Ah, third from the right,bottom row…that would be Roger Graber,alias the clip-board kid! Spent many a happy(and not so happy)hour chewing the cud usually in Yugoslavia working out how to improve Promotor. We worked it out eventually…we both left !!
Nottsnortherner:
Ah, third from the right,bottom row…that would be Roger Graber,alias the clip-board kid! Spent many a happy(and not so happy)hour chewing the cud usually in Yugoslavia working out how to improve Promotor. We worked it out eventually…we both left !!
Right load of tearaways by the look of them. Who would want any of them on the front page of a companies sales brochure! I recognise Mr Graber Nottsnortherner but doesn’t the little guy to his right in the photo with the mop of hair but none out of place and looking coy remind you of someone? What do you think Efes.
By the way Nottsnortherner. How come it took you thirteen years to work out how to improve Promotor■■? Yes, I suppose it did get better after you’d left. I jest.
I was also reminded of someone else the same as you Brian but wasn’t sure about the circumstances of the photo. I’m assuming its something to do with Skinners school rugby team but wasn’t sure about Mr Grabers attendance at said school hence the uncertainty regarding DB’s presence next to him. I do agree though that most of them look as though they’re out on bail !!
This was Tunbridge Wells Rugby Club rather than Skinners’ School. Amazing what turns up on the interweb
Graber looks much the same now but, sadly, somewhat doddery when I saw him when we attended Mick Twemlow’s funeral. I spoke to him briefly last year but not since. I texted him this photo but no response. Hope all’s OK?
Hi sandway and Efes, you both have a PM
Things don’t change quickly. Well, not in some places.
I took first photo somewhere near Bulgy border in Yugo late 70’s. Yann Clouseau took other photos recently. Thanks Yann.
sandway:
Things don’t change quickly. Well, not in some places.I took first photo somewhere near Bulgy border in Yugo late 70’s. Yann Clouseau took other photos recently. Thanks Yann.
We have scenes like that in Kent too…
Never fun driving in Romania in the dark in those days… Driving on the cobbled motorway I remember suddenly coming across a completely unlit horse and cart with driver fast asleep (almost certainly drunk) as the horse took him home… I missed him and he would have had a shock had he been awake… I had a shock that’s for sure…
Romanian transport cafes were something else, someone’s front room crammed with rather smelly drivers - although for the life of me I can’t remember where the one I have been thinking about was exactly in Romania. I think I was with Bugsy at the time…
Efes:
Never fun driving in Romania in the dark in those days… Driving on the cobbled motorway I remember suddenly coming across a completely unlit horse and cart with driver fast asleep (almost certainly drunk) as the horse took him home… I missed him and he would have had a shock had he been awake… I had a shock that’s for sure…Romanian transport cafes were something else, someone’s front room crammed with rather smelly drivers - although for the life of me I can’t remember where the one I have been thinking about was exactly in Romania. I think I was with Bugsy at the time…
Hi Efes, could you check your private messages on here please
sandway:
Nottsnortherner:
Ah, third from the right,bottom row…that would be Roger Graber,alias the clip-board kid! Spent many a happy(and not so happy)hour chewing the cud usually in Yugoslavia working out how to improve Promotor. We worked it out eventually…we both left !!Right load of tearaways by the look of them. Who would want any of them on the front page of a companies sales brochure! I recognise Mr Graber Nottsnortherner but doesn’t the little guy to his right in the photo with the mop of hair but none out of place and looking coy remind you of someone? What do you think Efes.
By the way Nottsnortherner. How come it took you thirteen years to work out how to improve Promotor■■? Yes, I suppose it did get better after you’d left. I jest.
Hi sandway could you check your private messages on here please
euromat:
sandway:
Nottsnortherner:
Ah, third from the right,bottom row…that would be Roger Graber,alias the clip-board kid! Spent many a happy(and not so happy)hour chewing the cud usually in Yugoslavia working out how to improve Promotor. We worked it out eventually…we both left !!Right load of tearaways by the look of them. Who would want any of them on the front page of a companies sales brochure! I recognise Mr Graber Nottsnortherner but doesn’t the little guy to his right in the photo with the mop of hair but none out of place and looking coy remind you of someone? What do you think Efes.
By the way Nottsnortherner. How come it took you thirteen years to work out how to improve Promotor■■? Yes, I suppose it did get better after you’d left. I jest.
Hi sandway could you check your private messages on here please
Morning Mat. I did try and reply and thought the message had gone but unfortunately I’m not as savvy as Efes. I will try again. I’ve reposted a photo of Mick Twemlow and Pam as the early one on this thread was lost because of Photobucket.
EPU 305T. Scania 111 that I drove from the late 70’s through to the early 80’s. A very reliable lorry that saw us see a hell of a lot of different places. I have posted before on here little anecdotes of our time together but I have just been given the details of her demise, albeit quite a fews years ago.
After Promotor decided she had served the company well enough she was moved on and replaced by a newer model. At some stage Bill Humphries purchased her and turned her into the ‘Pink Panther’, a very striking lorry indeed. Bill had her for a few years before he to moved her on. She subsequently was resprayed again, possibly twice, into blue and then green. Finally David Johnson tells me he purchased her and ran her hooked up to a low loader. He thinks he bought her from a lad called Ben Price from Kent. David was in the spare parts business and they bought up old Scania’s, stripped them down and exported the parts. EPU 305T was used to collect the lorries from around the country and bring them back to the yard.
However, finally time caught up with her and she herself was cut up for spares and exported. I’d like to think though that parts of her are still running around somewhere in the Middle East or Africa or maybe even further afield.
David did say he wishes he still had her. I know how you feel David.
Efes:
sandway:
A couple of posts back I mentioned our old mate, Micky Twemlow, a Promotor driver for five years in the late 70’s and early 80’s. As most of you know he wrote three books of his driving exploits and I have borrowed a couple of photos from those books.The first photo is of Micky in about 82 but its the second photo thats the interesting one. Taken in the early to mid 90’s it shows a group of Kepstow Freight drivers and subbies standing in front of Micky’s lorry, who were on their way to an Oil and Gas Exhibition in Baku. A few Promotor drivers ended up on Kepstowe’s and in the photo, third from the right, is John Mantle. Its the only photo I’ve seen of John. He worked in our workshop as a fitter before becoming a Promotor driver in about 84. I never ran with him and in the years we were on Pro’s together I doubt if I saw him more than half a dozen times and most of those were when he was in the workshop.
That’s “Boshing Pete” on the extreme left. Good chap! Ran back from Moscow a few times with him and had one of the funniest nights ever one very, very cold winter night in Warsaw on the way home at the hotel just opposite the Palace of Culture, one of Stalin’s “wedding cake” buildings that were built around the Commie bloc. A building hated by the Poles. I shall relate this story a bit later… I wonder if Pete’s around these days? I am in touch with Henry Osbourne late of Kepstowe (management) still and must ask. Had many a good night out with Henry in Bulgaria (Plovdiv).
Happy days.
I read that Johnny Mantle was very badly damaged recently in a motorbike accident and was at Stoke Manderville… The now late Mick Twemlow told me this by email shortly before he died of cancer. I wonder has anyone any news on Johnnie?
I have been told by a contact that he met John Mantle at a Kepstowe reunion recently and that he was fine. Good news.
The border crossing from Austria to Yugo was one place I hated. I always seemed to arrive in the evening at Spielfeld/Sentilj and it was nothing but agro. After a while I started to use Radkersburg which was a small and quiet border crossing further north. After that the only time I used the main border crossing was when I had a wide load and had an ■■■■■■ waiting for me at Sentilj. However, it was different coming home. I never had any problems and always seemed to sail through.
The first photo is of George Fardell crossing into Yugo. The second photo shows Spielfeld in the daylight, something I rarely saw. The third photo is courtesy of Jazzandy and shows George’s old lorry when he drove for OHS. One he no doubt drove through Spielfeld/Sentilj border many times.
“SUPERCUBE”]i seem to recall mama at spielfeld having a black eye one day and insisting she did it on the kitchen door, a real nice lady, but her husband, i cant remember his name. did have a drink problem. maybe running a bar is not a good job for an alki.
Following on from my last post concerning Spielfeld I have copied a post Bob Heath aka SUPERCUBE put on TNUK many years ago. By pure chance his son Robert has just sent me a photo of him, looking a bit ‘p-eyed’ after a night on the beer but not at mama’s so I’m told. Bob was one of the very early Promotor drivers having joined the company in 71. Unfortunately we lost him a couple years ago.
Morning Mat. I did try and reply and thought the message had gone but unfortunately I’m not as savvy as Efes.
you are more savvy as you have replied (nudge nudge efes!!)
Come on, be truthful. How far did any of you long haul boys go for a photoshoot or did the boss have you in the yard early on a Saturday morning to wash off the lorry and line it up with the rest of the fleet so somebody could reel off a few photos for posterity or just the bosses vanity. No, I didn’t have to do that either. But I did have to do a photoshoot but under slightly different circumstances.
In the mid to late 80’s Promotor had organised a few All British Trade Fairs as I have posted recently and Dave Stage had been instrumental in setting them all up. I was also involved in the office but my main job was on site at that time. We had been involved in providing services to companies at the Tehran Fair but Dave could see an opening for one of his all Brit shows to be held in a hotel in the centre of town where many Iranian business men were based.
We had no problem getting a decent group of British companies interested, I think there were just under twenty in total. We booked space in the main function room in the Intercontinental Hotel, the only big hotel in the centre of Tehran. Flights were booked, visas organised and hotel rooms reserved. There wasn’t a massive amount of freight, you could hardly display a large generator in the function room, but we ended up with about two thousand kilos of exhibits which we decided to send out air freight. The display stands were built by a local contractor, one we had used at the main Trade Fair previously. This chap was a very useful contact for us as he knew his way around and had a lot of contacts in Iran. It was him who gave us the first inkling that all was not rosy on the political front.
Sure enough we fell out with the Iranians again and there was talk the British diplomats would be leaving for home. We were in a very difficult position. Do we press on with the event or cancel it immediately. After all the diplomats hadn’t left yet. Dave Stagg wanted to cancel and he went into Peter Calderwood’s office to discuss the situation. Peter of course would make the final decision. An hour later Dave emerged with a face like thunder. ‘He’s decided the event goes ahead as scheduled’ said Dave through gritted teeth. And with that we set things into motion. The local standfitter was given the go ahead. Airfreight was sent. Our local custom agent was informed and my flight confirmed. It was all systems go until the inevitable happened with less than a week to go to the opening ceremony. It was a full bust up. The Iranian diplomats in London were on their way home as well as the British ones from Tehran and Dave Stage was left to say ‘I told you so’.
It was at this stage things really turned awkward for Promotor. We had done a lot of the work and already paid out for things like airfreight, hiring of the function room and the construction of the stands. Peter was adamant that all the companies must be invoiced as if the event had taken place. However, we needed proof that the stands had been constructed and so I----------
------flew from Heathrow on an Iran Air flight to Tehran where I spent two nights in the Intercontinental Hotel met Bijan Nabavi our customs agent to tell him to return the airfreight and the hotel manager to give him the bad news.
But most importantly I did a ‘photoshoot’ in the function room using the completed stands as a backdrop before flying home.
Funnily enough when we went into Poland to deliver food relief when marshal law had been declared in the Solidarity times the local newspaper asked if they could take a photo of me by my lorry for an article they were writing about me. They asked me to go on my (very rare) day off to stand by the lorry in Dunton Green but I naturally wasn’t terribly interested. I suggested they might like to go with me to Dunton Green on Sunday afternoon when I was leaving for my next trip and was advised that they didn’t work Sundays! Impasse. They settled for a photo of our hero standing with an open map instead.
[Inserted later] We did a photo shoot for the TV with a convoy of several of us motoring around in a big circle in the Dunton Green depot when the food relief project was going on. Were you in that Sandway?
I never heard that story about Iran before Sandway. Most interesting! I wonder how many paid up?
I showed your Tehran Embassy photos to friend of mine but he said the building he visited was a modern concrete jobbie and nothing like what he saw in your pictures. Maybe our military people that protected the embassy lived in a different building?
Efes:
Funnily enough when we went into Poland to deliver food relief when marshal law had been declared in the Solidarity times the local newspaper asked if they could take a photo of me by my lorry for an article they were writing about me. They asked me to go on my (very rare) day off to stand by the lorry in Dunton Green but I naturally wasn’t terribly interested. I suggested they might like to go with me to Dunton Green on Sunday afternoon when I was leaving for my next trip and was advised that they didn’t work Sundays! Impasse. They settled for a photo of our hero standing with an open map instead.[Inserted later] We did a photo shoot for the TV with a convoy of several of us motoring around in a big circle in the Dunton Green depot when the food relief project was going on. Were you in that Sandway?
I never heard that story about Iran before Sandway. Most interesting! I wonder how many paid up?
I showed your Tehran Embassy photos to friend of mine but he said the building he visited was a modern concrete jobbie and nothing like what he saw in your pictures. Maybe our military people that protected the embassy lived in a different building?
I loved doing the food aid to Poland Efes as I think most of us did but I was never in a photo shoot. However, I only did, I believe, four loads and always loaded back out of Germany except on the last occasion when I was told to go direct to the docks in Rotterdam. There I was to meet Micky Twemlow, who would be loading a big dump truck on one of our stripped down supercube’s. I had to swap trailers with him then proceed asap to Izmir in Turkey to an exhibition being held there. A fantastic trip but didn’t have my camera with me.
Concerning the cancelled All British event. Two companies refused to pay up. One of them was Wilson Generators from Northern Ireland. Brian Wilson, who I knew well and was a good customer, rang me and after the pleasantries just said, “I’m not paying that invoice of yours”. And that was that.
The other thing you mentioned was the construction of the Embassy building in Ferdowsi Avenue, Tehran. The side of the building facing the Avenue is modern but if you look at photos online you will see it has softer lines on the garden side. I have attached a photo taken from Ferdowsi Avenue showing the business side of the building where the main entrance is. The entrance I used on at least a dozen occasions.
Just read a lovely little anecdote from Micky Martin who did a bit of work now and again for Promotor back in the 70’s. The first photo is of Micky parked up in one of the many forests in the commie block. Seems he went into the woods for a dump but was disturbed by what could have been a bear.
He has now added a second photo, titled ‘meals on wheels’, of the bear in hot pursuit. Tell me Micky, ‘did you usually take your bike into the woods when you went for a crap’!!!
