CHAPTER 8. NEW DIRECTIONS

[Stanley]

NEW DIRECTIONS

As we got out of the winter of 1973 a series of changes began to affect my life. These are very clear in hindsight but at the time things weren’t so obvious. On the surface, all was normal, the dealing pattern was the same as usual, I had ironed most of the faults out of the new wagon and things were settled at home. The kids were growing well with no problems, Vera had her part time work and was, as far as I could tell, very settled and happy, her mother was an occasional source of worry for us but never on the grounds of health, always because of money. We had to take control and bail her out on several occasions and could never understand how she got herself into the predicaments she created. This was a strain at times but Vera and I were always in tune on the subject. Our attitude was that it was a bloody nuisance but par for the course and we always managed. My mother and father were well, and had built their own life down on Avon Drive, mother was still cleaning for Ursula and on the whole, life was good for all of us.

I’d really settled into the cattle job and was a good man at my job. I knew the men, the farms and the cattle and Richard had an easy time as regards transport. He could give me a list of tasks, send me off and he knew he could set his watch by the time of my arrival back. I remember once in Ayr I was talking to one of the local hauliers when one of his men came up and asked where a farm was down the coast. Tom told the driver he didn’t know but asked me and I gave his driver directions. We joked that it was coming to a pretty pass when the locals had to ask an English driver for directions on their own turf! What was more important as far as my state of mind is concerned was the fact that I knew that Richard respected my ability and that he was proud to have a good worker. I remember once in Gisburn he was stood with Wilf Bargh, one of our customers who congratulated Richard on the condition of the cattle. Richard told Wilf it was all down to me, he had only just arrived. He said “You’d never think he was a wagon driver.” And I looked across at them and said “That’s right, and when you know as much about four wheels as you’ve taught me about four legs you’ll be a hell of a man!” and we all had a good laugh. He wasn’t slow to sing my praises to the Scotsmen and the result was that I had their respect as well. There was nothing they admired more than ability and this, coupled with the fact that I was seen as an essential part of their lives and the economy of their farms meant that they treated me very well. I was always welcome and there was that air of romance that clings to travellers, they envied me the fact that in a few hours I would be two hundred miles away and would have seen all the country in between. I always shy away from the concept of the ‘romance of the road’ but on a good day it existed. Couple this with the biggest wagon they had ever seen on the farm and you have the ingredients for some serious job satisfaction!

I got so much enjoyment from the people I met as well. There was always something new to see. I was at a farm near Troon one day to pick up a load of cattle and the man’s wife was making me a cup of tea and a sandwich while we waited for her husband to turn up. The farm stood on the edge of a sort of cliff which dropped down to a flat piece of land where the main road was and the sea shore was on the other side. It seemed fairly clear that at some time the land had risen and the sea had moved away from the bottom of the cliff. The farmhouse was near the edge of the cliff and the net result was that the view from the kitchen window was of a short stretch of grass and then open sea as far as Arran. Only one thing spoiled the view and that was an electricity supply pole bang in front of the window. I asked her what had possessed the supply company to put it there and she said she didn’t know, it had been installed one day while they were on holiday. They were in the middle of a battle to get it re-located. As I stood there looking out of the window I noticed a ship out in the Clyde moving at an incredible speed for its size. I pointed it out to the lady and she said it was the new Cunard liner doing its sea trials, it had been going up and down the Clyde for a couple of days. It must have been doing speed trials that day and as we watched the helm was put hard over at full speed and it made acres of white foam as it turned. I watched it for about half an hour and it was one of the most impressive things I have ever seen in my life. Of course, I realised later it was the QEII Cunard’s last great Atlantic liner on its trials before being accepted by the owners.

I had my share of passengers, Richard’s son John loved to have a day out with me in Scotland. Harry Horsefield’s son Maurice once went with me to Jim Baird’s at Lurdenlaw. He was so knocked out that he asked if he could go and work their for a fortnight and Richard arranged it. I took him up and his father told me afterwards that it was the worst thing that ever happened to them. All they got when Maurice got back was comparisons with how they did things at Lurdenlaw! Harry was secretly delighted but played hell about us corrupting him. There was a lad in Gargrave and I keep trying to remember his name, I think it was Miles, he used to help Keith at Church Farm and often used to ask if he could come with me. I used to check with his mother if it was all right and he did a lot of trips up to Scotland with me. Looking back, I’m fairly sure I was being used sub-consciously as a surrogate father, his parents were divorced. He was a very mature lad and I had long conversations with him about the how he had been affected by the break-up. He was very informative and this was to be useful later on. The overall picture was of a settled life in all areas, everything was in balance, or so I thought. With hindsight, this is the time to look out for squalls, there’s no such thing as absolute stability, we are ruled by change!

Another of the things that lulled me into a false sense of security was my mastery of driving. I know that it’s a cliché that every driver thinks he is excellent but in my case there might have been something to it. All the evidence of experience, absence of accidents and the opinions of others suggested that I might be above average at least. I had my own theories about safe driving and as they have served me well for almost fifty years perhaps you’ll forgive me if I air some of them. When I first started driving I got hold of a copy of ‘Road Craft’, the manual for police drivers at Hendon. I’ve never forgotten some of the things I learned from it. One quotation sticks out in my mind from the introduction, ‘Driving isn’t an art, it’s a state of mind.’ I’m sure that this is true, you know you are getting the hang of it when you no longer have to think about distance to the vehicle in front, speed, which gear you should be in or how far in front you should be anticipating. You may have noticed from time to time I speak of the ‘pattern’ of traffic. In an ideal situation where everyone is driving consistently a pattern builds up in the traffic. Certain vehicles are travelling faster than others and, if you are aware of the pattern, you can anticipate when someone needs to overtake and make things easy for them.

The corollary of this is that if they are on the ball as well, the same thing happens when you need to pass someone. A classic example of this with wagons is when you get two vehicles in the same pattern, one heavy loaded but with a high top speed when on the flat or going down hill and a lightly loaded wagon that is governed to a lower speed. As soon as you hit a hill the light loaded wagon can pass because the heavy loaded wagon is slowed by the gradient. As soon as you are on the flat again the reverse happens and the heavier wagon needs to overtake. Assuming that we’re dealing with two competent drivers this presents no problem, they will simply anticipate what’s happening and make as much space for each other as they can within the limitations of the road and other traffic. Anyone who wasn’t experienced enough would think that the two wagons were playing silly buggers and this is where tempers get frayed, judgement suffers and the chances of trouble rise sharply. Far too often nowadays you see situations like this building up, usually because a car driver has been baulked and has lost his temper. The bottom line is that the better you understand the flow of traffic and what’s governing it, the sharper your anticipation is and the more time you have to manoeuvre. This all makes for greater safety.

One other small thing which might surprise modern drivers is the amount of driving we used to do at night on the old roads without headlights. It wouldn’t work nowadays but on the old roads, especially in the small hours of early morning, there wasn’t a lot of traffic and speeds were much lower than they are today. It can be surprisingly refreshing, on a moonlit night, to drive on sidelights only. Remember that there were very few streetlights and what there were usually went off at midnight in the smaller towns so your eyes could get used to the dark. I’ve driven many a mile like this and as it was my preference, there must have been something restful or attractive about it or I wouldn’t have bothered. I wasn’t the only one, many other drivers did the same thing.

Time we got back to the changes in my life. The first big one was at Drinkalls, Richard and Ursula moved from Yew Tree Farm at West Marton to Backridge at Waddington which they bought from Wilf Bargh when he retired. I was too busy to have a lot to do with this, Richard wanted me on the road. However, one Saturday they were making the final move to Waddington and Richard asked me and David Lister to wash HYG out and bring the final load from Yew Tree. David wasn’t an employee of Drinkalls, he was a sort of associate dealer. He lived at the family farm in Burley in Wharfedale with his mother and sister who was a nurse and did a bit of dealing on the Yorkshire side. He worked with Keith and David and whatever the arrangement they had it seemed to suit him and he was often about. He was a happy -go- lucky lad and always struck me as being a bit a bit work-shy but I got on well enough with him.

On this particular day we went to Yew Tree and loaded all the bits that were left, beds and wardrobes mainly and the kitchen furniture. Flitting is a rotten job and always takes longer than you think. The last item we loaded was an enormous oak wardrobe. Normally these come to pieces but this was definitely an antique and had to be moved as it was, we had a hell of a job getting it out of the house and weren’t looking forward to taking it off! When we got to Backridge we left the wardrobe until last but in the end couldn’t put it off any longer. We asked Ursula where it was to go and she said in the attic! We had tied the door together to stop them swinging open and started off up the stairs. It was a pig! Every turn in the stairs was a puzzle, we backed into doorways and juggled the thing about but made slow progress. What was annoying both of us was the fact that there was something loose inside it and it kept thumping from one side to the other! After almost two hours we finally got it to where it had to go, we set it upright in the corner and David set off towards the door. I told him to hold on, I was going to satisfy my curiosity as to what had been rolling about and annoying us all the way up the stairs!

Five minutes later we were downstairs and sitting with Richard in front of the fire. I told him we deserved a whisky and his face fell. “You’re right, but there isn’t a drop in the house!” I told him that there mightn’t have been any until we came but there was now and pulled a bottle of Thin Red Line out from behind my back. We had found out what had been annoying us all the way up the stairs! We settled back with the bottle and three glasses and sat there having a quiet drink while the sound of music drifted through the house. “It didn’t take the lasses long to get the record player working.” I said. Richard said “That isn’t a record player, it’s Ursula!” We went into the other room, and I have to say that my memory of this bit is different from Richard’s but I’m sure I’m right, where Katherine was playing the piano and Ursula was singing, she had a wonderful voice and we just sat there listening. To cut a long story short, we finished up with Ursula playing the piano while we sang our way through all the favourites we could find in the Methodist Hymn book. By midnight we had finished the hymns, drunk the bottle of whisky and Richard said that as far as he was concerned it was the best house-warming party anyone had ever had! I remember driving home and having to be very careful, the road seemed a lot more tortuous going than coming!

If my memory is correct, the eradication of brucellosis was complete and Demense became our dealing farm because it was so handy to Gisburn. I saw less of Richard and seldom went to Backridge, he still ran the cattle side of the job but most of my contact was with David. This didn’t seem too important at the time but I have to say there were times when I missed Richard’s skills in man management. He was a hard employer but had the knack of creating a good atmosphere with his men.

Another man whom was affected by the move was John Henry. He had been suffering from poor health, he was having trouble with his breathing and was diagnosed as having Farmer’s Lung. Funny thing about this was that it later became a recognised industrial disease and when he went before the medical board for compensation they told him he had asthma! Par for the course. Actually one of his biggest problems was that he was loosing a lot of blood and when this was cured he improved dramatically but by this time he had decided that he was going to give up farming and go into the building trade. He and Ivy moved to Carleton and John is still there though sadly, a widower. I was talking to my eldest daughter who lives at Clitheroe one day and she told me she had seen Stephen, John Henry and Ivy’s son. She told me he still had the scar on his forehead where I cut him open with a muck shovel one day in the Low Barn at Marton. I was giving John a hand to muck out one Wednesday morning and as I turned round to throw a shovel full of muck into the barrow I caught young Stephen on the forehead and gave him a very bad gash. I was terribly upset by this but John was very good about it, he said accidents happen. I can still see the blood pouring out of the lad’s head.

Back at Avon Drive my father was in failing health. I remember going in one day and he had just had a visit from Arthur Morrison who was still our doctor even though we had moved to Barlick. He was puzzled by the fact that the medicine Arthur had given him for his breathing was in the form of suppositories. He couldn’t understand how shoving these things up his bum was helping him to breathe! I asked Arthur about it and it turned out that the drug he was giving him was destroyed by the stomach if taken by mouth so an alternative way in had to used! I told father and he thought it was all very strange. He got worse and started to retain water. He had one spell in hospital and came out seeming to be a lot better but very soon relapsed and it was fairly obvious that this could be terminal. I was sat with him one night and he said he wanted to die, I told him he hadn’t been able to choose when he came into the world and he wouldn’t choose when he went so the best thing was to settle back and wait and see. We had a long conversation and one of the things he told me was that he had made a will and wanted to be cremated and his ashes taken back to Australia and scattered in the McQuarrie River just below Eumalga where he was born. I promised him I’d do it as soon as I could. It was getting late so I asked him if he was going to die straight away or could he hang on for a while. He said he was OK. I had a word with the Sister and she said she thought he’d last the night so I went home and had something to eat and a bath.

In the early hours of the morning there was a knock on the door, it was a bobby and as soon as I saw his face I knew what he had come about. I wasn’t too badly affected but finished up giving the young lad a cup of tea and a small whisky, it was the first time he had ever told anyone about a death and he was more affected than I was. The date was 22 August 1973. We cremated him at Skipton and Harold Duxbury who was the local undertaker as well as the builder promised he’d take care of the ashes and have a casket made for them.

A ghost reared its head at this point. Mother told me that she was in trouble because her only income had been father’s pension and it had died with him. She couldn’t have a pension of her own because Bowker, her legal husband was alive and well and still working. I went to the Social Services and put the case to them. I could see all sorts of major problems of course but in the event, the SS people were brilliant. They immediately put mother on an emergency payment back-dated to father’s date of death and did their own investigations. They told me that this circumstance was quite common and it wouldn’t take long to sort it out. I don’t know what form their investigations took but assume that they must have interviewed Bowker at some point. Whatever, the upshot was that they put her on Supplementary Benefit which, if anything, had slightly more generous rules than the Old Age Pension. Mother finished up with an entirely adequate income and she was, in her terms, comfortable for the rest of her life.

At this point I have to admit that I’m having a bit of trouble with the chronology. I’m usually pretty good at sorting the dates out but the haze of battle has settled over this period, perhaps because there was so much change going on at the time. I’ve tried to sort it out and think I’m somewhere near but if I’m wrong, bear with me, it was all a long time ago.

Mention of the time I split young Stephen’s head open and imminent events concentrates my mind on accidents. The last thing I want to do is give the impression that the roads were battlefields and that all drivers were heroes but I saw my share of accidents, some of them fatal but some of them either incredible or actually hilarious. While I was on the tramp working for Billy Harrison I was involved in an accident travelling up towards Derby. It was one of those funny days when the rain was moving up the country at the same speed I was so I was on a greasy road in a sprinkle of rain all the way. I had considered stopping and letting it get properly wet particularly as the wagon in front of me had no brake lights and was making life a bit difficult but decided to carry on. At one point I had to stop pretty sharpish and felt rather than heard, a collision behind. I looked in the mirror and saw a crash helmet rolling out into the centre of the road! I got out and went round the back of the wagon and met the driver of the bus behind, he was helping a young man up who was as mad as a wet hen, he was blaming me for his accident, I had stopped too suddenly and he had come off his scooter. The bus was empty so we all drew in to the side of the road and I exchanged particulars with the young man who had ‘L’ plates on. He left us and the bus driver and I exchanged addresses, he was a good witness, he had seen everything and said it was the young bloke’s fault, he had overtaken him and was going far too fast and couldn’t stop in time. As we were stood there the bloke on the scooter set off again and waved his fist at me as he accelerated, he never saw the car in front stop and ran straight into the back of it.

We looked at each other and went to scrape him off the road again. We both gave our names to the car driver as witnesses and then we sorted the lad out. By a miracle, neither he or his machine were badly damaged. I asked him how long he had had the scooter and he wouldn’t tell me. I said that if he took my advice he’d get rid of it, he was obviously not fit to ride it. The bus driver and I set off leaving him to get sorted out. A couple of miles up the road we came to a road junction with a bobby on point duty. I was turning left and the bus was going right so we finished up alongside each other. The bus’s passenger door was open and me and the driver were exchanging pleasantries when I saw in the mirror the scooter coming up the gap between the two lines of traffic and going far too fast! “Oh Christ, here he comes again!” He shot between us, saw the bobby, slammed his brakes on, came off and slid right up to the bobby’s feet! The bobby looked down at him and waved both streams of traffic forward, then he reached for his notebook! The bus driver and I decided it was private grief and went on our way. I often wonder if the young lad survived! I never heard anything more about it.

I was coming back from Uttoxeter one day with jersey milk for Leeds when the traffic flow along the old A50 came to a halt. We soon saw the problem, one of Pickford’s heavy wagons was creeping down the road with a heavy load. There was room between me and the car in front and I pulled into the side to give the oversized outfit as much room as possible. Everybody else did the same except for the car in front of me. The driver was a commercial traveller and he had taken advantage of the halt to catch up on the paperwork. He was so engrossed in this task that he was oblivious to what was happening round him. I assumed he would shift before the load reached him and so, evidently, did the lead driver of the road train. The tractors, there were two pulling and one pushing, were narrower than the trailer and as they passed the car at about three miles an hour the lead driver sounded his air horn and waved the bloke out of the way. Before he could get himself sorted out and move, his front wing was under the front corner of the trailer and it started to roll his car up and crush it just like rolling a cigarette! I don’t know to this day how the bloke managed it but he got out of the passenger door just in time, the car was rolled over and by the time the trailer stopped it was under the trailer as far as the windscreen and a total wreck. We moved on then but it just goes to show, it isn’t always speed that kills!

Another time I saw a wagon catch the sheet on a large heavy load near Stafford. It was overtaking at the time and caught the load what looked like a glancing blow. The police escort stopped the bloke and the road was blocked. I was right next to the load. A little man in a blue suit and wearing a bowler hat got out of his car behind the load and came up to the driver who, by this time was stood with the bobby right next to my cab. “Who is your insurance company Driver?” he asked. The driver told him, the little fellow consulted a notebook and then he looked at the driver, “I think you’ve just bankrupted them!” It turned out that the load was a rotor assembly for a big turbine in a power station and the glancing blow had damaged some of the blades. This meant the rotor had to go back to GEC at Stafford for re-balancing and in turn, this meant that penalty payments would come due under the contract. He was talking millions of pounds!

Some of the accidents had more serious consequences. I was coming up Sawley Brow in the old days before the new road was built. There was a line of traffic and I saw this bloke on a Velocette motor bike weaving in and out of the traffic coming the opposite way. One of Wild’s wagons from Barlick was in front of me driven by Harry Smith., he was carrying bales of coir fibre for Silentnight. The motor cyclist lost control and went straight under the back wheel of the wagon, Harry didn’t stand a chance. We pulled up and did our best for the bloke, an Air Force lad on his way home for a weekend’s leave as it turned out. I cushioned his head on my jacket but it was obvious he was very bad. I’ve never seen anyone as grey faced. I kept telling him the ambulance was on its way, he was still conscious and when I looked up Harry had left me and was sheeting his load in case it rained before he got to Barlick. The young lad died as I crouched there in the road with him. Harry knew what his priorities were! He has his own transport firm now, Hown Transport.

I saw several more fatal accidents, if you did enough miles you came across them and they all reinforced my growing conviction that the road was a dangerous place and you had to have your wits about you. I’m not going to talk about deaths any more at the moment but will end the accident section with a couple of funny ones.

I was tramming quietly along the new road by-passing Whalley one summer afternoon with the wagon and trailer when I saw a van weaving in and out of the oncoming stream of traffic. He was really pushing his luck and I watched his progress with interest. As he got nearer it became obvious that unless I did something imaginative he was going to hit me so I swung onto the grass verge and drove down it taking out the plastic waymarkers one by one. There was a hell of a crash behind me and I realised he had missed me but hit the car behind a glancing blow. Luckily nobody was injured but the driver of the car behind flew at me when I walked back to see what was going on. “You silly bugger!” he screamed, beside himself with rage, “Why didn’t you let him hit you, you’re bigger!” I’m afraid I couldn’t stop laughing and even the police had to smile when they turned up. I was witness again but never heard any more of it.

Last funny one, Norman Benson and his driver were going home from Lanark to Huddersfield on the M62 with a load of cattle. His driver thought the steering felt funny so when he pulled off at the slip road he stopped and had a look round the wagon. He got the shock of his life when he went round the back, somewhere along the line they had collected an ‘E’ Type Jaguar which was jammed under the spare wheel carrier at the back. They rang the police who it turned out, had been looking all over for them because a number of people had witnessed the accident. Evidently the car was stolen and at some point the driver had lost concentration and hit Norman’s wagon from behind. His driver remembered a slight jolt but had put this down to the cattle moving about. At the time they were going fairly slowly up a bank and in traffic and the driver of the stolen car had bailed out and had been picked up by another car following him. They never found the thieves and wouldn’t let Norman keep the Jaguar!

We have one more accident to cover. David and I were going up to Lanark one day fairly early in 1974. As we climbed Beattock we saw a cloud of dust rising from the south bound carriageway and a large red car rolling down the road. As it rolled two bodies and a dog were thrown out. You could tell by the way the bodies hit the road that they were dead, the dog was unharmed and ran away up our side of the carriageway. As I write this I can see the whole thing as clearly as if it was happening now. It was a bad accident and fairly obvious that there were more injured people in the car. David turned to me and said “It does you good to see something like that every now and again.” I told him that I couldn’t answer for him but it had done me no good at all. Later I enquired and all five people were killed. I think it was the rate collector from Falkirk and a dentist friend of his. They were going, with some of their family to Southport to book their holidays.

This had a very bad effect on me. I had always said that the road was a young man’s job and I would be out before I was forty. All this came flooding back and I had a dream again that had haunted me for quite a few nights after I had written Richard’s car off. It always ended with me in a car rolling over in the road. I was very unsettled.

A couple of weeks later I was in the Dog having a Guinness with Billy Ent, Dan Smith and Jack Platt. Jack asked me what I was going to do next seeing as how I had reached the peak of the profession, I had the biggest wagon, the longest hours and the most miles. They were pulling my leg of course but I gave them a serious reply. I told them I wanted out and the only job I really fancied was driving the steam engine at Bancroft Shed. Billy Ent said that there was a good chance I could have it, they were looking for a firebeater and the engine tenter retired in July! I went straight home, had a word with Vera and she said she’d go down and arrange for me to go in and see the management on Wednesday before I went in to work. I went in and saw them and made it quite clear that what I wanted was the job of running the engine. This was agreed and I arranged to start a week the following Monday. I went down to Marton but didn’t see Richard until the Thursday at Gisburn. I gave him a weeks notice and I don’t think he was all that surprised. I was told later that someone had asked him what he would do without me and he said they would set on two drivers and a mechanic. I don’t know whether this was true or not but it wasn’t far from what was needed.

Years later, Susan, my middle daughter rang me one evening from I think it was the Spreadeagle at Sawley where she was working as a waitress. She said that Richard was speaking at a Farmer’s Dinner and his subject was the importance of having good men. She said I would have been proud to hear what he had to say about John Henry Pickles and me. That was nice.

On the following Saturday, after working a weeks notice, I left the wagon at Demense and I think Mary drove me home. Fresh vistas were opening up, I was no longer a wagon driver, I had moved on to being a firebeater!

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