Tell us more, we had 1 of theirs in our place Sunday afternoon delivering. You must have good grounds to go on or the mods won’t like it and lock it.
malcolmj:
have heard Eat More Chips have had their chips
+1
this wont stay long as they locked the last one
Eat More Chips + Die?
seen two newish dafs, north bound m5 this afternoon, on trade plates, unit only !
Have heard on the grapevine that D Mortimers have gone into administration. Anyone else heard anything?
If I am wrong I apologise as not wanting to spread false rumours.
Someone posted something similar the other week, two or three times I think but all the threads were then locked or removed because it came under “hear-say”…no proof or evidence then no post!! 
Guess your`s will end up the same way!
bullitt:
Someone posted something similar the other week, two or three times I think but all the threads were then locked or removed because it came under “hear-say”…no proof or evidence then no post!!Guess your`s will end up the same way!
I think CEVA have bought them 
Toby Ovens is a member of this site
Wheel Nut:
bullitt:
Someone posted something similar the other week, two or three times I think but all the threads were then locked or removed because it came under “hear-say”…no proof or evidence then no post!!Guess your`s will end up the same way!
I think CEVA have bought them
Toby Ovens is a member of this site
If CEVA have bought them then it cannot be rumour.
Sad to see the demise of a once brilliant company run by a great guy. Used to be a job that had them queuing to Bristol for a job.
We have been trying to find out more on this,
We know that HMRC issued a winding up petition against them, but do not know if that was granted.
They are not answering any of the phone numbers we have for them including individuals mobiles.
I have reinstated these threads and merged them into one, however if information comes to light that they are not in the situation we think they are it will have to be quickly removed.
Try… 01225 700 657
So it can’t be dis-proved either, then it’s allowed? Fair point I suppose.
CM have spoken to them now,
The company has not ceased trading or been wound up at this time, but they are “not doing anything for now” while they look at various options.
We hope to have some clarification of what that actually means soon…
I spoke to one of their drivers at a First Milk Cheese place and he was telling me,That one of their drivers that week had been fined over 8000 € in Spain for going over his 90hrs got caught twice for the same offence but in different regions of Spain. You cannot run with those type of costs coming out of the bank,
Robertthegreat:
I spoke to one of their drivers at a First Milk Cheese place and he was telling me,That one of their drivers that week had been fined over 8000 € in Spain for going over his 90hrs got caught twice for the same offence but in different regions of Spain. You cannot run with those type of costs coming out of the bank,
can you be prosecuted for the same offence, even in Spain?
I thought Mortimers had a lot of owner drivers pulling their trailers
Wheel Nut:
Robertthegreat:
I spoke to one of their drivers at a First Milk Cheese place and he was telling me,That one of their drivers that week had been fined over 8000 € in Spain for going over his 90hrs got caught twice for the same offence but in different regions of Spain. You cannot run with those type of costs coming out of the bank,can you be prosecuted for the same offence, even in Spain?
No. once you have been done by any enforcement authority in any member state they should issue you with some kind of paperwork which shows you have been punished. You then produce this at any subsequent stops in the same or a different country to avoid being done again.
REGULATION (EC) No 561/2006
Article 20
- The driver shall keep any evidence provided by a Member
State concerning penalties imposed or the initiation of
proceedings until such time as the same infringement of this
Regulation can no longer lead to a second proceeding or
penalty pursuant to this Regulation.
The above account means one of two things. Either the driver was a master BS’er or the driver who got done was an idiot.
Although the rumours on here do not look good for Mortimers, they are more fortunate than most in a similar situation in that the transport arm grew out of a necessity to provide for their original core business of potato merchants (later expanded to fruit & veg).
I’d hazard a guess that given the sightings of units on trade plates, Mortimers are considering downsizing their international transport somewhat to pay the wolf at the door and concentrating on their fruit & veg business to weather the storm.
It’s not beyond the realms of feasability that a swift restructure could benefit them long term. Heritage’s business model of running relatively very few vehicles of their own and subbing the bulk of the work out seems to work well while limiting the expensive risk of operating and fuelling their own vehicles.
I’d be very suprised if we’re seeing the last of D Mortimer & sons.
Lets hope they save some of it they have been around a long time.
Times are very hard and no help from the people we elected.They will turn this country around at our exspence and if you manage to make it you will be very lucky.
It seems like we are all trying to ride a bike with no chain and they can’t work out why the wheels ant moving.
Happy days.
JOBE:
Lets hope they save some of it they have been around a long time.
Times are very hard and no help from the people we elected.They will turn this country around at our exspence and if you manage to make it you will be very lucky.It seems like we are all trying to ride a bike with no chain and they can’t work out why the wheels ant moving.
Happy days.
This came up on an internet search and thought it may make this thread a bit more user friendly. From the New Statesman in 2009 so has nothing to do with the current predicament.
Long-distance lorry driving was once a romantic pursuit, as Christopher Hamilton remembers. Can it still be so?
Keep on trucking
There is nothing quite like watching your own road movie unfold from high in a lorry’s cab, in open-plan comfort. But insurance and security issues make hitch-hiking harder to do than it once was; and now that Continental frontiers have largely disappeared, the romance of long- distance lorry driving seems to have run out of road.
European legislation dictates that truckers can drive only nine hours per day (ten hours twice a week), with enforced rests in between in a comfortable bunk. It’s probably no bad thing that the disreputable types played by Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Sean Connery, Patrick McGoohan and David McCallum in the 1957 film Hell Drivers are no longer to be found exhausted, slumped over the wheel in a lay-by. But some drivers still hanker after old Foden and ERF lorries with Gardner engines and the magic of stirring treacly tea at foggy pull-ins like the Blue Boar at Watford or the Windrush Cafe in Oxfordshire, where Brechtians in leather jackets would sit at a corner table, waiting for something to happen - a set- to between mods and rockers, perhaps.
My own low-budget road movies took place in the early 1980s when I drove for a small removals firm created by a bunch of minor public schoolboys who had gone off the rails in Fulham. If they hadn’t taken to the road, my employers would probably have sold jeans, or cars, or gone into aviation. The company was a kind of down-at-heel Foreign Legion on wheels, where no questions were asked as long as you could drive once around the block without hitting anything.
This was not foolproof. One driver (who had been cashiered from the Royal Signals Regiment) wrecked three trucks in a week - the last being turned into a rather fetching HGV convertible when he drove it under a low bridge in Cannes. On my first run, the driver’s mate appointed to keep me awake had to be poured into the cab outside the Windsor Castle pub near Notting Hill, only to fall out again at Dover, on to a customs officer. There were Checkpoint Charlie moments abroad, too, because my papers (T2s, T2Ls, VA2s) were generally out of order and the load manifests dodgy at best.
On my weekly 850-mile trip to the south of France, the free cabin on the Newhaven-to-Dieppe ferry was essential, as freight drivers were given a litre of red wine to go with a huge (and very good) complimentary dinner. For lunch, an array of Relais Routiers between Calais and Paris offered (another) litre of wine with an excellent three-course lunch for 15 francs, with endless complimentary pastis before it and copious brandies afterwards, “pour la route”!
No wonder those long, wide, undulating roads between war cemeteries were littered with the detritus of appalling accidents. By 1998, when I last drove that way, there was not one of these places left.
In those days, drivers were given “run money” in cash. Many had fiddles, ranging from dodgy fuel chits to the selling of batteries and spare tyres: “Sorry chief, they must 'ave 'ad them away while I was asleep . . .” Though drivers now use plastic to pay for the costs of a run, fuel theft has become a big problem: thieves sharpen one end of a bottle jack and wind it up under the tank to pierce and drain it, or organised gangs use a high-speed pump to transfer those 500 litres of diesel (worth £670) into a waiting van.
It’s already quite hard enough for many British transport firms to compete in Europe. A new tractor unit costs £100,000 and a new trailer will set you back £50,000. Road tax is between £1,200 and £1,800 a year; a Channel ferry crossing costs £180 each way; and insurance and European continental road tolls keep going up. “It costs £70,000 a year to keep a truck on the road,” says Toby Ovens, of D Mortimer & Sons, near Melksham in Wiltshire. “And that doesn’t include fuel.”
Fuel prices are a worrying issue, especially as an articulated lorry does just 7-8mpg. On European runs, drivers try to fill up in Belgium or Luxembourg, where fuel is 20 per cent cheaper. At £6 per gallon, the price of diesel in Britain is second only to that in Norway - though both countries pump North Sea oil.
Mortimer’s finds itself at the sharp end of the struggle faced by several small British transport companies. The family firm began as a carter in the 19th century and now specialises in carrying potatoes, in lorries emblazoned with the slogan “Eat More Chips” (although, with a nod to Jamie Oliver, perhaps, their lighter vehicles bear the legend “Eat More Fruit”).
“Competitors from eastern Europe are heavily subsidised,” says Ovens. “We can’t match them on price and they don’t stick to the rules.” Many British truckers complain that they are unfairly picked upon by foreign police forces, even when they do stick to their hours.
It takes a law- abiding driver between two and three days each way to make a trip of 1,270 miles to Valencia in southern Spain - which adds up to a week away from home. It galls many hauliers to find their lorries having to run empty on one leg of a route, just to get them in the right place at the right time and meet contractual obligations to big customers - supermarkets come in for a lot of stick for “just-in-time” deadlines that often seem arbitrary.
New technology tightens things further, as satellites can monitor the position of a truck. GPS route finders are now commonplace and are increasingly blamed for the creation of new HGV rat runs. I could have done with one years ago, when I got lost in Liège during a fog. I had already stumbled, map in hand, through a doorway under a flashing pink neon sign before twigging that the girl in the window was naked. “Lost?” she asked. “You must be English - that’s what all English drivers say . . .”
Physically, however, conditions are far better now for drivers, especially in the removals trade. Where we once struggled up and down seemingly interminable staircases with grand pianos and heavy boxes of books, some firms can now deliver goods through upper windows using conveyor belts and high-lift platforms. And those cabs just keep getting better and better, with their air-con, tellies and microwaves. Whereas my own “pit” behind the seats was a disgrace to mankind, a Mortimer’s lorry is supremely clean and orderly.
So, if you are an unreconstructed petrolhead, you can have a last blast by buying an eight-year-old lorry with a million miles on the clock. Even if its 7mpg fuel consumption isn’t economic for the suburban school run, at least, if push comes to shove, you won’t take any more crap from taxis or Chelsea tractors. And when the oil runs out, you can always sleep in it.
I found more about this great looking fleet. I wish for them to survive, but I wonder of the wisdom of this decision in January 2011, written by Bob Beech to BLB.
Hi Brian, Long time no speak, yes I still do a bit for Mortimers, Toby and his father Jon have gone a bit mad lately and put the five new TGX’s on the road, in addition to ten new DAF XF105’s, nine 460’s and one 80 tonne 6x2 510, all with Super Space cabs. They also bought ten new Schmitz fridges and a new Faymonville four axle step frame plant trailer.
Mind you some of the older kit had done quite a bit of work and needed updating. Two of the new MAN’s went to Spain on their first trip and the third went to Greece, taking Motzarella cheese from West Wales, strange old world isn’t it.I will be driving for them tomorrow (Mon), but nothing very exotic, taking two of the old tractors, a Scania and an MAN to Northampton , they are sold for export. But I will be driving a new Actros Demo on loan from the local dealer. After that it’s up to Cambridge for a load of straw for North Devon, you can get quite a few large bales on a step frame trailer, welcome to the glamorous world of road transport. RGDS Bob
So my earlier question about using owner drivers seemed to be wrong.
To D Mortimer and sons. - Get Well Soon!
Eat More Chips