Even after all these years there are so many things that I miss about running our haulage business.
Stupid as it seems I think the stress is probably the most. I here many people saying that they have stress at work, & I suppose they really think they have, but only those of us in Haulage can imagine the stress we suffered. From worries of getting payment from customers, always with the thought that they may go bankrupt & you’ll end up loosing in some cases 10’s of thousands to problems with drivers and vehicles and when like us on anyone day you have 100 out there on the road, things do go wrong from time to time.
Although I was involved in our business all of my life, I worked there 20 years, and during that time I only took about 10 weeks holiday, which in my mind were weeks wasted as I really enjoyed my life. I did take the odd couple of days away each year usually at London & I tended to travel by train unless I needed my car to visit customers outside the West End.
Whenever I went away it seemed something always went wrong that I had to sort out when I came back and it was on one of my London trips I will recall today. David Dalrymple was our Removal estimator at the time and as he lived in Darlington and had a company car had drawn the short straw to meet me at Bank Top Station Darlington.
Getting into the car he said would I mind if he quickly nipped round home for a minute or two and his wife would make me a cup of tea. At the time I thought nothing about it but I suppose it was the equivelant of a Police Officer coming to your door and asking can we sit down, before giving bad news.
He told me Bob Pinkney (I apologise if I’ve got the first name wrong as we had a Bob & a George (Not related) had had an accident earlier that day and was dead. Its wrong to think you get hardened but experience makes you think of practical issues instead of becoming overcome with grief and all wanted to know was the circumstances what had happened.
At that time we hadn’t found out entirely of the facts, however we did have some information as one of our female drivers, Christine Oliver had been following and although very shook up she had told my father what we knew.
George had been driving one of our Bedford Marsdens Passenger chassis which by then were longish in the teeth, FUP145C which was virtually identical to the one below in the picture, and Christine was following in one of our Leyland Super Comet tractor units with a forty foot trailer, which at the time was about one year old.
George was approaching a road junction and went straight across just missing a line of people standing at a bus stop and ploughing into a stone church wall which the Bedford demolished. George was found dead in his driving seat.
Although our maintenance standards were very high, at that stage you cannot help wondering had the brakes failed.
Whenever I’ve heard of a coach crashing & passengers and or the driver being killed, particularly if its in our area of the North East, how I feel for the coach owner, because there is often a few days before you hear of the results of the tests that establish the cause of the accident , and so it was over the next two or three days with my dad & myself at Spennymoor.
The results eventually come that George had suffered a heart attack and had managed to steer the van enough to avoid in killing anyone standing at the bus stop but was most probably dead at the time of impact with the wall.
FUP145C was a right-off and our usual course of action would have been to arrange to buy the salvage off the insurer and repair and put it back on the road, but in this instance we didn’t and the van never returned to Spennymoor