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view by the Hawk
I High haulier
'hat was London haulier Eric Taylor, under of Eric R. Taylor Transportation, )ing on a mule 9000ft up an Ethiopian ountain last month? You might well ask. he answer would make a very long story, 'let me try to keep it short.
Eric i a very active Rotarian, and recent :art trouble seems to have made little fference to his enthusiastic participation, early 20 years ago he was one of a party of 3 which visited America, including the home 'Rotary — Chicago — and the 18 got on well together that they have had an annual ip every year since then, always to a differit part of the globe — Japan, India, C amadia, Mexico — and always with a Rotarian This year the party was due to go to Chile ut Eric's doctor demurred because of the Tect of high altitudes on dicky hearts, ad so Eric pulled out. One by one, it seemed, le rest of the party decided against going, they looked for an interesting alternative. hey chose Ethiopia, which turned out to be tscinating (where else do you find a country ontaining the remnants of 70 nations with 0 different languages?) but no one was more urprised than Eric Taylor when a trip to .te ancient churches hewn out of solid rock ivolved a climb to 9000ft. So much for odging Chilean heights!
Now you know what he was doing there — with himself on one mule and his cine amen equipment on another. A far cry from ,ondon docks, about whose labour problems e was furrowing his brow when I met him a days ago.
I Filming fan
'aking films of these annual Rotarian forays one of Eric Taylor's great enthusiasms — nd not just for his own amusement. For istance, on a visit to Southern India a few ears back, the party became enthusiastically ivolvecl in a project, originated by Madras totarians, to bring clean water to a depressed illage area. Eric filmed the project and so ar has made £500 towards the worthy cause, iy showing the film over here.
I Truck tonic
t has taken longer than most of the fore!asters imagined to get the British truck mar;et moving again, but at last things seem to )e picking up. Barry Childs, London zone nanager for Ford trucks, told me this week that things are really beginning to look much brighter. The May registrations for all makes of heavy trucks (above the Transit bracket) totalled 5999 — the highest monthly figure since April 1971.
Meanwhile the medium commercial vehicle market has skyrocketed. The allmakes May total Was 12,200 — the highest ever recorded in the UK. Of these, said Barry, 4700 were Transits.
II Flying Kestrel
The exotic in transport is becoming commonplace very quickly. It used to be ships leaving home ports which conjured up "faraway places with strange sounding names"; now it's road transport's turn. For instance, the very colourful brochure just produced by Kestral Freighters Ltd, Barking, advertises "Weekly scheduled groupage services to and from Paris, Munich, Trieste, Milan, Vienna, Thessaloniki, Amsterdam, Turin, Zagreb, Athens, Brussels, Piraeus."
Kestral has mushroomed. It was only three years ago that G. B. Holland started in haulage with a single Volvo, working from his home — he drove and his wife looked after the paperwork. Now the company runs a big fleet of 12-metre trailers all over Europe and the Near East, has an enormous warehouse and container park at Barking and operates a forwarding agency and a distribution network.
• York to clean up
York Trailers are going into the washing business. They read in CM June 30 that half a million heavy goods vehicles would need to be fitted with screenwashers by October 1, and the truck equipment division decided this was too good a chance to miss. The result is that, as from Monday, the division's nine depots will be fitting washers or supplying very low-cost kits.
• Not so blind?
Consternation among intending passengers at Manchester bus stops recently when a SELNEC bus appeared with its destination blind written in Chinese characters. In fact it was working a local route from Hyde garage — but Granada TV was using it with the oriental blind to publicize a feature on the programme News Day. This was a story about a Manchester firm which prints many of the world's destination blinds, T. Norbury and Co Ltd, who have been doing this work since 1907.
Staggering thing (or perhaps not) is that although some passengers made the expected clever remarks about taking a single to Kowloon, quite a few who boarded hadn't even noticed the Chinese lettering!