Page 64 - It's a Rum Life Book 3 "Ivy House Tales 1970 to 1984"

pipe so that he could braze the two broken ends together.

I was even more pleased that old ‘Jack’ was not with me on the journey, as he would have
no doubt found that last leg to Inverness worrying to say the least.
The trip back home was uneventful, the repair held and a new pipe quickly fixed in place.

Unfortunately, ‘old Jack’ Rundle died a few months later, he never did get to
Scotland, but perhaps it was best he did not make his first trip to Scotland in a very
smelly, second hand lorry with only three cylinders working during its crossing of
some of the highest mountains in the land!

CHAPTER 13

THE FIRST TEA BAG

My first encounter with tea bags was while visiting a packaging plant near Manchester on
a totally unconnected errand.
The ‘errand’ was a paying job, in fact the very first paying job for “FJK140”, purchased
from haulier neighbour Herbert Epton.
As well as running large articulated lorries and some farm contracting, Herbert had a
contact at the ‘Wonderloaf’ Bakery in Grimsby and whenever they sold off their older
delivery lorries he had first refusal. “FJK 140” was the third ‘Wonderbun’ lorry in our fleet
and the largest so far.
The first two had been small 7.5 ton Ford 4 cylinder local delivery vehicles with large box
bodies. Herbert removed the bodies and replaced them with open, flat truck bodywork that
suited our clients better at that time. Michael, Ruth’s brother and our ‘resident ‘mechanic
painted their cabs in whatever colour we had in stock.

The ‘Wonderbun’, as FJK140 quickly became known had a long box body and rear end
hydraulic half ton tail lift.

.
THE CONTRACT
‘She’ was bought especially to serve our new work for SWEL Foods of Boston. I had been
touring the Marsh Lane industrial estate seeking haulage work for our small fleet and
arrived at SWEL Foods at just the right time.
They too were growing and developing their lines of dehydrated produce and ‘convenience
foods’, naturally being in South Lincolnshire their first line was potato powder of varying
types.
They had a new client who needed this packing into small units, looking back now, the
client could well have been a supermarket chain. The market leader at the time was
“Smash” produced by one of the really large international companies.

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