Job or Joy?

UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUMS OLD TIME LORRIES, COMPANIES AND DRIVERS (INTERACT
1

A recent post on the Bewick thread got me thinking. One of the things I loved in the early days was to compare what I was doing to what I had done before and what my friends were doing.

  1. I had a 4 wheeler Leyland comet - 8 stud wheels, 9.00 x 20 tyres, legal payload 9 tons. Usually 10 on board.

I’d loaded ‘pulp’ - 4’ lengths of scots pine from the Scottish Borders, setting off at the end of the day, and ran down to to Bowaters at Ellesmere Port. It was now 11.00pm. Late summer, just getting dark. I expected to unload in the morning, but found that it was a 24 hour operation. My load was pushed off by a large blade on a rubber tyred machine within a few minutes.

I could have settled down for the night in the cab. I did spend many nights slumped over the engine hump of the Comet.

But, I wasn’t tired, so I headed back up north, starting a new log sheet! stopping at the Jungle on Shap and arriving back on site near Biggar early morning.

I then loaded old, very light timber for the board mill at Hexham, where the foreman asked if it was dry. I said it was. This timber was priced on volume not on weight, because, ‘dry’ timber was better for the machines than new.

I unloaded, then headed back for St Boswells. 2 full days and the night in between with only an odd ‘kip’ when I was tired.

Then came Log ‘books’ as opposed to log ‘sheets’ - a bit more difficult to fiddle. Finally - for me - Tachographs. Luckily, I was starting on Middle East by then and they were only really understood in Western Europe. By the time you got to Yugoslavia a few dollars were the saviour of any difficult situation!

Again, Middle East was an adventure, not a ‘job’. Yes, we got into situations when a 9-5 office job in Blighty looked enticing! But usually what we were doing was ‘interesting’ at least.

I then spent 10 years in Saudi, in Transport, shipping and airfreight. Every time I came home I could go to my local pub and meet my old mates, who were working towards a pension in the shipyard or teaching or in the Town Hall.

So, here we are at pension age. Theirs is better than mine - I should have put more into it!

Would I swap? Not for a second - it was never a job, it was a life!

John.

2

John West:
A recent post on the Bewick thread got me thinking. One of the things I loved in the early days was to compare what I was doing to what I had done before and what my friends were doing.

  1. I had a 4 wheeler Leyland comet - 8 stud wheels, 9.00 x 20 tyres, legal payload 9 tons. Usually 10 on board.

I’d loaded ‘pulp’ - 4’ lengths of scots pine from the Scottish Borders, setting off at the end of the day, and ran down to to Bowaters at Ellesmere Port. It was now 11.00pm. Late summer, just getting dark. I expected to unload in the morning, but found that it was a 24 hour operation. My load was pushed off by a large blade on a rubber tyred machine within a few minutes.

I could have settled down for the night in the cab. I did spend many nights slumped over the engine hump of the Comet.

But, I wasn’t tired, so I headed back up north, starting a new log sheet! stopping at the Jungle on Shap and arriving back on site near Biggar early morning.

I then loaded old, very light timber for the board mill at Hexham, where the foreman asked if it was dry. I said it was. This timber was priced on volume not on weight, because, ‘dry’ timber was better for the machines than new.

I unloaded, then headed back for St Boswells. 2 full days and the night in between with only an odd ‘kip’ when I was tired.

Then came Log ‘books’ as opposed to log ‘sheets’ - a bit more difficult to fiddle. Finally - for me - Tachographs. Luckily, I was starting on Middle East by then and they were only really understood in Western Europe. By the time you got to Yugoslavia a few dollars were the saviour of any difficult situation!

Again, Middle East was an adventure, not a ‘job’. Yes, we got into situations when a 9-5 office job in Blighty looked enticing! But usually what we were doing was ‘interesting’ at least.

I then spent 10 years in Saudi, in Transport, shipping and airfreight. Every time I came home I could go to my local pub and meet my old mates, who were working towards a pension in the shipyard or teaching or in the Town Hall.

So, here we are at pension age. Theirs is better than mine - I should have put more into it!

Would I swap? Not for a second - it was never a job, it was a life!

John.

I think all of us who had any experience of middle east work can honestly say, if you got beyond the first trip, it was not just a job, or even a way of life, but to us lucky few who were there, it was the greatest adventure anyone could have imagined