Heritage Commercials Magazine - capturing the spirit of vintage days

Classic Truck: Denby Transport

The company can trace its roots back to May 1926 when William ‘Bill’ Denby was 19 years old and working on his father’s dairy farm at Sturton by Stow just north of Lincoln.

May 1926, as scholars of history will be aware, marked the start of the General Strike, and one of the industries brought to a halt was the railways. Now this caused a serious problem for the Denby family farm because at a stroke there was no way of getting their milk to the Lincoln dairies. Something had to be done and the answer was provided by young Bill, who went out and bought an old one-ton Ford to transport the milk from his family farm and also from neighbouring dairy farms.

The strike dragged on for about a month, but Bill provided such a good and reliable service that when the strike was over, only around half the local dairy farmers decided to put their milk back on the railways, and so Bill found himself with a viable business. This situation was a common occurrence throughout Britain at the time.

The business prospered and like many haulage companies in this part of the world, initially specialised in serving agriculture. As the firm grew, it moved to premises in North Hykeham just to the south of Lincoln and then into Lincoln itself, with a yard at the city’s Brayford Wharf, which had been a centre of river goods traffic since Roman times.

As the Denby fleet expanded, new contracts were taken on, including haulage for the Lincoln Hovis flour mill and local engineering firms such as Clayton Dewandre (famous for commercial vehicle braking components among other things) and excavator maker Ruston Bucyrus. The fleet by this time was dominated by Bedfords and Commers.

Nationalisation

Bill remained at the helm of his firm during WW2 as he was classed as being in a reserved occupation. However, in 1945 when the Labour party came to power, it announced that road transport, along with many other industries, was to become nationalised. And so in February 1949, Denby Transport found itself as part of British Road Services.

At the time of the takeover, the company had around 20 Bedfords, Commers and Austins, including six artics. Although petrol engines were still very common at the time, Bill could see the advantages of the diesel engine and had several diesels on the fleet.

His son Dick told me: “From memory, his petrol-powered vehicles cost around £600 each whereas diesels cost over £800. However, petrol cost 18d per gallon while diesel only cost around 9d. Add to this the fact that the diesels did more miles to the gallon and you can see that it didn’t take that long to recoup the investment. The diesel engines he used were mainly Perkins and at the time were noisy, smelly and a bit difficult to start in the winter, but overall it was worth it.”

As was common at the time, when BRS took over a transport company, they often took on the former owner as manager and in Denby’s case it was no different. However, after 12 months Bill had had enough and resigned in order to concentrate on another business he’d set up called Lincoln Tyre House.

1951 saw Bill starting a partnership with two others, Jim Mayall and Don Turner, with the intention of buying about 60 lorries as they came up for sale. This new firm was to be called DMT Transport (the editor’s first employer in haulage!) However, they only succeeded in buying around 18 vehicles and so Bill decided to leave the business immediately and return to just running the tyre concern.

DMT Ltd carried on being run by Mayall and Turner and ended up renting Bill’s old lorry yard on Brayford wharf in Lincoln. Eventually they built their own premises on Outer Circle Road in the city. They also took on some warehouses and a workshop on Deacon Road just round the corner. DMT disappeared in the 1980s.

In 1955, Bill’s 20-year-old son Dick joined the family tyre business, having just completed his National Service in the Royal Navy. The tyre business did well but in 1960, just as Dick was about to get married, they decided to sell the company and it was purchased by a Goodyear-backed tyre distributor from Doncaster called FJ Wilson.

It had now been 11 years since the Denby family had last been in road haulage but this was about to change, as in April 1961 they bought the loss-making haulage company of Atkin Brothers, who were based in the Lincolnshire village of Langworth. This firm had mainly been involved in agricultural haulage but it did have some very useful assets – 11 ‘A’ licences and 13 ‘B’ licences; essential requirements in those days if you wanted to do 'hire and reward'.

The fleet they purchased numbered 24 vehicles and was quite varied, including tippers, cattle lorries and four artics which had Scammell couplings. However, things had to change if the firm was to become profitable and so the cattle lorries were sold off within the first year and a year later the tippers were gone. The company then moved as fast as the licensing restrictions would allow to become an all-articulated fleet using fifth wheels. The lorries bought were either TK Bedfords or Fords, all using four-in-line semi-trailers at the then maximum weight of 24 tons.

Regulations

In 1964, the maximum weight limits changed from 24 to 32 tons (on four axles), and Denby’s re-equipped with AEC Mandators plus a few Scammells and Leylands. They also took delivery of some Ford D1000s which were operated at 28 tons gross. Dick told me: “The 1964 regulations effectively killed off the four-in-line trailer concept. After that we bought tandem-axled trailers mainly from Fruehauf.”

The late 1960s and early 1970s brought more changes to road haulage caused by new regulations. The first of these happened in 1968 when vehicle testing and plating was introduced. Two years later there were more changes with the introduction of HGV licences. Existing drivers merely had to take a medical and then got the new licence under ‘grandfather rights’ while new drivers had to take a test as well.

In 1970, there was also another regulation change when the 13-metre overall length limit was increased to 15 metres in order to allow the 40ft ISO container to be moved legally by road. However, Denby’s decided they didn’t need to buy new trailers but instead they sent many of theirs away to be stretched. A while later, the limit went up to 15.5 metres in order to accommodate sleeper cabs, but the semi-trailer was limited to 12.2 metres.

Another regulation that changed in 1970 was the abolition of the carrier’s licences – no more ‘A’ and ‘B’ licences etc. As Barbara Castle, Secretary of State at the time, said: “Quantity control is to be replaced with quality control.”

The 1970s saw the introduction of the tautliner trailer and Denby Transport became big users, even on their cross-channel work to France. At the time, very few operators used them on international work and as Dick Denby told me, they were almost alone in using them for such work.

The next major change in regulations came in 1984 when the maximum weight limit went up to 38 tonnes on five axles. At the time there were several ways of doing this, such as ‘Chinese six’ tractor units etc, but Denby’s favoured a two-axle tractor with a tri-axled trailer.

The company today

Since the early 1990s, the Denby company has been run by Dick’s son Peter, and the firm now operates 50 tractor units and 145 semi-trailers on all manner of haulage, including doing 60-70 round trips per week to France, Belgium and Northern Spain.

Training courses are also offered in subjects such as LGV driving, forklift operation and even car and trailer driving.

They also have 250,000sq ft of warehousing, but it’s their ‘Eco-link’ trailer system that has brought them to the attention of the public recently.

Dick told me the reasoning behind this: “By the 1980s, lorry manufacturers were having to produce vehicles with far cleaner engines and this led to them having to invest heavily and triggered rationalisation of manufacturing. These cleaner trucks cost more money to buy but have developed into today’s vehicles which only emit a fraction of the emissions and particulates than was the case 25 years ago.

“The carbon dioxide emissions however continue to be related directly to the quantity of diesel consumed – indeed some of the later ‘Euro’ engines use slightly more diesel. This was partially addressed in 1996 when 38 tonnes gross gave way to 41 tonnes gross and then again in 2001 when 41 gave way to 44 tonnes. In 1990, the length limits were also increased from 15.5m to 16.5m and the 12.2m semi-trailer limit was replaced by another formula that allowed 13.6m, thus reducing diesel consumption for that increasing quantity of goods that ‘cube out’ rather than ‘weigh out'. Today, some 80 to 85 per cent of maximum-length trucks on our motorways run below the 44-tonne limit.” Enter the Eco-link vehicle.