Читать книгу Writing's on the Truck, The: The Tales and Photographs of a Traditional Signwriter - John Corah - Страница 4

As a signwriter, I have always had an interest in, and based a substantial part of my working life around, art. One of my other passions is vehicles, particularly historic commercial vehicles. I consider myself lucky to have forged a career that has combined the two.

This books aims to take a look at my signwriting of commercial vehicles, combining photographs new and old with four chapters detailing a little about myself and how I came to be a signwriter.

Having finished school with a couple of GCE ‘A’ Levels, one being art, I enrolled at the Plymouth School of Art and Architecture in 1964 to study architecture, heeding the advice of the school careers master. Art and design were substantial elements of the course but maths played an even bigger part. I struggled to make buildings stand up as that demanded a mathematical aptitude that I lacked. They never fell down because I never got that far. After two years, I dropped out and joined Lloyds Bank in its High Street premises in Exeter. The job involved designing the interiors of banks, either new ones or those being refurbished, for which maths played a very small part but art and design was at the fore.

However, this career did not last long as promotion up the ladder was always going to be difficult with no qualifications and I therefore gave up any ideas of making a living using art. After a complete rethink, I embarked on a sales career, joining a Lancashire textile manufacturer as ‘their man’ in the south-west. Horrockses of Preston originally put me in the West End of London before a retirement left a vacancy for me to cover the area from Penzance to Bristol, including the Channel Isles. Good job, well paid and a new company car every year but five years later the company was taken over and I was made redundant.

Besides art, one of my other interests has been restoring vintage lorries, an interest that started as a result of a summer job driving a Ford Thames for Pollards Frozen food in Newton Abbot while at art college. This gained me grandfather rights HGV Class 3 driving licence and in 1971 I did the London to Brighton Run in a newly acquired 1932 Albion bought with a friend of mine, Brian Beard. The following year, my sales rep job finished so I took my class 1 artic licence and decided to give lorry driving a go. I began with an agricultural merchant, delivering farm machinery with a TK Bedford. I then moved on to an artic for Feniton Haulage, driving a Mark 1 Atkinson with a 180 Cummins engine on round timber and straw. In 1975, I was taken on as a holiday relief driver by Brian Harris (then trading as Harris & Miners) after a brief spell as an HGV driving instructor. My first lorry on that firm was an A.E.C. Mandator and so began a few years of long-distance driving between Devon and Scotland. Although ERF was the mainstay of his fleet, I drove a variety of other British-made lorries, including Foden, Leyland, Albion, Big J Guy and Seddon. During my years with Brian Harris I never had a foreign lorry; he wouldn’t have them in the yard! You can find out more about Brian and his company in my earlier book From Moorlands to Highlands, now in its third edition.

After a brief spell back as a sales rep, this time for a Manchester textile producer, I once again found myself unemployed as that company ceased trading in 1982 and it is in that year that my signwriting story began.