Saudi Arabia, here I come

“These three buttons on the dash engage the three diff-locks; here are the keys.”

The White Trux transport manager and I were in the cab of a Mercedes 2632 articulated vehicle that I was to drive at the start of a new job in Saudi Arabia. That was it! He then got out of the cab and made his way back to the office, saying over his shoulder, “Don’t forget to give it a thorough service and check all the oil levels.”

This was my first day in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was midday in the middle of summer. The sun was blazing down and it felt like being in an oven. With no shade anywhere, I just wilted, unable to think clearly or do anything.

“What on earth am I doing here,” I thought. “Now what have I let myself in for?”

The day before arriving in Jeddah I had been at my home in Maidstone, Kent, enjoying a very pleasant sunny day in June. A couple of weeks before, I had read an advertisement in the local paper asking for lorry drivers to work in Saudi Arabia. The job sounded interesting – three months working in Saudi then one month off at home. It was summer 1978 and with the pay at £150 a week plus trip money, and tax free, this promised to reward me much more than my present job. So I phoned the company, White Trux, and was given a time and day for an interview.

I arrived on time to meet Mr. Michael White, the managing director, in his transport yard office near Canterbury. At the interview I was asked what driving experience I had, and my clean HGV One driving license was checked.

I told Mr. White of my three years in the Army with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as a recovery mechanic driving a Scammel recovery truck, or sometimes a Diamond “T” tank transporter. One of these towing a 32-wheeled trailer loaded with a 72 ton Conquer tank would have a gross weight of 120 tons. The Diamond “T” only did a maximum of 25mph, and the 24 gears with two gear sticks made it tricky to drive, when fully loaded.

I left the Army aged 21 and in 1959 joined National Benzole delivering fuel to garages in South East London and Kent. In that job I drove all makes of road tanker from small Dennis four wheelers up to their biggest, a 28 ton Leyland or an AEC eight wheelers. I left National Benzole when they moved too far away to Northfleet, and after that worked for three years as an insurance agent. My father had an insurance brokerage business, and hoped I would carry on in the firm. However office work was not for me, I liked the open road.

Then I heard of a job with Asian Transport. Bob Paul took me on as their first driver in a brand new AEC Mark 5 Mammoth Major and trailer. I did seven years from 1966 to 1973 with Astran, as they were renamed, driving mostly to Tehran in Iran. In 1970, I was the first English driver in a Scania 110 to take a load to Doha, Qatar. The truck and trailer had a full load of telephone equipment, cables, crates and plastic ducting tubes. At that time Qatar had no telephones at all. The first delivery by ship had taken two months and most of the delivery was so badly damaged it was unusable. My trip took only two weeks and there was no damage at all. I was rather proud of that achiev