Growfun pains
Page 47
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IN 1966, Thomas Brothers Haulage and Container Service bought a Bedford Telehoist skip truck and 10 skips.
In retrospect, David Raymond,_ a partner in the firm, told me, writes Paul Mungo, it was the best move they had ever made.
"It we hadn't have bought it, we wouldn't have been in business now."
In 1966, rubbish haulage contractors were making the change from trunks to skips, for the simple reason that the skips saved labour and time. Using a normal tipper the material to be hauled away has to be handled many times; with a skip it has to be handled only once.
"With a rubbish container," says David Raymond, dump the container and it's up to there how they fill ir" They bought their second skip in 1967, then one every year after that. "In early 1972 we had six skip trucks and approximately 140 skips," says David Raymond.
"That's the level we've maintained since. Being a small firm we had to count what we had. We bought six skip lorries over a period of five or six years, plus building workshops, and all this at the time they brought in the M-oT. We decided we had to stay as we were for a while.
"Besides," he adds, -"the last two or three years business hasn't been all that good."
Thomas Brothers rely on the building trade for their own prosperity. But building is a particularly cyclic business that follows the booms and busts of the general economy with an unbecoming precision. At the moment, David Raymond will tell you, building isn't on a boom.
The company has always hauled rubbish, ever since it was started in 1931 by David Raymond's father, Ivor Raymond, and his Uncle, Thomas Thomas. During the war the two men moved the company from London to Wales, where they had a contract hauling coal and cork to RAF camps.
In 1946, Ivor Raymond came back to London with a contract at the Uxbridge RAF camp, doing almost the same thing he was doing in Wales.
They also supplied another RAF base, in West Drayton. "We kept them on until we got the skip lorry," Ivor Raymond says. "Then we packed them in.'" That was in 1966. In 1962, David Raymond had joined his father's company and in 1967 he became a partner; making the two owners of a firm called Thomas Brothers neither brothers nor named Thomas.
Thomas Thomas, the man from whom the company's name derived, is now in Wales. He was Ivor Raymond's halfbrother, and despite his retirement, people still call up and ask for "Mr Thomas." "People even call my daughter Thomas," says David Raymond with a shrug. -But on the other hand they can't ring us up at home, which can be handy."
In the evenings, when the six skip trucks and the two tippers