Several RC regulars – including Rowena – cut their motorcycling teeth as despatch riders in the express courier business. Paul Myers shares his memories of a working life on two wheels…
I didn’t really make a conscious decision to become a despatch rider. It just sort of happened. Sometime in the early to mid 1980s, having just extricated myself from a failing business, I found myself with no job and no income. My pride and joy at the time was a large BMW twin which I’d recently bought from Eddys (who eventually became, until recently, the main Harley dealer in the area) after trading in my Norton Commando.
No! This wasn’t the rash impulse buy of someone with more money than sense. It was the rash impulse buy of someone with no money and no sense. I received £1000 in cash for my faithful Norton and walked away with a £2000 hire purchase agreement with absolutely no idea how I was going to make the £100 monthly repayments.
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Shortly afterwards, riding through my home town of Leeds and wondering how I was going to avoid having to register at the dole queue, I was overtaken by a similar bike with the rider sporting a phone number for a local despatch riding company on his back.
It hadn’t really occurred to me that you might use a large bike for despatch riding. After all it’s mainly short trips across busy town centres, isn’t it? I was also surprised that such a business existed in Leeds. I thought all the courier companies were based in London where two wheels were a necessity if you needed to cut across the traffic in a hurry.
I rang the number and arranged to meet the owner. The business was run from a rather scruffy portacabin at the back of a disused factory on an industrial estate in Pudsey. There was a single telephone line manned by either the owner, Alan, or the only other full-time employee, Sharon. The riders were all self-employed with their own motorcycles. Owners with the smaller machines worked in and around Leeds, but what surprised me was that there was a demand for larger machines to cover runs all around the country. This sounded pretty good to me. A job which paid me to ride my motorcycle all over the UK – bring it on!
The theory was that all the riders would turn up for work at the office and wait for jobs to come in. When the phone rang it was first in the queue with a suitable bike got offered the trip. There was also some contract work. I soon found out of course that there was a pecking order and some riders hardly came in to the office as they were busy doing contract work or waited to be rung at home. No one had radios in those days and mobile phones were a dream of the future. Radios were introduced later on for the local riders but it was never worthwhile for the bigger bikes.
Fortunately for me there weren’t many riders with larger bikes for the distance jobs and soon I was racking up over 2000 miles a week, a large proportion of it up and down the M1. Within a few months I could name every junction, service station and pothole along the entire length of the main route between London and Leeds.
One of my regular runs became taking the payroll tapes from British Telecom in Leeds and the Electricity Board in Harrogate down to the BACS centre in Edgware, just north of London. Nearly every Thursday I would ride to Harrogate to pick up their tapes by 8:30, back to Leeds, just off Dewsbury Road for BT’s package before joining the M1 and riding mostly non-stop to my destination. I might manage a coffee or a quick burger on the journey if I had time in hand but usually if I had an important package on board it was better not to leave the bike unattended until it was safely delivered.
Sometimes on reaching my delivery point there would be a message waiting for me on reception with details of a return job, sometimes I would be cheeky and ask to ring in to see if there was a pick up to be made. More often than not I was free to make my own way home by whatever scenic route I chose.
I spent almost two years in this job and I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. I never tired of riding the bike and I even spent my holidays during this time touring on two wheels. It wasn’t without its incidents though.
Once I was passing through Jedburgh on my way to Edinburgh and a car pulled out of a junction in front of me. I hit it just ahead of his front wheel and the ‘big sticky out’ bit on the side of my BMW pulled the whole front of his car off. The accident wrecked one of my panniers and bent the crash bar. The driver seemed a bit agitated and definitely wanted to avoid involving the police and insurance companies so I accepted his offer of £50 in cash and left him collecting bits of his bumper and front wing off the road.
Another time I was sent to a local computer systems company, Systime, to pick up a parcel and deliver it to the British Army somewhere near Oxford. The package turned out to be some kind of computer equipment destined for testing in battlefield conditions. It was too big to go in my pannier and the staff were most particular about making sure it was strapped on to my rear seat and rack securely. I was under strict instructions to take good care of it, not to fall off and not to let it out of my sight.
Yep, you guessed it. I was filtering through the traffic queue somewhere near Banbury when, BANG, I was hit, side-on by a transit van emerging through a gap in the waiting cars. No damage to me or the bike. Naturally I said nothing when I dropped off the precious parcel. If it was designed for use in the battlefield it should be able to cope with a test from white van man!
My favourite run took place mostly on alternate weekends. We would pick up some advertising copy from an agency in town and we then had the weekend to deliver it to newspaper offices all over the country. The deliveries were divided into three runs, North, South East and South West. I adopted the South Westerly trip. It varied between 900 and 1000 miles, depending on which towns were on the list that weekend, and would take around 24 hours.
I would usually set off early Saturday evening and the route would include Manchester, Warrington, Chester, Birmingham, Coventry, Swindon, Cardiff, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth and occasionally Cardiff. By varying the order I did the drops in I was able to take in some wonderful biking roads, some of the most memorable being down through the centre of Wales.
A lot of our work came from the media industry. This was long before the internet took over. One of our regular trips was to pick up the complete newspaper copy for a weekly paper based in Barrow-in-Furness and take it to Bradford for printing. This package was about a metre wide – about the size of a broadsheet opened out and when strapped to back of the bike rather resembled a crude attempt at an inefficient rear spoiler.
The newspaper was run by an amiable married couple who were usually putting the finishing touches to it when one of us arrived to pick it up fairly late in the evening. There was nearly always time for a pleasant chat and a cup of coffee while we waited.
The last time I did this job they were in a rush as they were heading towards Manchester by car as soon as they’d finished for the night. I stopped for fuel on my way out of Barrow and didn’t give them a second thought until I realised the Jaguar I was overtaking at around 100mph, with my ‘aerofoil’ flapping in the slipstream, looked rather familiar. I believe we received a phone call shortly afterwards to suggest they would be happier if we sent a car or van in future…
I once had to pick up a pair of trainers and deliver them to Gleneagles. Sorry I can’t remember the name of the golfer but he was a household name at the time. Another trip was to deliver a washer for a JCB all the way from Morley, near Leeds, to the Isle of Sheppey. Yes I kid you not! It looked like an ordinary washer about an inch in diameter, the sort you could have bought from any engineering stores and someone paid a few hundred pounds to have it couriered halfway across the United Kingdom.
We played our part in bringing the news to your TV sets. Often we were called out to fetch back film from location shooting to make its deadline. The miner’s strike of 1984/85 was very tough for those at the coalface (excuse the pun!) but the police did quite well out of the overtime and we despatch riders weren’t complaining either. Benefiting from other people’s misery does seem rather indecent though.
Many times I was fetched out of bed to meet a BBC news team at some coal mine in the middle of South Yorkshire to race back with footage of the police having rocks thrown at them. The Beeb were not very popular with the strikers and it wasn’t unusual for the mob to turn their attentions to the reporters and film crew. One of our riders did have his bike trashed along with a BBC car in one particularly ugly incident.
Towards the end of the strike I had to sit and wait outside the house of Peter McNestree, one of the NACOD union leaders, and follow him when he left to report where he went. The intelligence was that he was going to a secret meeting with Scargill and the BBC wanted to be the first to cover it. My instructions were to keep a low profile and not be spotted. Well it’s pretty hard to be covert on a large white motorcycle as dawn is breaking on the straight and empty road of the A19 heading south towards Doncaster!
The driver didn’t take long to spot me and our speed varied between 110 and 120 as first he tried to lose me then tried to make me overtake him. In the end the car pulled over and Mr McNestree came to speak to me, demanding who I was working for. If I’d thought a bit quicker I might have said the Sun newspaper but as I was rather disgusted with the task I had been given I just told him the truth. I still got paid for the job anyway!
We got quite friendly with some of the film crews as we spent a fair bit of time with them. My job one day was to be in Doncaster to fetch back a report on Princess Anne opening a school for autistic children. An obnoxious official told me I was too scruffy to appear in the presence of royalty and I was to keep out of the way. Overhearing this, the cameraman immediately gave me a battery pack to hold and asked me to follow him round. As we were following the entourage around the school a local dignitary asked me if I was the helicopter pilot. (I guess it must have been the blue jump suit!)
Was it all worth it? Well yes I think it was. It was often long hours and it was very often in bad weather, especially in the winter (and I rode through two of them) but I don’t remember ever wishing I was doing something else and it was reasonably well paid. I can’t remember what the rates per mile were but £100 for a day’s work was achievable. £350 to £400 per week was possible, but not every week and of course all the fuel and running costs for the bike had to come out of that, which typically would be between 25% and 30%.
So why am I not still doing it? I’d had two great years at it and I was still enjoying it, but I was in my early thirties. Would I still enjoy it in my fifties if I’d been doing it for 20 years? Could I survive 20 years of riding a bike in all weathers averaging 2000 miles a week? I’d been lucky in that all that time I never even picked up a speeding fine despite riding everywhere I could at over 90mph.
And that included racing a Porsche on the M62, which then became a race to escape the chasing police car. I left the Porsche to pull over as I saw my highest ever speed on a motorcycle speedometer – 135mph. I spent weeks waiting for a knock on the door after that incident, but fortunately for me it never came.
More significantly, my bike clocked up over 225,000 miles on it. Two hundred thousand of them were added by me in less than two years. In that time I’d renewed at least 15 rear tyres, 7 front tyres, piston rings, big end bearings, a shaft drive, alternator, gearbox bearings and gone through countless gallons of oil and petrol. My income had funded the maintenance and running repairs but if I was to continue it was really time to replace it. Around this time the computer industry were advertising they would train anyone with half an education into this new emerging technology.
FEC 80T was broken up and sold as spares and I started to train for my new career. I now get some form of satisfaction from earning my living writing software to send the same information through the internet as I used to deliver on a motorcycle.
I still enjoy riding and I even owned another BMW virtually identical to my old despatch riding mount as well as two very different styles of Harley-Davidson alongside my Royal Enfields and Triumph, but I only ride for pleasure now.
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Words and Photos by Paul Myers
