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Industry legend Dick Denby talks exclusively to CM about the haulage firm he founded with his father
Words: Will Shiers
Before May 1926 Britain’s dairy farmers were getting up at stupid o’clock in the morning, milking the cows, hitching the pony and trap, and loading the churns before setting off for the local station. By 6.30am the milk would be on the train and on its way to the local market. But on 3 May 1926, the eve of the general strike, all this changed. With the railways paralysed dairy farmers needed another way to get their milk to market.
“In 1926 my old daddy [Bill Denby] was a mere 19 years old, and working on his family’s dairy farm in Sturton-by-Stow,” says Dick Denby. “He didn’t really like working on the farm and thought there must be an easier way than this to make a quid or two. When the strike happened he bought a one-tonne Ford, and started hauling the milk into Lincoln. Not only his own family’s milk, but neighbouring dairy farmers’ milk too.” Bill Denby wasn’t alone, this model was being replicated all over the country. When the strike was over, and farmers were used to the convenience of having their milk collected from the doorstep (and having an extra hour in bed), it’s no surprise to learn that, nationally, only half the milk returned to rail. A lot of UK haulage irms were built on the back of the general strike.
Denby was born in 1936, by which time his father’s haulage irm had expanded to a respectable size. Like most schoolboys, he was fascinated with lorries and used to spend his holidays in the yard, tinkering with spanners. Then in 1949, when he was 13, it all went pear-shaped.
“Clement Atlee decided to nationalise anything that was viable, and that included road haulage,” says Denby. “My daddy’s takeover day was in February of that year. I was still at school, and I was pissed off because I’d got rather keen on road transport.” Having lost his haulage irm Bill set up a tyre distribution company called Lincoln Tyre House.
Denby left school at 18 and in 1955, after two years’ national service in the navy, he came home.
Although he was in no rush to join the family business, that’s exactly what he did.
“Looking back it was great training because I had to get out there and sell,” he says. “We distributed tyres for all the major manufacturers and I was out there talking to car dealerships and local trucking irms.
“Then in 1960 my dad called me into the ofice. I’d been out the night before and had an appalling hangover. He told me that he’d been approached by someone who wanted to buy the family business and asked me what I thought. I told him I was still young enough to learn something new, and told him to accept the offer.” That something new came along just six months later in the shape of local haulier Atkin Bros (Langworth), which Dick and his father bought between them. Although it was a “broken-down, loss-making livestock carrier”, it had the all-important Aand B-licences (11 As and 12 Bs) required to operate. Denby says the irm was running junk trucks (a mix of Austin, Morris, Albion, Ford and Leyland rigids) and haemorrhaging money. Some 45% of the total revenue was going in labour, which wasn’t sustainable. “As a rough rule of thumb, 50% needs to cover diesel and labour, so we had some challenges ahead,” he says.
Denby Transport is born
Bill, who by this stage had been out of the industry for 12 years, took a back seat, leaving his son to run the company, but remained a director and chairman until his death in 1980. “The irst thing I wanted to do was get out of agriculture,” says Dick, who recalls some good advice given to him by a relative at the time. “He said ‘now then Dick, if you carry for a factory there is something coming out of the gate 52 weeks a year, and farmers can’t do that for you. Besides, the prosperous farmers are buying their own lorries and leaving you with the overspill, and the poor farmers can’t pay your bill anyway’. It was good advice.” With this in mind, Denby sold four limited livestock licences to local haulier ER Wright & Sons, together with seven trucks that were “so close to scrap you wouldn’t believe it”. The deal was done in March 1962, and “I threw my hat in the air and celebrated because I was so glad to be out of that loss-making sector”.
Things started to improve when the newly-formed Denby Transport turned its back on the sugar beet market and successfully won contracts to carry pit props from Immingham to the Yorkshire mines, ishmeal out of Grimsby, and cardboard for Linpack Packaging.
However, the company was still losing money, and would do for 18 months. “It then took another two-anda-half years of modest proit to recoup the money I had lost,” he says, “so I effectively worked for nothing for four years. At the start my wife was working, but she had inished by the time Peter [their son] was born.” By this stage Denby was well aware that his leet of ageing rigids was not ideal for long-distance industrial haulage. “Unfortunately, with A and B licences you couldn’t just snap your ingers and buy artics,” he says. You had to surrender two rigid licences to obtain one artic licence, which was wasteful considering you were replacing two trucks with 10-tonne payloads for one with a 12or 14-tonne payload. Denby found a way around the system, applying to replace three rigids with two artics. “Of course the railway put in a standard objection as a matter of policy, but we got the artics.” By 1967, when Denby Transport had moved to its irst Lincoln premises, it was running a predominantly Ford and Bedford artic leet.
Denby says one of the most important things he ever did was to attend a TACK sales course. “The tricks of the trade they taught me were mainly common sense, but it proved to be so useful,” he says.
Armed with his new sales skills, he ironed a crease in his trousers, put on a trilby hat and headed up the Humber Bank to knock on doors. His irst big success was with British Titan Products. It was short of wheels, and Denby’s timing was impeccable. Within 24 hours of talking his way into the MD’s ofice, Denby Transport was carrying for it.
Another big conquest contract win was with textiles giant Courtaulds. Not only would it prove to be one of Denby Transport’s best customers for years to come, but in 1966 it also provided the irm with its irst continental work. Although the irst Denby semi-trailers crossed the Dover Straits in the mid 1960s, European work didn’t really take off until 1973. “Until then we didn’t have enough trailers to provide a reliable service,” he admits.
In the early days it was mainly unaccompanied trailers, but this changed when Denby discovered the EEC “triangular permit”. This allowed hauliers to bypass French cabotage rules, delivering to France then reloading for another member state. Over the years, the Continental work continued to expand, and today it accounts for 80% of Denby Transport’s journeys, although more of it goes through the Humber and Tees than Dover.
Like his father, Denby passed the reins to his son while he was in his 50s. Although there wasn’t an oficial handover date, French-speaking Peter joined in the late 1980s and was soon purchasing equipment. “As soon as he was ready to take responsibility I was keen to unload it,” says Denby. “I ran it from the age of 25, but by 55 I’d had my fun. I knew it needed youngsters to run it. The young brains are running it better than I ever did it. We have a good team.” Although he remains a non-executive chairman at Denby Transport, on 1 November 2011 he oficially retired from the board as an executive director.
We’re sure you’ll agree Dick Denby is well worthy of a place in CM’s list of ‘Heroes of Haulage’, and deinitely not ‘Has-beens of haulage’ as he insists on calling it! ■
INNOVATIONS
Denby appears to love nothing more than wading through pages of official government legislation looking for loopholes. It’s a trait that’s paid dividends for Denby Transport over the years. An early example of this was in 1961, when the official width limit was 7ft 6ins (2.32m). He discovered that this increased to 8ft (2.44m) if the unladen weight of the tractor unit was in excess of 4 tonnes. Just one problem – none of them were! That didn’t deter Denby. He went out and bought a new 4x2 tractor unit with two diesel tanks and two spare wheels, which weighed in at just over 4 tonnes. “In those days you paid more tax the heavier the truck, but I didn’t mind,” he says. “The difference in productivity was enormous and customers loved it.” Another example came a decade later when he discovered that while the maximum width of a box trailer was 2.5m, a reefer could be 2.6m. “But the legislation didn’t actually say ‘fridge’. It was simply if the trailer was designed for the carriage of goods at a low temperature. You didn’t need a fridge motor.” Cashing-in on the loophole he asked Fruehauf to make him some insulated box trailers, which were used to service a contract with ICI at Halewood.
Denby has always embraced innovation, and Denby Transport was one of the first companies to fit low-profile tyres on its tractors and air suspension on its trailers. It was also one of the first to use Tautliners on cross-Channel work. And if you were wondering why Denby’s trailer numbers are so large, it all dates from the first Tautliner on the fleet. Reminiscent of a scene from Spinal Tap, Denby gave the signwriters the figures in feet, but they mistakenly assumed it was in
metres. “Customer reaction was pretty good, so we stuck with it,” he says.
The company was also one of the first to buy sleeper cabs. “Why? Because I wanted to recruit and retain the cream of the drivers,” he says. “For a while we were running at 15.3m when the legal length limit was 15m, because of the sleeper cabs.” But the innovation Denby is best known for is his Eco-Link – the much publicised, environmentally-friendly 25.25m rig. He came up with the idea after seeing B-doubles in operation in Cape Town. “They were so smooth and stable, and I thought we could do it even better with some European technology,” he says.
Over the next decade Denby had a truck built and then fought tirelessly to get LHVs permitted on UK roads. His campaigning reached a peak in 2009 when he famously tested the law by attempting to drive Eco-Link on a public road. It created huge publicity for his cause, although Denby is the first to admit that the thing most people remember about the stunt was his live interview with BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine. “I think they’ll put that on my tombstone!” he says.
But while the UK government has so far refused to acknowledge the huge environmental benefits LHVs have, it’s a different story in Holland. Denby Transport has just been granted a licence to operate Eco-Link on Dutch roads, and Denby is hopeful this will soon be extended to parts of Belgium.
Sales and marketing director Simon Judge is keen to hear from anyone who would like to be involved with Eco-Link’s Dutch trials.