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(There was, of course, rationing all the time)
There was obviously rationing and the two lorries that were not employed on the buffer were used to deliver the rations to the various places in Caerphilly. I well remember one particular incident when I was on what we used to call the general deliveries; I was given a load to deliver to a firm known as India and China Tea Company; That company, Burtons was the actual name but they went as the India and China Tea Company, and they had a depot in Cardiff in the warehouse, as I have already said. Truckloads for this particular firm used to be sent to Cardiff for storage and then delivered by Great Western road transport to the various shops in the South Wales area, from Bridgend to Newport and up the valleys; One 5 ton lorry was completely used in every respect to deliver those. When the war came, and of course petrol rationing, that delivery had to be cut out and the goods were sent by rail. I well remember going into work one particular morning, on a Thursday morning which was the usual day when the India and China Tea Company received their weekly ration. They had a shop in Caerphilly and a shop in Llanbradach which was only a small shop. The Caerphilly shop was quite a large shop and had -quite a good four or five tons every week of general commodities; I can remember going to this shop on this particular Thursday; I pulled up outside the shop in Cardiff Road, the main road, and went in to see the manager; "Right oh" he said, so I started with my vanguard to unload my trailer because I was driving an artic at the time, and I carried the bags of sugar in. They were 2 cwt at a time and you had two little steps to go up to the shop and a hand truck was no good - it was far easier to carry them in one's back and take them round the back of the counter and lower them gently on to another sack of sugar of which invariably they had a little stock in, and lift them from there dow to the ground. I remember I went in and carried in quite a lot of the stuff as the boy brought the stuff from the middle and the front of the trailer towards the rear for me for me to carry it in; I was clearing the counter of a few odds and end that I had put on there, and the manager said to me "What are you doing?" I said "I'm clearing the counter; I've got a sack of peas to come in, dried peas in a hessian sack, and it would contain 2 cwts of dried peas."
So he said to me "Don't worry about that, bring it in and I'll take it off you;"
I said to him "Now are you sure you ….?"
"Yes", he said, "Of course I'm sure; I'll be able to take it off you." So fair enough, the boy used the little sack truck on the lorry, brought the sack of peas to the tail end, I put my back under it and carried it into the shop. When I walked in I turned round and the manager came up behind me. I said "Now when you're ready to take the bag from me, say Let go'".- I waited as he walked behind me, put his arms round the sack, he said 'Let go', I let go of the bag and the next minute the bag went straight through his hands, hit the ground and split from top to bottom. I was up to my knees in dried peas;
(And, of course, the shop would have had sawdust on the floor. …)
Yes. The manager was very good; He apologised and he said we had to sweep it all up and put it through the sieve so that the sawdust would go through the sieve and leave the peas on top; But, fair play, he did give me a clear signature because he said "I should have listened to you; I won't do that again." I said "You can't say I didn't warn you;"
(Were many of the places very difficult to deliver to?)
Yes, Woolworths shop in Central Street was an awkward place because you had to back up a hill. The pathway was reasonably wide, about 12 feet wide, and you had to back up this; It is always difficult to reverse a fully loaded vehicle up hill but we did manage. I understand - although I didn't actually see it but I was told by the driver of the lorry (Tommy Dunscombe) - that when he was driving the rigid lorry he and his mate had reversed his 8 ton Thorneycroft up this little hill to Woolworths reception where they took all the inwards goods and they handed him a barrel of mothballs; They put the skids' down because it was a couple of hundredweights and it was awkward to try to lift on, slid it down the skids, but unfortunately as the barrel hit the floor the bottom came out so all the way down the hill were mothballs running into the street; I wasn't there to see it but I'm told that's what happened.

(It must have been pretty hard work with all these heavy weights you had to lift)
Of course it was, of course it was. I remember an incident that happened although I didn't see it but I did see the result of it; There was a shoe shop, Leonards, on the corner of Cardiff Road and Central Street and they had a glass verandah with panels with the word 'Leonards' in the glass panels. One of the drivers was going up Cardiff Road to turn right into Central Street and the outside door flew open and it just caught the edge of the verandah and all the letters 'Leonards' fell out on the floor.
We had some very awkward jobs to do and we used to do them to the best of our ability; I remember there was a fish and chip shop in Central Street, right opposite Woolworths, and they used to have 5 tons of potatoes in a hundred bags at a time, and I had to carry them right through the shop, right the way into the back, thirty or forty yards, and believe you me, by the time you had shared it between you, in a hundred bags one at a time, you were tired .
As I was saying, the Ministry of Food Department, the buffer department, provided us with a tremendous amount of work all through the war period; I well remember I was on the buffer one particular week and we were delivering 100 lb bags of flour from the States; They were more sensible than we were. We never had anything less than 140 lbs, our sacks of flour, and the Americans never believed in anything more than 100 lbs, and that's where you get your 2,000 lbs American ton.
I went to the buffer for my first load on this Monday morning and when I went there the chap in charge said "Pull up there Reg", I pulled up and right close and untied the stack that had been delivered the previous week. I had a very long trailer and there were three or four feet spare on the tail end of the trailer because I was only permitted to take six tons.
He dropped a bag of flour on the floor and said "I want you and your mate to pick it up so that my chaps can walk underneath;"
I said "What?"
He said "Drop it on the floor, you will lift it up over your head, you and your mate, and my chaps will come underneath and carry it on to the stack."
I said "You've got another think coming". So I immediately got down and pulled the lorry away from the stack and said
"You get your runs down. If you think I am going to do that you've got another think coming;"
Anyway, the staff he employed had no alternative but to put down their runs, as they called the planks of wood, to enable them to walk up on to the sacks from ground level or even from lorry level they could walk up. I was going back in after delivering my load and the agent was waiting for me; He could see me from his office, coming down the road, and when I turned into the yard he was waiting for me and he called me in;
He said "Reg, Mr Blake complained you are not co-operating with him in discharging these loads of flour".
"Oh" I said, "In which way did he say we are not co-operating?
"Well he didn't actually say, he only said you were being awkward;"
"Oh" I said, "He didn't tell you what he wanted us to do?
"No" he said;
"Well" I said, "I'll tell you", and I explained that what he wanted us to do was that he wanted my boy at one end of the bag and me at the other, and lift the 100 lb bag head high so that his chaps could walk underneath from the floor of the lorry and go straight on to the stack; "Now" I said, "I am prepared to do that if you are prepared to give me a written instruction signed by you that we must do it";
And he said "No, I can't do that, Reg";
"Well" I said, "If you can't do that, I can't do the other job.
You realise that that either or both of us could rupture ourselves by doing that;"
"Oh yes" he said.
"Therefore" I said, "If we were doing this and one of us did rupture ourself we must be held partially responsible for the injury and we wouldn't be able to claim 100% compensation.
That was the last I heard of that; As far as I know, the other chaps carried on the same as I did. It was the young driver, the youngest of the lot, who started it off, but I have a shrewd suspicion - I can't prove it - that there was a backhander given to him and his mate to do it, and I think that's why they did it, but I wasn't prepared to do it.
(There was a risk there, as you say)
I wasn't prepared to do it.

The Americans started to arrive somewhere about 1942 or 1943, I'm not quite sure. But in the meantime the Caerphilly local works had a contract to assemble motor transport for the American army that was coming over. The parts would arrive in wagons, be shunted into the loco department where they would be passed to be assembled, and then without any warning you'd suddenly find about ten of them driving up to have a whole petrol tank filled up with petrol. They all took about 15 gallons each and we had to pump every gallon separately and you had about fifteen lorries to fill up, about 150 gallons. You can just imagine how long it took and how tiring it was, but still, it was one of those things, we had to do it and we just did it.
(You didn't have electric pumps on these?)
No, it was all done by hand.
(It was all petrol? No diesel lorries?)
It was all petrol. I don't know the make of them. GMCs? I'm not sure of the name. There was a very small body, six wheels and very short bodies. Then one particular day we had a lot of Bailey bridges in sections arrive to be discharged on to the ground in the yard We had a big yard 'and plenty of …
(What did they come on, low loaders?)
No, they came on ordinary wagons, ordinary open trucks, what we called mineral trucks with only a small door in them, and the two top planks were what we called through planks; That meant the planks went the full length of the wagon; A group, quite a crowd of Americans, came to discharge them. My God, I'll give them credit, they worked like slaves because, as I said, every- thing had to be manhandled out. They had no crane, there wasn't sufficient room between the sidings for the crane to work, and everything had to be manhandled either over the top of the side of the wagon or through the door whichever the case may be. They were a happy lot and they often used to have a stroll around. The sentry was a particularly pleasant chap. He'd have his rifle slung under his shoulder, and he'd be walking round the yard smoking. They were a happy lot and, as I say, they really worked hard to discharge those wagons;
Well then we had a consignment of bed frames, so we understood they were, metal bed frames in bundles weighing about 7 cwts a time. They were being craned out by our hand crane which stood in the yard, and loaded into their transport to take to their depot on the outskirts of Caerphilly to be assembled into camp beds for the forthcoming North African campaign. They put about two of these bales in the back of the lorry, and they had sides, and they loaded them up, and as long as they were inside. I can well remember as they passed the office halfway down the entrance from the road one of the bales shifted and took off a corner of the boss's office; That was a how d'ya do. They stopped and surveyed the damage; The boss was naturally upset because he was in the office when it happened. He was very upset; Away they went, down to their camp and after about half an hour they came back with the 0/Cs in command and one said to the boss "Don't worry Guv, we'll see to that, don't report it, leave it to us." Fair enough. Fortunately the weather was fine and the following morning up they came, a gang of their soldiers evidently a pioneer gang or a labouring gang, and they rebuilt the corner of that office and put it all back and painted it and everything, and indeed if you hadn't known what had happened you wouldn't have been any the wiser.
That was the time when we had another rather startling event. The main road that ran between the shed and the first siding, which incidentally was No.-3, where the crane was situated, was fairly wide because we used to tail our lorries on to load, and you had had to have room for traffic to pass. One afternoon - it must have been about 4 o'clock or thereabouts — the engine was in the shed clearing the shed of the loaded and empty wagons so the loaded wagons could be sent on to their destinations and the empty wagons put back into the pool, and any wagons which weren't completely discharged and had to come back into the shed. The engine was coming up through the shed and .. pretty hard, and one of these chaps came round the corner with the coloured driver, a big hefty chap, and real coal black - no question about it - and was tearing up towards the crane where he would turn left and then reverse right under the crane. We could hear the engine pulling through the shed and we were shouting and waving but he never took any notice.
He went straight in and when he came to where he had to turn he swung round to his left and as he swung round the engine emerged from the shed; Now he was only about 10 feet away, perhaps 15 at the most, and he didn't hesitate. He slammed it into reverse gear. Fortunately he didn't alter his steering lock and he came back out the same way as he went in. Consequently his front end went away from the engine. Now had he reversed his lock his front end would have come towards the engine, and by doing that he wouldn't have been able to stop before he hit him. We all dashed up to see what had happened. I was one of the first and I can remember it as if it were only yesterday; He took off his hat and he blew.
"Aw" he said, "That made me turn quite pale" Absolutely hysterical. We had a good laugh about it but I must say they were very careful after that.

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