jmc jnr:
Left Thetford (Norfolk) at 5-00am. Delivered Buckingham, Brackley, Banbury, Stratford on Avon, Leamington Spa, Warwick, 3 in Coventry, Solihull , Sutton Coldfield, had a note waiting for me at the Queen Elizabeth Birmingham to ring yard. Told to ring again whe empty in Hereford, so delivered West Bromwich,Walsall,Wolverhampton,Stourbridge,2 in Wourcester, 2 in Hereford and rang in - big panic - Over the hills to Cardiff, collected the base of an artificial Kidney machine and took it straight to the Brompton Hospital in central London. I arrived back about 5-00am the following morning havin covered a thousand miles and there was a dozen drops in London waiting for me on the bank. Guess where I told them to go?.. Jim.
P.S. I was 23 and full of beans then! 68 now and much much wiser.
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isnt it a different perspective wen your keen,green and mad for tar?
in my early twentys i had a similar trip rammed into me.
paisley to tip dundee,empty to glasgow and loaded 20 ton of dogfood from spillars in london road,back to paisley,swap trailers,down to sheffield and swap trailers for a delivery in hackbridge next morn. tip hackbridge in the morn,run to tilbury,load an empty box and tie it on as the flat didnt have twistlocks,run empty to aylesbury for a load of rise and shine,load and tip port sunlight next morn,run empty back to sheffield and lift the trailer i dropped the day before,load at huddersfield and run to tip carlisle,then empty back to paisley to get told to loft another trailer as i was tipping back in hackbridge the next morning and at that point the cab got emptied.
the only kip i got was slumped over the hump between tipping and loading,plus this was when the m6 stopped at carlisle.
happy days all round.
Chris Webb:
“You’ve got plenty of hours,will you tip Baglan Bay,wash out and reload for Stallingborough”. This was one Saturday job from Sheffield I got,didn’t want to turn it down of course but didn’t want to be away Saturday night which happened now and again.
I think I booked off at Monmouth and kept going,hid the wagon at Beighton,got int pub about 8-00pm.
Had to be done.
Top man ,you sound very much like someone i knew very well who would fiddle home from almost anywhere . He once came back and hid the motor and ran in fairly early the morning after and his gaffer said how come you were away last night with 2 other drivers they ran in this morning with a layer of snow on the back and you have none. He replied oh i swept it off … more chance of him platting fog than seeping the snow off
Hayter Mowers. Mr Hayter (Doug) sees me in the yard one evening and said “you are going to Preston in the morning I think”, “Yes sir said I” " well on the way back can you call into this address in Liverpool and collect a Grandfather clock and some other items, then go to this address in Manchester and collect a sideboard" anything for the governor so off I goes, anyway gets to this address in Liverpool, it was an estate agents or something and collects this Grandfather clock with the other stuff, well this clock looked bloody expensively old so I takes it from together and wraps me blankets (I always carried 7 and 6 cushions for sleeping in the cab) round it and trundles off to Manchester, finds this auctioneers and told them what I had come for, ah it is still in the house, and will send a couple of blokes to help you get it loaded, when we gets to this house the sideboard is upstairs (I think 3 flights) and the only way we could get it down was to tie a rope round it and lower it over the bannisters with 3 of us hanging on for dear life, anyway we gets it down to the ground floor and finds a couple of passing blokes to give us a lift onto the lorry, then had to tie it down with the cushions under the ropes to stop it getting marked, gets back to the yard and was told to deliver the stuff to an antique shop in Harlow, it was not company goods but the governor was doing it as a favour for a friend, don’t know how I would have stood with the old bill with that load, and I never even got a drink out of it. Bummer.
Can you just take the landrover to our showroom at London bridge and deliver the new mowers for the window display, off I goes having never been there before as the place was to small to get our artic’s in, so I finds it and drives in the back, unloads and lo and behold the 2 sales men come out and pushed the landrover round, I was parked on a turntable, never seen one like that before, there was some clause in the lease that you could not reverse out, so they installed this turntable, what a wonderful idea, could have done with one of them down some of those wharfs on Tooley Street where we used to collect from, or round Covent Garden market when you could not move for lorries parked being unloaded, if you were not away from there by about 5am you could be stuck for hours trying to get out, was a blessing when they moved the market, not so much fun though.
On Hayters I used to do all the big shows Chelsea/Edinburgh/Stoneleigh Park etc, with Edinburgh it was a Saturday leave yard, Edinburgh Sunday morning to unload and sort display stand out for show to start Monday, then continue doing delivery’s up as far as Aberdeen then back to show ground and sit around till the show ended to load all the stuff back on again and take it back to Spellbrook. Chelsea was just a day deliver sort stand and back to yard then at end of show go down and do it all in reverse, one year we were loading and I saw all these rose bushes in a skip and asked the bloke what was going to happen to them to be told they were for the dump, so after we finished loading our stuff I pulled round and loaded a lot of these roses on the back, also found some indoor plants and stuck them in the cab, talk about a mobile greenhouse it was a wonder we never got stopped on the way home, we did have the best roses in the village for a few years though.
Over nighted at Stoneleigh one year and got the 410 out in the evening and nearly got caught poaching in the grounds, but that is another story.
