When I was a boy in the 1960’s, we lived on the main A120 at Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire. Among the regular users of that trunk road were the blue and white lorries, mainly Foden S20 and older FG types, all with noisy 2-stroke engines, which had K&D or KD on the door in gold letters, and were based in Bedfordshire I think. They also had Bedford S Type 4-wheelers and they must have been quite a sizeadble company but I can find no photos or mention of them on the internet. I’m just wondering who K&D were and what happened to them.
Is this the outfit your looking for Caffeine ? transportphotos.com/road/photos
Thanks for posting photo. I think it’s almost certainly the same company although the livery layout looks different - above the windscreen it says ‘Hemelite’ indicating it was on contract to them and so painted in their colours. The K&D livery I remember was mainly mid-blue cab with a white or cream curving down lower cabside, similar in style to Welch’s Transport. The ornate K & D lettering looks the same as I remember, except it was normally in gold or perhaps straw colour.
I looked up Hemelite and they make concrete blocks. I found images of their lorries and the livery is white with red, which ties in with your picture.
This is the livery of one of Hemelites motors albeit a Dodge so I would think that the Foden would have been on contract to them from K&D
I’ve now found just one colour photo of a K&D Foden FG 8-wheel flat, in blue and cream, apparently taken in their home town of Bedford. It’s a thumbnail for a photo sold on Ebay so I’d better not try and display it here, but this is a link …
thumbs.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/m … DUdFfw.jpg …exactly as I remember seeing them all those years ago. The livery was very similar to Welch’s Transport. I lived on a long, gentle hill and I can recall the fierce growl of these things as the drivers changed down the gears in quick succession until they found a ratio that would pull. Completely different to the Gardner powered lorries (in particular), that used to rattle the house windows as their drivers tended to hang on to a gear until the last possible moment!
Also, on the subject of Foden 2-strokes, in Bishop’s Stortford, where I lived, there was a coach company called Biss Bros and for a while they had a real rarity, a Foden PVR rear-engined coach with 2-stroke engine and rather strange looking bodywork.
Hiya…i don,t know if the same coach as your talking about is the same one that St Ives sand and gravel had.their was some talk about
it may be a year ago. a member was asking where it had gone to,that was a rear engined two stroke it is the right area i think,
John
Re. Foden PVR coach This was the Biss Bros one - ORO107 with Windover body…
flickr.com/photos/dscn8785/6671734893/ … a lot easier to find pics of this than of the original subject, K&D lorries!
You can find allsorts on Bob Hobbs site transportphotos.com/road/photos
K&D stood for Kilby & Davison.
They were based in Bedford and became part of CAEC Howard in the 1950s.
Among Howard’s interests were haulage, warehousing, engineering and breeze block manufacture.
K&D were a general haulier, they are perhaps best known for hauling the Hemalite range of blocks which were manufactured by Howards but they also hauled raw materials and finished goods for George Fischer who had a large engineering works in the town.
They ran Fodens,ERFs and latterly Volvos amongst others.
Many ran in the blue and cream livery although others usually on Hemalite work were white with red signwriting.
Some photos taken by Peter Davies of the blue and cream Fodens are in circulation.
K&D faded away in the early 1980s although the Howard group is till around today, mainly holding property interests.
Thanks everyone - after 50 years I now know what K&D stood for 