I thought that Jolodas had long since died the death, but typing the name into Google, after Eddie Heaton said they were still operating, is a revelation. Multi million pound industry, well done that company! Not really the jolodas that I remember, but they’ve moved with the times.
Brother Andy, who throws nothing away, still has a pair, so I got him to dig them out and took a couple of photos.
Loading Andrex toilet tissue at Bowater Scott in Barrow in 1970 involved backing your flatbed trailer into the warehouse. A ‘clamp’ truck, often driven by Ste Burrow’s dad, Ian, who was about 18 at the time,
(picture of him a few years later, not looking much older!) would put a block of cardboard boxes containing toilet rolls on your trailer. These boxes were square and sat on top of each other. A clamp truck load, eight feet high was naturally unstable, and ‘spread’ so that it was wider at the top than the bottom. The driver would then pull out and put the clamps to the side of this mound, expanding the clamps outward and moving the boxes tight up to the previous block.
Somewhere on here is a picture of the ‘first load’ out of the new Bowater Scott factory in the late sixties. It’s a Brady 33’ trailer if I remember rightly. Anyway, I can’t find it. The point was that the boxes were square, by the time they were 8’ high, they were like quicksand! The clamp truck would lift your sheets onto the load. If it wasn’t busy, or if it was wet, you were allowed to stay in the warehouse to sheet up. If it was busy and dry, you had to gingerly pull outside!
Until you got the first sheet on you were in great danger of falling to the ground in a cascade of boxes. I was lucky and that never happened to me.
There are occasional comments on the Bewick thread about how easy it must have been to sheet and rope a 40’ container, because they were nice and square, but I promise you, the result might have looked easy, the reality was different. Repeating earlier comments, BRS were given 2 trunks a night, with a view to them taking over all the transport in about '72 or '73. We were all worried at first, but they weren’t used to these high, unstable loads and didn’t last a week.
Unlike Bewick, I wasn’t tied into crane loaded return loads. I quickly realised that van trailers were a better bet and sold my 2 flats and rented ‘Rentco’ 40’ trailers. (My brother Andy and I drove a ‘Mastiff’ each). Looking for backloads for the vans was what got me involved with Pritchett’s.
The first van I got was flat floored. The other van I’d hired had joloda tracks. As I remember, the Pritchett vans which had them usually had the tracks filled in with blocks of wood, because most of the loads were electric barrow, or even, as I remember at Kraft, the fork lift just drove straight in.
By this time Bowaters had moved on to interlaced shrinkwrapped trays, which were much more stable. If you had a van, the trick was to take a block of wax and use a coin to make flakes onto the trailer floor, you finished up with a dance floor surface - this meant that the clamp truck pushed the stacks up near the front in a line and then you unloaded and stacked the boxes.
One night I tried pushing the stack up to the front, then lying on the floor and pushing the stacks sideways with my feet so they didn’t need restacking. it wasn’t really successful. However, it gave one of the old guys who helped load a ‘light bulb’ moment. I can’t remember whose van it was, but he realised that if you put a few flat cardboard boxes on the floor, and the clamp truck driver put the stack to one side instead of down the middle, it could be Joloda’d to the front, then pushed over the last few inches as I had tried to do when the stacks were down the centre.
As said, one of the vans I’d hired had joloda tracks. I could see immediately how this would save time, so bought a pair of jolodas. Absolutely brilliant! now you could load and unload nearly as quickly as a flat trailer, without having to rope and sheet!
I soon changed the second van for one with jolodas. Bowaters joined the GKN pallet scheme (the rumour was that they only joined after they already had a load of pallets on hand, but I’m not sure). We started doing pallets to the retail drops in the vans too, although the depot drops remained off pallets because they used clamp trucks instead of forklifts anyway. I believe the old loader, whose name I can’t remember, received a financial reward for his idea.
We did quite a lot of work down to Lincoln, Boston, Kings Lynn and Norwich. Reg Leader gave me a tip to call in at Donald Cook’s at Kings Lynn and we started doing pallets of canned veg back to the North West for them - it was multi drop, and obviously, in a van, you had to get the order right or you were handballing! Donald Cook’s also paid something like five shillings (we might have been on 25 new pence by then) per pallet you brought back in, so that paid for my evening meal and visit to the cinema. Bowaters paid nothing, but grumbled if you didn’t have enough pallets!
We also loaded the big 8’ reels down to Kimberly Clark at Larkfield in the vans on the jolodas. The smaller reels were no good, because the vans weren’t high enough to put a reel on top of the ones standing on end, they still had to be loaded on the flats.
You had to be wary of the pallet condition. if the cross bars weren’t strong, with a heavy load, the pallet would drag on the floor. I usually kept a few pieces of wood to put down if the pallet looked a bit ropy.
found this on the net, hope the owner doesn’t mind.
John
However,I kept hold of the pair of Jo-Loada trolleys as they were quite valuable and I stuck them in a corner of our store.Well a couple of years later our manager happened to be in a local scrap yard buying some bits for his Stock car and he spied these Jo-Loadas propped up in a corner of the office which fortunately we had painted red and stamped the no.12 on each of them which had been the van’s fleet no. So he tells me about seeing them so I shot up to the scrap yard and put them in the picture!! these Gobbins didn’t know what they were or how valuable they were but still had thought better of weighing them in 
So they said to me take them,take them !! but I wanted to badly know who had sold them to the scrap yard (as we had moved our stores some time previously and I had a good idea who the thief was 
"Shorry Oscifer the driver’s done a runner,and we’ve no idea who he was 
" Guess what all three got a ban IIRC ! Cheers Dennis.