Prestige or pity?
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T write in response to your leditoes recent comment on the image of our industry particularly your leader on Yorkie bars in the issue of 511 May.
I was born into the industry 60 years ago to a family which had been at it since pack horses. When I started to drive, my old Dad said "don't get any big ideas—most people regard you as a little bit better than a tramp, that bit being that you ride while he walks". In the intervening 40 years nothing has changed, apart from the nature of the criticism.
We used to knock off the window sills in Markyate and crack the historic buildings in Stamford while following the exhortation to 'stay awhile amid its ancient charms' stuck in the inevitable traffic jam. Then more people became car owners and we clogged up the A30 stopping them getting to the west country for their holidays.
The motorways gave us a respite on the long-distance front, but attention turned to all the lorries cluttering up the local high street. But widespread car ownership and mass car commuting brought more people into competition with lorries. At the same time pressure from our customers triggered our campaign for longer, heavier lorries to keep their costs down, But the public perception, fostered by the media, is that this is a sinister plot to inflate the vast profits [sic] which are made in the industry.
In a recent letter to the AA, a motorist claimed that a typical HGV will cause 10,000 times more damage to our highways than a typical car "yet HriVs normally pay only 20 to 30 times in road tax than cars". He urged that HMIs be made to pay their "true share" of road maintenance costs which would cut the costs to car drivers. The AA's response to this piece of nonsense was that it was continuing its campaign to get a government review of all motoring taxation.
Another complainant in the same magazine said lorries were to blame for his having to get up 30 minutes earlier and still being late for work because they clogged up the Ml.
Throughout history transport workers have had the dirty end of the stick. Sailors, drovers, stage coach drivers, canal boaters, Hansom cabbies, bus drivers and their modern day equivalents still suffer public opprobrium, along with our predecessors, the carters and dragmen. Coachmen were blamed for the 'great mire' in Piccadilly, while waggoners were cited by the Turnpike Trusts as the cause of their ever•growing maintenance costs and the rise in pike En a 1968 magazine piece in a trade journal I wrote: "road haulage is the prostitute industry Used by many and reviled by all, especially the clients." 1 long ago resigned myself to working under those strictures. There has only every been one prestige job in transport—engine driver. Perhaps I should have followed ray mother's family trade--railwaymen back to single wheelers --instead of my dad's.
Bob Rust
Basildon. Essex