George Spenceley recalls his years as a long distance lorry driver, the friends he made and the incidents that happened along the way.

When my time in the army was finished I was given three weeks leave and set out to look for new employment. I decided I didn't want to go back to farming?

All the lads in the Avenue were now adults and most were still in the forces, some disillusioned with civvy street had returned for a second helping. I began to wonder whether I'd done the right thing in getting demobbed knowing that if I had stayed I'd have been promoted to Sergeant.

At this time the Imperial Chemical Industry at Wilton was in its infancy and the saying went that ICI was paved with gold so I decided that maybe I could become a process worker. I had nothing to lose.

I went along to the labour office and met the Personnel Officer. I answered the necessary questions and said that I'd like to be involved in the process department. The Officer read my army records and suggested that I report to Mr. Bill Thompson at no 2 Process Office, so thinking that this was what I'd applied for I went along.

The interview was centred round the vehicles that I'd driven whilst in the army, he then told me about the vehicles that ICI owned and asked if I'd ever driven an articulated vehicle as most of the tanker fleet were of that type.

This was a new word to me but it turned out to be a type of box van. He explained to me that Terylene fibres were one of the main commodities they transported and after a long relaxed interview suggested that I should join the transport department, not the processing department.

I agreed to this suggestion and felt pleased with myself at getting a job on my first attempt. On the following Monday morning I turned up for work. The transport department consisted of two wooden huts, the amenity building and the offices.

The foreman explained that they employed about thirty drivers on site work and twenty or so on the long distance tankers. He said that you could only get on the tankers if a vacancy occurred. I spent the first fortnight training on the various jobs about the site, getting to know it and the different plants.

My work consisted of collecting and taking the rubbish from the offices to the tip. I also worked on site maintenance. I worked on a gully sucker and emptied the roadside gullies. I undertook store deliveries and in doing this really got to know the site.

After I'd finished my training my first regular job was driving the buses from Wilton Castle offices to Dormanstown store. I would pick up and drop off mail and passengers at various points on the journey. You'd think it would be easy but having to keep to a strict timetable made it very difficult.

If you were a minute or two late, or early, whatever the reason there was always someone ready to report you. As I became more accustomed to the work on the site I was allocated a three-wheeler vehicle to carry stores, drums of cable, steel pipes or anything that needed transporting around.

At a later stage I moved up the chain and took charge of a four-wheel vehicle and was then allowed to go off the site as far as ICI Billingham. It didn't matter how much previous experience you'd had as a driver everyone had to go through this procedure.

After two years there was a vacancy on the tanker fleet. The tanker work was allocated to the top ten drivers first then any extra runs would be given to the others. I was trained by going on day runs with an experienced driver.

We made local runs and at times went as far as Huddersfield and Manchester. Eventually I had to take a driving test to see how I handled the tanker. I demonstrated my ability to change gear, up and down the box and proved that I was capable of handling the vehicle in a safe manner.

At first I was allowed to drive short distances. I carried caustic soda liquid to ICI Billingham and on another occasion made a longer run to Newcastle to deliver a load of liquid soap to the Domestos factory there.

Being a new driver I only drove if all the other drivers on the rota above me had been allocated work. Being a spare driver went on for months and a great deal of my time I spent just washing down the tankers and listening to the older more experienced drivers exchanging stories.

As a junior driver one of the runs we were allowed to go on was with the wagon and drag, known as a Leyland Flat Bodied Vehicle, it towed a trailer. The junior was known as the trailer lad and he sat in the passenger seat where directly in front of him was the long handled break lever for the trailer.

It was only used when going down hill or when the driver needed help to hold the vehicle. The driver would change down to a low gear so that the engine would assist in breaking, he'd apply the foot brake and ask the trailer lad to ratchet up the trailer brake to help to slow it down.

As a vehicle with a trailer was only allowed to travel by law at a maximum speed of 15 mph you can imagine how long it took to cover the distance between Wilton and Manchester, once there we'd stop the night and then carry on the next day to ICI Runcorn with our precious cargo of Titanium granules.

A Scammel tanker

George Spenceley, 2002