The first coach Jack drove for Wild’s was an old AEC which they nicknamed ‘The Old Grey Mare’. Then as John got busier in the office he took over his Albion, a 28 seater like the one I pictured last week. Because of fuel shortages all the work was war related. When he wasn’t servicing the Overdale contract he was moving workers about for Rolls Royce. He remembered being in Nelson centre with a party from Rolls when Rodney was born in 1945.
Jack Platt drove coaches for Wild Brothers until the end of the war. With the loss of the contracts for moving prisoners of war about he found himself driving hire cars more and more. It was a clean job but somehow Jack couldn’t settle to it, personally I think it was cab fever striking again, the vehicles weren’t big enough and he was happier when he was doing a ‘proper job’ on general haulage.
All through the war Wild’s had five flat wagons working on general haulage. Most of this work was for the mills in Barlick and very occasionally Jack was called on to help with this. As the war finished, activity in the mills rose again and Jack moved onto the wagon job permanently. There was a lot of work to be had in the mills and Jack named some of the other firms who were carting in Barlick as well. He said there were six besides Wild’s; he named Aspin, Garnett, Whittaker Platt, Dixon’s and Clark Brothers. There was another firm which he described as ‘Mona’s Uncle’, they had two flat wagons. Wilkinson’s from Earby used to come into Barlick occasionally and some mills like Stephen Pickles at Barnsey had their own flat wagon and a tipper for carting coal in. Bancroft had their own wagon, Jim Nutter used to drive it.
All these vehicles were busy carting weft and yarn in and cloth and empties out. Most of the work was between Barlick and the other Lancashire textile towns but nearly all the cloth went to the merchants in Manchester. By this time the railway had ceased to be a serious competitor, all the traffic was going and coming by road.
John Wild was a good business man and he was one of the first hauliers to recognise that the textile traffic was declining, margins were getting smaller and that if he wanted to pursue his policy of keeping a smart modern fleet of wagons he was going to have to concentrate on the most lucrative contract he had which was with Johnson and Johnsons and put the rest of his fleet on to general haulage. It was during this period that a lot of the smaller haulage firms went out or reorganised. Clark Brothers sold out and became Stockbeck Haulage, most of the mills sold their wagons and eventually Jackson’s from Nelson had a virtual monopoly of all the transport to the mills in the town.
In his search for traffic, John went out looking for work but put his surplus wagons on the ‘tramp’ in order to keep the cash flowing. Jack and I talked the same language here as we had both been tramp drivers. In every major town and city in the land there were ‘clearing houses’ where a driver could go and get a load if he had no regular run. In practice, tramp work was low profit because you were getting what was left after the regular contractors had creamed the good work off. You could get work but you never knew where you were going or when you would get home. There was a famous haulage firm called Slater Brothers in Leeds at the time and a transport journal once printed a cartoon showing a little lass saying to her mother “Is Daddy Dead?” The mother replies “No Love, he works for Slaters.”
The name of the game was to get as many miles in loaded during the week as you could. We all broke the law regularly because we were only allowed a certain number of hours a day driving. I seem to remember that we were allowed 11 hours driving, a 14 hour spread over and no longer than five and a half hours at the wheel without a break. Suffice it to say that a drivers log book in those days was largely a matter of fiction. It was a hard life, everyone was fighting for traffic and one of these days I shall write more about some of the terrible things that went on in the name of profit.
All this took its toll on the drivers. Anyone that knew Jack Platt will describe him as a top class friend and a good bloke but, if pressed, they would have to admit he was a hard man. I’ve thought a lot about this over the years and I believe a lot of this was down to the fact that you had worked on the tramp, if you weren’t hard you didn’t stay the course. Neither Jack or I were on it long enough to get really case-hardened but I fear it left its mark. My kids have told me that I used to frighten them sometimes when they were young. I hope and think that over the years they have begun to realise why. It was dog eat dog and Jack and I were very happy to get out of it.
The end result was that the only way a firm could survive in this trade was by being absolutely ruthless and cutting every corner it could. Knowing John Wild, I suspect that he soon realised that this wasn’t the road for him and that unless he could find a more regular and profitable way of running his business he would have to get out. He had a lot of contacts in Liverpool and one day found himself talking to a man about a new-fangled way of shipping goods around the world called containers. Next week we’ll have a look at what transpired.
SCG/26 April 2003
Jackson’s wagon loading beams at Bancroft in 1978.