You’ve got to hand it to John and Edgar Wild, they were far sighted business men. They saw the collapse of the work from the textile industry coming in the 1950s and started looking for more lucrative work. One key thing to recognise is that at this time the vast majority of wagons on the road were four wheelers and all the haulier’s garages were geared to this size of vehicle. This might not sound very important but nearly all the premises that you delivered to had been built for horse-drawn transport and on general haulage anything bigger than a two axle wagon was a liability.
Wild Brothers stuck to four wheelers and gradually built up a respectable fleet using the better makers. My picture this week is one of the better end, a Maudslay Mogul that Jack Platt drove for while on the tramp. My thanks to Brian Carlos for this snap. Eventually they standardised on AEC Mercury’s because at the time, they were the highest powered four wheeler you could buy. They all had the AV470 engine that delivered about 120 horse power and very high torque. We always used to say that the rougher they sounded the better they were running.
It was a fairly steep learning curve when Jack went on the tramp at first. However they soon got a regular clearing house in London, a firm called Verlins and they used to load them for Glasgow. In Glasgow they had a regular man on the Broomilaw who loaded them out of Colville’s at Gartcosh with sheet steel for Fords at Dagenham. The first time Jack went in there he was with Gordon Westwell and when he came out he said to Gordon that his wagon seemed a bit low on the springs. When he got his note he found he had fifteen tons on when all he was allowed by law was eight. He had to back in and get seven tons taken off.
Jack and I agreed that Buckhaw Brow at Settle was one of the steepest hills on a main road in England. If you could get up that you knew you were alright wherever you had to go. Wilds never had a lot of trouble because John wouldn’t allow them to load more than eight tons in normal circumstances and as they had good wagons they were well within their weight.
The big problem with tramp work was that you were taking what was left over and the rates were very low. John was acutely aware of this and on one of his trips to Liverpool looking for work he found himself talking to a man who could give him container work. These were the large metal containers we are so familiar with today, they were loaded at the factory sending the goods and not opened again until they reached their destination. The firm was called Anglo Containers and soon Wild Brothers wagons carried nothing else.
The container work was from the Preston area to London and much of the freight was perishable goods like meat and fish. There were no refrigerated containers in those days. The goods were loaded and then containers of ‘dry ice’, frozen carbon dioxide, were put in. These kept the container cold enough to do the trip to London.
The container job was hard work but it was a regular earner and kept Wild Brothers going comfortably through the 1960s and 70s but things were changing. The search for economy led to bigger wagons and the 32 ton articulated lorry became the hauliers standard. If Wild Brothers made a mistake it was by not converting to larger vehicles but they never did. The old 18 ft long containers were superseded by 40 feet boxes and Wilds gradually lost their haulage work. By the late 1970s they had declined general haulage and were concentrating on coach and private hire work. ‘Travel with Wilds for Miles of Smiles’ became a well known phrase in the district but in the end ill health in the management and an unwillingness to invest led to closure.
Wilds lasted long enough to see Jack into retirement. By 1973 I had seen the light as well and was engineer at Bancroft Shed. Jack used to call in many a time for a cup of tea and a crack in the engine house. We travelled a lot of miles in those two chairs telling each other tall stories about the things we had carried and what we had seen on the road.
One thing we always agreed on, the coming of the motorways, more regulation and tighter management might have given the lads bigger, more powerful and certainly more comfortable wagons but they had taken the magic out of the job. There was a lot more interest fighting your way over Shap Fell in winter than tramming up the M6 through Tebay. I suppose we were both getting older but the characters had vanished, the old transport cafes had given way to truckstops and the traffic bobbies all looked far too young!
If you’ve got the impression from these pieces that I liked Jack, you’re right. He was a hard man and he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea but we understood each other and had done the same jobs. I suppose the biggest characteristic we shared was that we had both had a spell of being cab happy and we weren’t ashamed of it. We saw the end of the old style haulage industry in Britain which ran on overloading and bent log books. This was law breaking I know but the end result was a lot of goods carried very cheaply and did much to fuel the country’s economy when the railways went into terminal decline. It was hard, but it gave us a living and a lot of kids were reared out of the plunder. Rest easy Jack, they were happy days.
SCG/29 April 2003
Jack’s Maudslay Mogul wagon. (B. Carlos)