few sweaty smoked filled rooms for a couple of hours but if you were coming into Turkey and you had a problem then Young Turk was usually able to sort it out for you, for a price of course and it was always a case of the bigger the problem the higher the price was to fix it. As both of my deliveries were in Turkey I obviously didn’t have to pay ‘Transit Tax’ which saved me a big chunk of my running money.
After the trailer had been resealed I pulled over towards the exit gate and parked up while Young Turks ‘runner’ followed the customs man back into the customs building.
I was reading The Bubbleman’s, Scrapbook Memories thread a couple of days ago and he posted an article about The Middle East’s First Salvage Run. Well, behind the customs buildings at Kapic there were a few fields which were filled with what could only be described as hundreds of different kinds of vehicles. From old and new cars and caravans to campervans, trucks, plant equipment and a couple of bulldozers on low loaders and what always stuck out to me was a red English double decker bus that was parked there. The first time that I went through Kapikule I thought that the field behind was a scrap yard although the vehicles weren’t piled on top of each other but they were all parked up very closely together. I could see that there were a couple of British trucks and trailers in there that looked like they had been abandoned so I asked another British driver why they were parked over there.
He told me that the hundreds of vehicles in the field had all been confiscated by the Turkish customs men for various reasons. Drug smuggling was probably the main cause for vehicles leaving the country but not being able to pay the import tax by the importer, having suspected false paperwork or even being involved in an accident in the local area with a foreign vehicle might have you being towed up to the compound. Once the vehicle had been put in there then there was a 99% chance that the owner would not be getting it back.
At the time I thought this drivers explanation was completely bizarre but it turned out to be absolutely true and with every trip that I passed through there the rows of vehicles seemed to get longer and longer until eventually they just disappeared over the hill in the distance.
Taken from the Internet.
I walked out of the customs compound, past the policeman and the army guards who had probably seen me get out of my truck as they didn’t even bother to ask for any identification.
Young Turks office was only about 100 hundred yards away on the left of the main road outside the customs compound. There was room to park a few trucks on the road outside of the office but if the Traffic Police came along blowing their whistles they would sometimes fine you so as it had happened to me once before I decided that it wasn’t worth taking the chance.
I walked into Young Turks office and told them my companies name and the trailer number. He said that my paperwork would be here soon and greeted me with the customary greeting of “would you like a cup of Chai” which always came in a small glass with five or six sugar lumps, always without milk. Young Turk would let you send a telex or make a phone call to the U.K. so I asked him if I could call Taci Kochman who was agent in Istanbul. I told Taci that I had cleared at Kapic and he told me to drive down to the stadium in Istanbul where Saladin, who was one of his employees would meet me at 8 a.m. the next morning and help me to clear customs. Then Saladin would go with me to the factory where I had to off load the four bales of textiles and when I had finished I was to return to the stadium and get a taxi round to Taci’s office.
It always seemed a bit strange having to clear customs at the border, then having to be resealed again before I was allowed to drive the 250 kilometres down to Istanbul so that I could finally clear customs but that was the way it was and we just did as we were told, ……… most of the time.
Young Turks runner arrived after about twenty minutes with all my paperwork which I checked to make sure that my T.I.R. carnet had been stamped in the right place and to see if the correct page had been removed. I payed the bill, collected my receipt which also included the cost of the telephone call and said good bye.
I walked back to the truck and on the way out of the compound the policeman at the gate stopped me and asked to see my passport. After a quick glance he gave it back to me and then went around to the back of the truck to check the seal, then he waved me through the barrier.
As this was late in November it started to get dark just after 4 o‘clock in the afternoon and the cold winter nights were already creeping in. I made my way towards the first town on the T.I.R. route which was Edirne but just before the town there was an old stone bridge that we had to use which had been built hundreds of years before, probably in the time of the Ottoman Empire or it may of even been the Roman Empire. The bridge wasn’t wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other so you had to wait until the bridge was clear. It was not unusual for somebody coming the other way with a donkey cart to enter the bridge from the other side while you were already halfway across. Next to the main road as you passed through Edirne was a magnificent Mosque and I had read somewhere that it was famous for having 999 windows. The Sultan or whoever built it wanted 999 windows so that people would always remember something about his great Mosque. I never stopped to count all the windows but I did manage to take a photo on my way home on a later trip.
The Bridge At Edirne.
The Mosque in Edirne.
As you know Brian, although Istanbul was only 250 kilometres away it often took between four or five hours to get there depending on the time of day. It wasn’t really that hilly although there were a couple of long hills on the way but it was the problem of getting stuck behind a couple of Tonkas or a tractor that really slowed you down, especially if you were driving a right hand drive truck.
I had decided to park up for the night at the Londra Camping as I knew that I would be able to get a hot shower there and a decent feed. I probably joined some other drivers who were on their way home for a couple of beers and made the point of not getting involved with an Efes Control as I had already set my alarm for six o’clock the next morning.
At 6 a.m. I woke up and after getting dressed and having a quick walk around the truck to make sure that everything was O.K. I set off and headed towards the stadium. The stadium was actually a sports stadium which I think belonged to the Besiktas Football Club. All the foreign trucks that were clearing customs there used to pull up and park on the stadium car park. It was only about three hundred yards to walk down to the sea front and within walking distance to an ancient Turkish baths which I visited on two occasions. There were quite a few restaurants and cafes close by and it only cost about fifty pence to get a taxi to The Galata Bridge or to Kochman’s office.
It took less that half an hour at that time of the morning to get to the stadium and as soon as I arrived there I got back into bed. Just before 8 a.m. I got up and put the kettle on and it wasn’t long before Saladin came knocking on the door.
The Stadium, customs parking area. Pictures from the Internet.
The road next to the stadium.
Saladin was a name that I had heard of before because in the sixties the British Army used to use the Saladin scout car which was made by Alvis and then I found out that it was actually named after a great Muslin warrior called Saladin.
Now I had never met Taci’s employee before but all the other drivers who had jokingly called him Salad Tin for some reason. He spoke very little English so much of our conversation was in pigeon German but we got on quite well with one another.
Saladin took all my paperwork and disappeared for about an hour, when he returned he told me to wait where I was and that he would return just before midday.
When he came back he was accompanied by a couple of customs men who checked the seal that had been put on at Kapikule and then they told me to unlace the back of the tilt and to drop the tailboard. One of them climbed into the back and then quickly climbed out saying “alles is gut, finish”. It had taken me twice as long to unlace the tilt than it had for them to do their inspection but now I was able to go along to my first drop.
Saladin went with the customs men to their office so that they could stamp the paperwork and when he came back we set off through some of the very narrow streets in Istanbul. He was giving me instructions of where to turn and where to carry on and on one occasion he had to get out and assure me that there was just enough room to get past some of the parked cars on a sharp corner.
The factory where we were delivering to was next to the old city walls and I had to park in the street next to a set of big old wooden doors. Saladin got out to organise the offloading and came back about ten minutes later with half a dozen of the workers.
Now I know that this was along time ago so I can’t really remember if one of the customs men had followed us to the factory or not. It now seems strange that having done the customs about an hour earlier that I would have to do customs again and then be resealed but back then we did a lot of things that seemed strange at the time. Something at the back of mind is now telling me that I did have to be resealed again because when we arrived in Izmir we parked up in the customs compound.
I opened up the back of the tilt, dropped the tailboard and pointed to the four bales with the black crosses which had to come off. There was no messing about, the unloaders just pushed the bales of cloth straight off the back of the trailer onto the road. Somebody gave a clear signature on the C.M.R. and we were soon off back to the stadium.
Saladin had already told me that he would be travelling with to Izmir, I didn’t mind as there were two bunks in the S reg, column change M.A.N. 16:280 which was named Sandra, after the girl who worked on the reception desk in the office.
We parked back at the stadium and then we got into one of the many taxies that were available to take us down to Kochman’s office which was next to the cruise terminal, not far from the old wooden Galata Bridge.
Kochman’s office was on the ninth floor of a very old building which had fantastic views of the Bosphorus Straights and looked directly across to The Harem, a place where we also used to park up. The building was probably constructed in the early 1900’s and it was full of character. As you came in from the street you walked into a huge hall which I would describe as dilapidated Art Deco as it looked like a lot of restoration work was long over due. On the ground floor there were a variety of shops including, spice shops, leather shops selling all types of leather and suede jackets, a stall that made fresh cold orange juice with hundreds of oranges piled up in a huge pyramid shape, suitcase shops and a café. Straight away my nostrils were filled with the fragrance of aromatic spices and the smell of barbecued Lamb Kofties and mint. On the ground floor of the hall there was a large marble staircase but what always made me look twice and made me feel that I was going back in time was a lift which must have been installed when the building was being built. It was one of those that had the double concertina gates, with two big aspidistras in very large vases at the entrance. Inside the lift sat on a stool was an operator who wore a shabby looking black suit and used to wear a red Fez. The lift went up and down in a cage and I always expected Inspector Hercule Poirot to get in at the next floor, he certainly wouldn’t have felt out of place in there.
Most of the offices in the building were connected to shipping agents and on the top floor was Taci’s office, his right hand man who was called The Colonel got up from his desk to greet me. He was actually a retired Colonel from the Turkish Army and all the British drivers who had ever met him all said the same thing, The Colonel was a gentleman. It was alleged that he knew all the right people in all the right places, he certainly was an asset to have whenever you came up against Turkish bureaucracy.
The Colonel picked up the phone and called the café downstaires to ask them to send up what we called the Chai Wallah. Taci was in his office on the phone and when had finished his call he also came out to welcome me.
He asked if there were any problems at the factory where we had just delivered and I told him no. Then he asked, would it be possible to take Saladin with you to Izmir as I would like him to visit a customer of ours. I told him that I didn’t mind and that I had already looked at the map but I wasn’t sure which was the best way to go. Saladin knows the way said Taci, he will look after you, then The Colonel added just make sure that you don’t end up on the military road. He then said something to Saladin in Turkish which I presumed was the best way to go.
A young boy walked into the office carrying a large silver plated teapot on a large silver plated tray with several small glasses and a bowl of sugar lumps. He put the tray down on the desk and started pouring the tea out. The Colonel gave him back some empty glasses and a Turkish Lire banknote and the boy left the office.
Taci asked when do you think that you be in Izmir Steve and I said that as it was then about three o’clock that I would drive through the night and be in Izmir the first thing in the morning.
Taci and The Colonel stared at me in disbelief and I knew that I had said the wrong thing. You have to go to Izmir Steve said Taci not Izmit.
I knew where Izmit was as I had passed through there before, it was about an hours drive over the other side The Bosphorus Bridge. As you were heading towards Bolu you could see some fantastic views of The Sea Of Marmara over on your right as you started to climb inland.
I also knew where Izmir was as I had seen it on the map, even though I had never been there before I had worked it out that it was about 600 kilometres away and if I did a late night tonight and an early start tomorrow then I could be there about 8 a.m.
Taci said be careful, the roads are not very good and if you brake down at night then you might not be able to get any help until the morning. I assured them that I would be O.K. but my naivety was certainly beginning to show.
The view from Taci’s office.
That’s a well written and brilliant memory MM, very descriptive. Looking forward to reading part 2…and 3 …and 4!
mushroomman. I said of one of your previous posts it was of “War and Peace” dimensions. I have a feeling this “little anecdote” will surpass even that. Great stuff. I keep telling myself I must make my narratives more interesting. The only way is to learn is from a master storyteller so I will read it through again tomorrow and then perhaps again the following day. Keep up the good work.
Another great read - thanks to those of you sharing your stories.
A pic taken at the National, Belgrade- not you is it Mm?
Sorry if its still on its side.
Glad to say that the paperback and the Kindle versions of “Trucking Magic” are now on sale on Amazon.
Thanks for letting me use the photo’s Brian and Steve.
Mick
Well, thats one sold Micky T. Put my order in this morning. Now come on the rest of you, only takes a couple of secs/clicks.
Hiya bullitt, Part Two is coming up after this short break.
I have tried to keep it short for Sandway and you can blame him for mentioning Izmir as it’s he’s reminiscing of these places that bring it all back to me so I hope that my ramblings do the same to him.
kmills, I always enjoy seeing all those old photos from the 70’s/80’s, did you take the photo or were you driving down there at the time. Anymore old photos that you have would be very welcome on here. I think that the Dow driver in the white vest might be Billy Jones from Liverpool, can anybody make out the name on the front of the unit.
Bugger, I have rotated this photo and I can’t get it the right way up, can anybody help.
Here is photo of Sandra which was taken in a West German lay-by somewhere near Munich.
Here are a couple of photos that I took on the Izmir to Canakkele road about five years later.
Saladin and I set off from the stadium and headed towards The Bosphorus Bridge and by the time that we passed through Izmit it was already dark. Around 6 p.m. I pulled over and made us something to eat in the cab, it felt really cold outside and there didn’t seem to be much light anywhere. Everywhere looked pitch black, no moon, no stars, not even any street lights in the distance. We carried on with Saladin telling me which signs to take and we passed quite a few villages that didn’t appear to have any electricity. Most places seemed to be illuminated with Tilley or Hurricane lamps. I looked at my map on quite a few occasions but I can’t remember now which route we actually took.
We started to climb some very long hills and it seemed that every few minutes I was changing down to a lower gear. The truck would have had about seventeen ton on it and it was definatly struggling. It certainly was tiring driving, I couldn’t see much at the side of the road but I had a feeling that there would of been some very long drops into the valleys below. There were plenty of stretches of bitumen road but there were also some very long stretches of gravel road. I can remember stopping to wipe the dirt off the headlights a couple of times as the beams didn’t seem to reflect off the road surface. In some places we must have been driving in what were probably low clouds because of the moisture that kept building up on the window screen and it seemed as though we were always climbing. We almost collided with a couple of donkeys that were stood in the middle of the road which was also another hazard to look out for and by 9 p.m. I told Saladin that I was going to park up for the night as I was feeling shattered.
He tried to tell me that not very far away there was a place to park with a restaurant so I decided to carry on a little bit longer. There didn’t appear to be many other vehicles around at that time of night. The ones that we saw coming towards us often only had one headlight working and the rest didn’t appear to have a dipped headlight switch. We did manage to pass at least two slow crawling vehicles that had no rear lights but this was quite normal for Turkey.
Another hazard of driving in the dark was that when The Turks broke down they would often put a pile of rocks on the road a fair distance back from the broken down vehicle. This was their idea of a plastic cone or a hazard warning triangle. The idea was I presume that the approaching driver from behind would swerve out to miss the rocks allowing them enough time to miss the broken down vehicle. The problem was that usually after the vehicle had been repaired then they would drive off and forget about removing the pile of rocks which would then be left abandoned in the road.
Eventually we arrived at a building in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, there were several trucks parked up, most of them were what we called Tonkas, either four or six wheeled rigid lorries. I took my tachograph out to see how much distance we had covered and I couldn’t believe that we had only done about 250 kilometers in five hours. But it didn’t matter, the fact was that I felt completely knackered and I decided that I had done enough for one day.
We got out of the cab and straight away the cold hit us, it wasn’t snowing but it certainly was bloody cold. As we walked towards the building I could hear a humming noise that sounded like a small diesel generator. There were a couple of rows of dimly lit electric light bulbs strung up, one row outside and one row inside.
Inside the building there was about a dozen tables but everybody was sat around a big log fire in the corner of the room. As soon as you walked in you could smell the wood smoke that filled the room.
A waiter got up and came over to meet us, I let Saladin do the ordering along with two bottles of Efes beer. He ordered two plates of what appeared to be some kind of a lamb stew with rice which as far as I can remember wasn’t too bad and after we had finished I paid the bill and we went back to the truck.
The thing that I remember the most that night was how dark it was and how long it seemed to take me to get up all those long hills. It was still bitterly cold outside and as the truck didn’t have a night heater I left the engine running for most of the night.
The next morning we woke up about 7 a.m. just as the sun was rising and after a quick coffee and a bowl of cereal we were on our way. It was still cold outside so to save a bit of time we didn’t bother to have a wash but I knew then that there was no way that we going to get to Izmir before lunchtime as I had really underestimated the conditions of the road. We must have been parked near the very top of the hill overnight as shortly afterwards we started descending a very long section of twists and turns. At about 10 a.m. we stopped to have a coffee, I made us some sandwiches and because the weather was getting a bit warmer we both had a good wash.
I remember that while we were sat there I looked over to the left and I could see that about two or three hundred yards away there were what looked like some ancient ruins. It appeared to be a Greek or Roman amphitheater with tall marble columns some of which had fallen over and were broken. There didn’t appear to be a fence around the site and the place looked deserted as I couldn’t see anybody around. I was very tempted to go over and to have a good explore around but Saladin said that we didn’t have the time and that I should go and have look the next time that I passed that way, but of course I never did go that way again. He did mention the name of the place and as it wasn’t shown on my map I never bothered to make a note of it, some thing which I now really regret.
An hour or so later we were going along a stretch of dirt road when I noticed something moving towards the middle of the road. It looked like a brown leather medium sized suitcase so I started to slow down. I got quite a surprised because there in front of us crossing the road was what I thought was the worlds biggest tortoise, I never realised that they could grow so big. The oversize tortoise came to a stop and turned towards us, Saladin jumped out of the cab and lifted the tortoise up, he did struggle a bit to lift it but he did manage to carry it safely to the side of the road where he gently put it down and it wondered off into the vegetation. Saladin climbed back into the cab and said “alles gut” without blinking an eye lid, like this happens all the time. I have no idea why I never took a photo the biggest tortoise that I had ever seen.
Eventually we arrived at a garage near the docks in Izmir around two o’clock in the afternoon. The garage turned out to be where we often cleared customs in Izmir, although I can never remember seeing any customs buildings near the garage. Not only could you get fuel at the garage but it also had a small café and we were able to get a hot wash or a shower there.
Saladin went into the garage to made a phone call and about twenty minutes later a car turned up with who I think was a clearing agent and maybe a customs man. I was told to follow the people in the car to a factory which was only about five minutes away. At the factory I had to open up the side of the tilt as they said that it would be a lot quicker for them to offload all the bales. Saladin told me that he was going with the agent back to the office and that when I had finished unloading then I must drive back to the garage and that he would meet me there. I was offloaded before 5 p.m. and after I had relaced the tilt up I made my way back to the garage. Saladin arrived about an hour later with a telex with my reloading instructions which said that I had to reload a full load of car tyres from the Simi Tyre factory in Timisoara, Romania for a delivery to a warehouse in Bradford, Yorkshire. As it was already dark I told him that it was best if we stayed there the night and made an early start the following morning. He agreed and suggested that we should get a taxi to a café/ bar that he knew on the sea front. Even though it was winter it was certainly a lot warmer on the coast than it had been the night before.
I can’t remember or I don’t think that I ever asked Saladin why he had to travel with me to Izmir, he and Taci had already mentioned that he had some business to discuss with somebody and I left it at that. I do remember that a few of the Dow lads did sometimes reload Tangerines from around the Fethiye and Antalya area after they had tipped in Izmir and they were jobs that we got through Taci. I only back loaded fruit twice from Turkey, once with a full load of Hazel nuts for Cadbury’s which I loaded on The Black Sea Coast at Samsun and once with a full load of dried Apricots which I loaded from a packaging place in Istanbul.
Saladin and myself had a good meal with a couple of beers and as it wasn’t very expensive I paid for it as I didn’t think that he would have been on very high wages.
He told me that we would be going back a different way which was something that he had already mentioned before. He said that we would be driving up to Canakkale where he would be catching a bus up the coast to catch a ferry across to Istanbul. I would have to get the ferry from Canakkale over to Eceabat and then drive through Gelibolu, Kesan and then I could go up to Edirne and onto the border at Kapikule. This would be an area that I had never been to before so to me it was always exciting to see new places but I was slightly disappointed that I wouldn’t be getting the chance to see some of the areas that we had travelled through on the way down due to us travelling in the dark. And it would have been really good if we could of stopped to have a look at those ancient ruins, even it was only to have a forty five minute break.
After our meal we went back to the truck and set off about 7 a.m. the following morning. The bitumen road out of Izmir followed the scenic coastline for a while and then we hit the gravel road as it turned inland and then we started climbing into the hills.
After a while the road came back down to the coast which we followed for a while and then we went back into the hills again and headed towards the town of Bergama. For a few hours it was a case of following the road along the coast, heading into the hills and then going back along the coast which had some magnificent views.
When we were about an hour from Canakkale it started raining so I had to drop my speed down on the wet gravel road. There wasn’t much traffic on this road the further away from Izmir that we travelled just Tonkas, a couple of artics, a few cars, horse and carts, donkeys and even the odd camel.
We were driving along in the middle of nowhere when to my surprise I noticed a sign post pointing to a side road that just read to ‘Troy. Antiquity 5 kilometres’. I stopped to see if it was on my Michelin map but there was no mention of it and if it wouldn’t of been raining that day then I might of paid it a visit. The sad thing now is that I must of passed that side road to Troy more than a dozen times over the next seven years and I never went there once, it was always a case of I shall have a look the next time that I pass this way.
Saladin and I reached the quayside just as the Canakkale Ferry was leaving so I parked up at the front of the loading lane. I paid for a ticket which I think was about £7 and we knew that we had about an hour to wait before it offloaded and came back from the other side.
Near the loading area there were a few shops and a couple of cafes so we walked over to get something to eat. We sat at a table inside one of the cafes and I noticed that on the wall there was a large painted mural of a sea battle somewhere. There were some Turkish flags flying on the mural and a couple of ships flying the British Union flag. I wasn’t paying that much attention to it as I thought that it was a scene from The Crimean War but as we were walking out I took a closer look at it. As the inscription underneath it was all in Turkish I asked Saladin what did the word Gelibolu mean. He tried to explain to me that it was a place where there had been a big battle during the war but to me I had never heard of it so I asked him a few more questions. In English you call it Gallipoli, he said and then the penny dropped as I had been thinking of the second world war, not the first world war. All of a sudden I found that I was fascinated by this long forgotten piece of history.
As we could see the ferry approaching we walked over to the truck, Saladin took his small bag out of the cab, we shook hands, said good bye and then he walked off to go and catch his bus.
I drove the truck onto the ferry and as it had by now stopped raining I got out of the cab to have a look around the deck. The ferry was about the same size as The Woolwich Ferry which went across The Thames in London but this one had a Chai Wallah, a young lad who walked around selling tea in little glasses from a silver plated teapot on a silver plated tray, these boys turned up everywhere.
I looked over towards the hills where we were heading and I could see a huge Turkish flag flying which looked about the size of a tennis court. Underneath the flag I could see what looked like an old fort that was partly built into the hillside. I looked behind the boat where we had come from and on The Canakkale side I could make out several other forts almost camouflaged between the hills with smaller Turkish flags flying.
It was by now about two o’clock in the afternoon, the rain had stopped, the sun was shining and I had only just realised that I was crossing The Dardanelles Straits or as it was marked on my map Canakkale Bogazi, there was no mention on the map of The Gallipoli Peninsular.
I drove off the ferry and headed along the coast road towards Gelibolu or as I had now started calling it Gallipoli. I passed through the town but there was nothing that stands out in my mind except seeing a war memorial next to the sea and a statue of Kemal Ataturk. To me it was just another small Turkish town, there were hundreds of similar ones that I had passed through and a lot of them had the same kind of statue.
Although one thing after all these years still sticks out in my mind and that was something that I remember happened when I stopped on a small piece of waste ground next to the sea.
I pulled up just to have to look at the view across The Dardanelles Straights which was quite a wonderful site. The water was crystal clear and I could see that a rusty old boat had been washed up by the shore. It had obviously been there for many years and at the time it had really annoyed me that this rusty old piece of metal had just been left to rot there. There weren’t that many villages along the coast and as far as I could see there was no litter which was very unusual in these type of places. So for some strange reason I can still remember looking at this piece of rusty boat and thinking why did nobody ever bother to remove it before it started to rust away. I could make out that the boat looked like a rowing boat which was about thirty foot long.
At the time I suppose that I never gave it much thought and in the end I just got back into the truck and headed to Kapikule so that I could arrive there that night.
A few years ago I was watching The History Channel about The Gallipoli Campaign and it showed all these British, Australian and New Zealand troops disembarking from the larger ships on to what they called tenders, which were small rowing boats. These tenders were mainly made out of wood and crewed by Royal Navy personnel and I wondered if some of those boats could of actually have been made out of steel. Straight away I thought of seeing that old rusty boat on the shoreline of The Gallipoli Peninsular that day and since then I have always thought, could that boat of been involved in that great battle over 100 years ago, I guess now that I will never know the answer.
Regards Steve.
great post mm .the way you wrote it I felt like I was sitting in the passenger seat.
Really enjoy reading these stories. Thanks
Terrific story Steve. I really enjoyed it.
My great grandfather, who spent virtually his whole life in the Royal Navy was on one of the main battle ships at Gallipoli.
He was the only member of that side of my family who was a sailor. All of the rest, like me were soldiers.
They go back to The Peninsular campaign and the battle of Waterloo.
Wherever there was a fight going on then my family were there.(Whether there was a war on or not) 
Great post mushroomman. Many thanks for taking the time to write it all down. I know there are still stories to be told of times long ago. Many of the old hands have passed away but I’m sure there are still loads of little anecdotes waiting to be aired by those of us still here. I told a story of a trip to Paris recently. The stories don’t have to be about the M/E or Russia so lets hear em.
Greetings and a BIG Hello to Cannonhaul(Roy) of “Pied Piper” fame! Hope you dont mind me mentioning that Roy! Its Tony Grainger here(Nottsnortherner)Glad you,re still around and a lot of water under the bridge since you were tickling the skins!!! Do you remember the nightmare trip back from Bucharest when your Transcon was pretty new, I had my old man with me and you split a brake diaphragm and I had the tilt repair machine with me so we repaired your split diaphragm by replacing it with some carefully cut and shaped tilt material!!! Got you home I believe though we got split up in Slovenia I believe owing to different back-load locations. Sandway(Brian) you mention the lacking of pics of Promotors Transcon, well I think Roy will confirm that his was in actual fact the same one! When Roy decided to try something different I think he sold his Transcon back to Peter C. and for a while Stevie Smith drove it. I think it was then passed on to Wellie Ward who at the time had a reputation of trashing stuff on a regular basis. I remember a conversation between Peter and I think Tommy in the workshop as to who should be given the big Ford and Tommy said give it to Wardy, he,ll have trouble trashing that…I think it took him something like 6-9 months until it was trashed!..alledgedly of course
Nottsnortherner:
Greetings and a BIG Hello to Cannonhaul(Roy) of “Pied Piper” fame! Hope you dont mind me mentioning that Roy! Its Tony Grainger here(Nottsnortherner)Glad you,re still around and a lot of water under the bridge since you were tickling the skins!!!
Hi Tony I hope your well. At this moment I haven’t got access to photos but I have got a photo of the 2 transcontinental which I hope to put on soon along of some others I have found.
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cannonhaul:
Nottsnortherner:
Greetings and a BIG Hello to Cannonhaul(Roy) of “Pied Piper” fame! Hope you dont mind me mentioning that Roy! Its Tony Grainger here(Nottsnortherner)Glad you,re still around and a lot of water under the bridge since you were tickling the skins!!!Hi Tony I hope your well. At this moment I haven’t got access to photos but I have got a photo of the 2 transcontinental which I hope to put on soon along of some others I have found.
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Sorry pushed wrong button. I remember that trip very well had to stop a couple of times to repair. I think Johnny Evans drove my truck and John Ward drove Promotor.
We had some good giggles back then. Oh to be young and foolish again.
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Hi Steve Lacey/ Flying flash. If you read this Dave O’Donnell said to send you his regards. He contacted me on the Trucking Magic face book page.
Hope that life in Hamburg is going O.K.
Mick
