BIRDS EYE
Page 45
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by The Hawk
Timing crucial
Norman Fowler, Minister of Transport, is a. good catch as a speaker at the Freight Transport Association's biennial conference at Eastbourne in September. The Road Haulage Association is seldom able to attract any notable member of the Government to its annual conference because the event is always held in October while Parliament is in session, and includes Wednesday when the Minister answers questions on transport in the House of Commons.
It is, however, the quality of the paper, rather than the status of the speaker, that matters in the end. I look to the day when an author will sink his pride and hand his paper to a newspaperman to rewrite in a way that will grab attention from the first sentence instead of lulling the audience to sleep with 15 minutes of introductory platitudes.
If I had a pound for every paper beginning in that way which I have scoured unsuccessfully for news, I could laugh off inflation as everyone else's problem.
Boring
Agencies enforcing road transport law in Gwent now meet quarterly at police headquarters to discuss problems, says William Farley, chief constable, in a report. They operate under the appropriate acronym of Mole — Meetings of Officers of Law Enforcement — boring away underground to ensure that "goods vehicle legislation is being adhered to by operators with the minimum of delay to drivers.'" Despite that good intention, I cannot escape the conclusion that Gwent County Council, backed by the police, have been making a mountain out of a molehill. After banning lorries over three tons unladen from parts of Usk, except for access to premises, they vexatiously claimed that drivers could not enter those areas to reach their lodgings.
The • local magistrates, hearing a case fought by the Freight Transport Association, took a logical view, if you will pardon the pun. They dismissed a charge against an ICI driver who had been stopped by the police just after leaving his lodgings in a banned road.
CM first with gas
E. E. Holliday's reference (Commercial Motor, July 6) to a Gilford vehicle with charcoal gas producer in 1937 reminds me that CM anticipated this development by 20 years. It put forward its own design for a gas producer in the issue of September 27, 1917. A prototype based on it was built by the late Maurice Edwards, who founded what is now the great Edbro tipping-gear empire but left it in 1934.
He was one of eight brothers and the son of a mining engin eer. He was a prolific inventor and at one stage went into the cycle business with his father, designing a new bicycle. The MEB record-breaking threewheeled car and cinematograph equipment were just two other items in a bulging portfolio of innovations before Maurice died in 1971 at the age of 94.
My earliest recollection of a gas producer was the Tullock Reading, which the bearded Reading demonstrated on, I think, a Crossley army tender one cold, drenching winter's day in about 1930 on the heath at Bagshot. He had a command of the vernacular that would have stunned any Thames bargee or Billingsgate fish porter but the captain who was driving the truck ran him a close second when his cap fell into the middle of a large, deep, brown pool.
My innocent young ears turned a delicate shade of purple and 50 years later my shoes are just drying out.
Shame on you!
Why have only 13 entries, been submitted for the Sam Gunnell award for the best centre in the Lorry Driver of the Year Competition? It costs nothing to enter and the centre officer concerned has merely to say in writing why he thinks his contest should be eligible for the award.
Do nearly two-thirds of the centres believe that they are unworthy even of consideration? If so, their officers need treatment for an inferiority complex. Whatever the reason, the abysmal entry is an affront to the memory of a fine man and to his widow, who continues to work devotedly for the competition.
Award for persuasion?
Castrol is to sponsor the Segrave Trophy which is awarded annually to the British subject who best demonstrates the possibilities of transport by land, air or water. The Minister of Transport who finally persuades Parliament that 44-tonne lorries are essential to economic transport in this country might be a worthy candidate.
Happy hippo
Only the British could hold a flag day for a hippopotamus. This was one of the means used by Humberside people to save Hercules, a 14-year-old 21/4-ton hippo, which became an orphan when Cleethorpes Zoo went into liquidation in the period euphemistically described as last summer. The flintiest heart was pierced by the slogan, "Make a Hippo Happy," and some £5000 was collected to give to the management of Dudley Zoo, Hercules" new foster parents.
As an earnest of its regard for the benighted beast, Harvey Plant Ltd carried it free on the 140-mile journey to its new nome. Hercules first had a ride on one of Harvey's 5000 fork trucks and then on an Overland semi-trailer hauled by a Scania 110 tractor. He is reported to have enjoyed this new experience.