LOOKING BACK
Page 22
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A century is a long, long time, more than double one's business lifetime, but throughout all those years, save Eve, Commercial Motor has informed its readers.
This is sheer longevity, for few of the companies the readers serve can now boast of a half-century, let alone 95 years. Perhaps it is easier to record events than to initiate them, but surely at this time all of us can enjoy the luxury of some reminiscence.
While each decade has had legislative innovations affecting the industry, the sixties saw the most. Plating, testing and operator licensing were introduced as a result of the Geddes Report, whose words opened up operation and removed the constriction of enlargement enforced by the railways.
The enormous changes we have seen since are mainly the result of Britain's lost manufacturing ability.
Long gone are the halcyon times when the vehicle you sent to Birmingham, or to other inland cities, would return with the platform bearing machinery for the London or provincial port docks. All this took time, but the wages and all other hourly costs were not those of today. It was tough on the drivers; all that tramping meant hard times, but what experience they gained, geographically, of varied loadings and their securing, and the weather.
Only on some agencies can a similar variety of jobs be found today—the man who can quickly sheet and rope is looked up to.
Vehicle fashions change too, but some return: drag trailers and six-wheelers, except tippers and mixers, went off the menu through the seventies, but are now really back with us. Currently four-wheelers are all sprouting an extra axle, unpowered, sometimes steered, a lift or fixed tag. Even the dustcarts are at it, and on multi-drop shop deliveries, especially if weighty, the twoaxle boxvan is less popular, VED and axle-load legislation being the cause.
This is not new—extra rear axles, usually single-tyred, were added to the eight-ton 20mph four-wheelers of the thirties, and who would have then dreamt that Leyland's "Steer" (it was all animal names then) creating the original "Chinese-six", presumably to reduce front axle loading before power steering, would become the standard trim for the units pulling multi-axle artics 50 years later?
Bodywork changes happen, but these do not return. Long gore are the cab-over platforms beloved by the hay, straw and baled wool and the cotton carriers, so popular in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Even the Lutons are much fewer, except in lightweight van-hire fleets. Furniture, like most other freight, loads differently now.
Pictorially modern logos have partly replaced the "Carriers" or "Haulage Contractors" liveries proudly born in mid-century, and in turn derived from the cartage contractors of the horse-and-cart era.
Less agreeable, perhaps, is the way some of the media have debased the historic term "driver" into "trucker"! On balance, however, the now often seen cab door lettered "Joe Soap, Haulier" engenders a respect for the industrious owner-driver whose unit is coupled to some householdnamed trailer; an arrangement now common and individually commendable, even though it denies the haulage industry as a whole the coercive clout now so essential to achieve better national status and, one could say, survival.
We must just hope that, post-millennium, the tide will somehow turn and that enlightenment will come regarding levels of fuel duty and VED charges. It behoves everyone in the industry to try their utmost to occasion this. Neil Peet,
Former BRS Southern driver and owner-driver, Northwood, Middlesex.