Indholdsfortegnelse for Volume 11 i Vintage Roadscene Archive

So’, I’m thinking to myself, staring at a blank computer screen at six in the morning. ‘What’s the problem?’ I’ve never suffered from ‘Writer’s Block’ before. Nor have I ever been known to use just fifty words, when five hundred would tell the story just as well. So why is the screen still blank? After a second cup of tea, I managed to come-up with a reason - being close to something is as much of a problem as it is a blessing. I loved most of my fourteen years at Shelvoke & Drewry. But there were also times when I started to look for employment elsewhere, such as Boss Forklifts, ERF and even BMW. And there were several occasions when I was probably close to getting the sack, anyway.…

There is little evidence that SD played an important role in Wartime production in the remaining photographic archives. What material survives, does show a number of Freighters about to be dispatched wearing blackout masks over their headlights. And there are several different versions of Tank Transporter Trailer. But at the back of an otherwise unremarkable loose-leaf book, a list of wartime products including radar unit trailers, mobile searchlights, components for Tank Landing Craft and pages of other components was only recently discovered. There were literally hundreds of different part numbers listed. But oddly, what isn’t listed – and was never featured in the main factory photographic files - were pictures and details of the SD ‘Wellfreighter’ 4-man submersible. It was significant not for what it achieved during the latter stages…

Over 11,000 T-Type chassis were built between the initial launch in 1960/61, to when replacement ‘N-Series’ took over in 1973 (although it was nearer 1975 when the last TNs were delivered), making it by far the most successful SD product line built in the history of the company. T-Type production accounts for almost half of all the 25,000 chassis made from the start of the fledgling company in 1922, to the completion of the 25,000th (a PY Revopak for Glasgow) in January 1980. In contrast, only 3000 W-Types were produced before it and roughly the same number of ‘N-Series’ chassis afterwards. Although never advertised in the road transport press as a ‘straight’ commercial vehicle chassis, plenty of T-Types were sold for use as tippers, skip-trucks and oil delivery tankers, as…

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It doesn’t take much working out does it? The founders of Shelvoke & Drewry were… Harry Shelvoke and James Drewry. But what is less well known is the reason (or reasons) why they decided to breakaway from their then-employer, Lacre Lorries, to form their own company. It was a brave move, so why, just a few years later, did James Drewry leave the company he co-founded? A company that arguably was created on the back of his design expertise? Quite what the original market for the Freighter was, still isn’t as clear-cut as previous articles on the history of the company suggest. Judging by the number of early chassis photographed in the company archives – and backed-up by James Drewry’s original ‘artist’s impression’ – the Freighter was seen as a…

It’s a tribute to the soundness of James Drewry’s unique design that the ‘Freighter’ stayed in production for as long as it did - a run spread over four decades, in fact – when many other advanced designs didn’t even make it into series production. Perhaps we should remember that the Freighter was designed to replace the horse and cart as an urban transport solution? And that it’s subsequent success as a refuse collector seems to be as much a result of luck than any preconceived idea, as James Drewry’s initial drawing depicts the Freighter as an urban load carrier. Freighters were easy to drive (although ‘kick-starting’ the engine with your foot on the low-mounted starting handle takes some practice), rugged and at around £450 in the late 1920s, was…

Where would the least likely place a Luftwaffe attack might destroy a secret Navy submarine? The answer must have seemed obvious - in a factory about as far away from the sea as it was possible to get in Great Britain! The ‘secret’ four-man submarine was known by the factory as the ‘Wellfreighter’ yet just about the only thing that it had in common with the normal products that had been produced in peacetime was that it didn’t have a steering wheel, either! It was said that SD was chosen for submarine production because of high levels of accuracy in production and the highly-skilled workforce. SD was also at the forefront of welding technology at the time and indeed further expertise acquired in producing the hull of the submarines was…

There are numerous photographs of gully and cesspool emptiers in the former SD Factory Photographic Archive – from the early days of the Freighter, right up to the P-Series, although it would be true to say, that by then (the late 1970s and early 80s), much of this traditional Council market had been lost to cheaper proprietary chassis. When the Author arrived at SD in August 1969, it was still considered vital that potential Council customers had the facility to purchase complete SD-built tankers, just as they did with an entirely ‘purpose built’ refuse collector. This enabled any prospective purchaser to place an entire fleet order with just one supplier. Or so it was hoped! With the arrival of politically-motivated ‘competitive tendering’,the advantages of that reasoning were not only questioned,…

Unlike the launch of the then new ‘T-Types’, which helped Shelvoke & Drewry build-up an unassailable seventy to eighty percent of the UK refuse collection vehicle market (the actual figure depended on who was telling the story!), the launch of the new P-Series proved to be less of an epoch-defining moment, than should have been the case. There were a number of factors which contributed to that;- firstly the late seventies were a time of intense political division, with ‘Privatisation’ hanging over Council fleet management like the Sword of Damocles. This certainly blunted sales of expensive new purpose-built refuse collectors, but a combination of widespread labour unrest and economic turbulence, mixed-in with high interest rates didn’t help either. That said, the P-Series was a big advance over the former N-Series.…

ON THE BACK COVER The largest collection of surviving SD chassis in the world (probably!) is owned by Peter Johnston, the chairman of McCreath Taylor, Lisburn, Northern Ireland. The company was once the SD distributor in the Province and is still in business selling and servicing municipal vehicles, today. Peter’s collection includes an early Freighter platform lorry (originally sold to agricultural equipment manufacturer Pearce& Co in the Republic), a totally-rebuilt W-Type Fore & Aft Tipper (rebuilt from drawings and photographs by talented engineer, Jimmy McAleer from Fintona) and one of the very last P-Series built in 1991. Since this photograph was taken, Peter has added an SD T-Type tar tanker to his collection. The only SD chassis type he doesn’t currently own? An NY-Series Revopak.…

First introduced in 1937, the ‘New Type’ which was also referred to as the ‘E-Type’ (the ‘E’ may have stood for ‘Edwards’, the new chief engineer who replaced James Drewry) continued to use the Freighter’s SD-built transverse petrol power unit, but this was flipped through 180 degrees and mounted ahead of the driver to create space for a three/four man crew cab although tiller steering was retained. But as we see from this street washer tanker supplied to Paddington Borough Council in 1939, this was soon replaced by a conventional steering wheel. Only a limited number of E-types were supplied prior to the outbreak of war. These included Chelsea side loaders, Moving Floor refuse collectors and municipal tankers - customers included Manchester and Southend BC. The Paddington BC Street Washer…

It’s interesting to note that back in 1963, David Kaye was already lamenting that no complete SD Freighters had been preserved. And it seems that he would have known, as he tells us that he had travelled to a Welsh farm, a holiday camp, a laundry and the lawn of a Hotel to view (we assume) various remains. There was, he adds, one remaining Freighter that had survived intact until 1961, but he was too late to save it. I think we can assume he’s only talking about Freighters used as passenger carrying vehicles here, as there were several Freighter dustcarts in various states of disrepair but still save-able right into the 1970s. Indeed, there are still a few awaiting preservation today. As the preservation of an early Freighter by…

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, we might observe that if the W-Type had been designed and produced in 1936, it would have been regarded as reasonably modern and up-to-date. Elegant even? Umm, perhaps not, but behind that restrained polished radiator, was a tough heavyduty chassis and (unlike the tiller-steered Freighter), a conventional drivetrain with an in-line power unit. True, it was still basically a variant of the tried and tested SD side-valve unit, but now increased in capacity, it developed 70bhp. And although SD literature kept pretty quiet about it, this conventional driveline would have made it easy to fit a diesel engine as an alternative. But interestingly, even well into the 1950s, many local Council customers continued to specify petrol engines on the basis that they were…

The N-Series cab could have been the product that took SD along the same path that the 13.4 cab did for Seddon. That is to say to finally shake-off the limitations of a traditional coachbuilt cab design and take the company’s products forward, in-tune with the production methods of the mainstream manufacturers. Like Seddon, SD needed to streamline production methods to help keep a lid on costs. And although coachbuilt cabs were cheap to produce in as much as they didn’t require complicated jigs and special tools, they were labour intensive and slow to build. And that took-up a lot of factory floor space. Oddly, there were several other parallels with Seddon too. That’s aside from many people thinking that ‘SD’ stood for ‘Seddon Diesel’. At one time, Municipal Vehicles…

BEFORE THE SPV RANGE In theory, the whole SPV project should have been a winner for SD. The reasons why ultimately it didn’t achieve the aim of replacing the forklift truck division, as intended, is a complex question to answer. There was certainly a lack of long-term planning. And in the early days at least, no real thought given to ensuring that the new range had any linking ‘corporate identity.’ Indeed, without last minute interventions from the Publicity Department, many SPVs would have gone into service without any reference as to the identity of the chassis, beyond a well-hidden chassis plate. Might it also have been a case of ‘too much, too soon?’ There was certainly a potential market for specialised purpose-built chassis designed to meet specific operational criteria. But…