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Eight classes for LDoY
Page 59
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PRESIDENT: LORD CHESHAM
• There will be eight classes in the 1970 Lorry Driver of the Year competition, This was decided at the annual general meeting of the organizing committee at Coventry on Tuesday. This means that there will be some amalgamation of classes for rigid vehicles. It is likely that classes A and B and El and E2 will be joined, to result in four rigid and four artic classes covering the same range of vehicles as at present.
The committee considers this to be one means of controlling the ever-increasing numbers of drivers who qualify far the final. Last year the figure was 282 and if the anticipated new centres materialize there could have been an increase of 100 at the 1970 event, which is to take place at Bramcote on September 6 1970. It has also been decided that the facility permitting two men, in certain circumstances, from classes B to E2 to go forward to the final has been discontinued. Only one man in each class will qualify. The scope of the Highway Code section (renamed the "oral section") has been extended to include drivers' legal liability knowledge and questions on vehicle familiarization similar in many respects to the h.g.v. driving test. The road route has been given a new importance in that the total maximum penalty points have been increased from 150 to 200. There will again bethree manoeuvring tests on the familiar theme of kerb parking. width judgment and reversing—but to different d imensions infutu re.
For the first time the competition is to have a national president: Lord Chesham, who is executive vice-chairman of the RAC and chairman of the British Road Federation. The retiring chairman and vice-chairman, Alderman R. W. Brain and Mr. M. Miles, were elected life vice-presidents. Other elections resulted as follows:— Chairman Mr. G. Aston, vice-chairman Mr. A. E. Havard. clerk of the course Mr. A. E. Teer. New members of the executive are Ald. A. Pedley, Leeds; Mr. G. Morgan. Birmingham: Mr. B. Gray. Woolwich; Mr. J. Whitehouse. Coventry: Mr. J. Emery, S. Wales: Mr. L Newman. Torbay. lain Sherriff ICM's deputy editor) was re-appointed national secretary and CM confirmed that it would continue to sponsorthe event in 1970.
At lunch on Tuesday the Lord Mayor of Coventry was host to the national organizing committee and representatives of the winning entrants, in the historic Guildhall. The Lord Mayor remarked that the occasion was the end of an LDoY chapter, with the retirement of Ald. Brain as chairman and Mr. Miles as vicechairman of the competition, which ended Coventry's specially close association with the contest.
The Lord Mayor said that Coventry was proud to have given birth to an "infant" which had now grown up, and whose marriage to Temple Press Ltd., the sponsors (publishers of CM) had provided the "pocket money" to give it the station in life to which it was entitled.
Aid. Brain, thanking the Lord Mayor, said the competition had been the event of his public life. The LDoY originated, he revealed, as a request by Jack Patience of the TGWU, at a 1952 Coventry Road Safety Committee discussion, for "something for commercial drivers".
Tributes to the work of Mervyn Miles and Gerry Aston—clerk of the course for many years—were paid by Ald. Brain, who thanked all the voluntary workers who made the competition possible.