'C' vehicles used for quarrywork in bogus deal
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AWILTSHIRE transport operator was fined £50 and ordered to pay 25 guineas advocate's fees last week after pleading guilty to 10 summonses alleging the carrying of goods not permitted under C licences issued for the vehicles concerned.
D. W. Goff, of Ashton Common, Steeple Ashton, before the Frome magistrates, heard Mr. Roger Stokes, prosecuting on behalf of the Ministry of Transport, say that the Licensing Authority regarded the case as one of the utmost gravity because of the means by which these offences were thought to have been established.
Bradgate Quarries, said Mr. Stokes, contracted with Sussex County Council to supply a large quantity of improved scalpings and it seemed that Mr. J. J. Morgan, Bradgate's works manager, contacted Goff to negotiate the carriage of the material to Sussex.
Goff offered C-licensed vehicles for the purpose though he knew he could not lawfully carry goods contracted to be sold from the quarry to the county council as an in
dependent haulier with Bradgate Quarries.
Mr. Stokes said that the Licensing Authority was prepared to accept Goff's statement that the suggestion to break the law came not from him, initially, but from Mr. Morgan. The proposal was that there should be a purely bogus and paper transaction, purporting to show the public at large, and the traffic examiner in particular and the Licensing Authority if there should be any check, that the scalpings on the lorries in question had in fact been sold by Bradgate Quarries to Goff and that those loads belonged to him during the course of transit.
Mr. Stokes said he would have liked to have brought Mr. Morgan before the court for aiding and abetting the offences but Goff would have been the only witness and he could not ask him to do this. Mr. J. J. Morgan, works manager at Bradgates Ltd., who elected to give evidence, said the quarry thought the traffic could be carried quite legally on a contract basis. Only after meeting Mr. L. R. Beattie, a traffic examiner, who quoted a High Court decision, did he realize it was quite wrong. It was a transaction that should have been administratively correctly carried out. It was purely a question of paperwork and certainly not a fiddle, said Mr. Morgan.