Clamshell Hire: Half Century and Counting

For more than 50 years John Watson has flourished in road transport and then specialised in tipper-grab and lift and shift work. Kevin Swallow visited the company in Bishopbriggs, East Dunbartonshire to discover that things could have been very different.

(First published in Transport News – August 2018)

It’s Tuesday afternoon at John Watson’s place in Bishopbriggs, in northern Glasgow, when I arrive. “Every Tuesday evening is bothy night,” he explained while showing me the two-bay workshop with a pit and home to an eclectic mix of art and props that adorn the walls.

At the back is a staffroom. “Here,” he revealed, “with friends we enjoy a whisky and a beer. We talk about anything but work. It starts at six and always finishes at nine.”

His mechanic Drew Chapman, someone he has known since school, is repairing an 8×4 tipper-grab in the painted livery of Clamshell Hire, which is where John’s business is at in its 50th year.

There’re other reasons to celebrate too; he has been given the all-clear from bowel cancer and is back into the swing of things, and will celebrate his 72nd birthday.

However, things might have been different not least because 50 years ago he contemplated boarding a ship bound for Australia. As a 21-year-old time-served HGV mechanic working for local Dodge and Seddon truck dealership Moodie & Co his plans to go into road haulage for himself had been thwarted. 

His father Jimmy Watson, a lorry driver turned transport manager at William Carmichael who ran 120 tippers in Glasgow, had promised his son to help him set up but had gone back on his word. “He said the time was not right,” John remembered. “When I was younger I went everywhere with my father in a lorry, and my ambition was to put a lorry on the road for myself.”

Disappointment and a chat with an uncle Maurice Fitzgerald back in Scotland who’d emigrated down under and ran a bus company were enough for John to ask about a £10 package at Australia House. News of John’s plan to become a “Ten Pound Pom” prompted his mother May Watson to apply pressure. Her husband relented.

THE START 

Jimmy persuaded a friend who ran a concrete pipework company to let John put a truck on the road. “I spoke to my boss Mr Moodie because I wanted to put a lorry on the road through his company. A new Dodge was £1,800. The finance company didn’t want to know.

“The sales manager Dick McCrory had a three-year-old truck owned by John Hamilton Transport that had been in a smash. “Would I want it with a new cab for £500?” Well, a different finance company who wanted my business asked for two guarantors; Mr Moodie and my father, both agreed.

“It was a Dodge D308, four-wheeler with a Perkins 5.8-litre 6.354 120hp engine with a 22ft flatbed body, 14.0 tonne gross vehicle weight and a 10.0 tonne payload,” he recalled. “On Monday, 13th May 1968 I was on the road.”

The following year John and his bride to be Susan bought a cottage that had been part of a piggery and where they still live today. In July they were married, and later that year John got a second truck, another Dodge D308, for just £25. The new engine it required cost £50. John and his father swapped the engines. “My father-in law Alex Hamilton, a traditional painter and decorator, then painted the truck by hand. No one could believe it wasn’t sprayed, that’s how good a job it was,” he said. It took to the road in October.

By the time hauling pipes ended in 1970 he had a third truck on the job. He picked up work with Marley Roof Tiles (now Marley Eternit and still based in Bishopbriggs) before a local haulier, James Arthur Transport introduced John to timber merchants J&A Stewart.

“James Arthur were keener on heading south than the local work so I took it over,” he said.  

“In 1972 we put our first artic truck on, an Atkinson Silver Knight, the following year we set up the workshop. By 1974 we had seven trucks on for Stewarts, and that was the year my father joined the business.”

After 34 years with William Carmichael a misunderstanding over a business card would lead to Jimmy’s departure. “My son Jimmy was born in 1970, and in 1972 I had a business card made up that said, “John SL Watson Haulage Contractor, presented by James U Watson”.

“A condition of me putting a lorry on the road was that it would not encroach on any of Carmichaels” work; they ran tippers and my father wouldn’t allow me to run a tipper. At one point my father was working out of the King George V Docks for Carmichaels, and would often be here for lunch with my mother May. He put that same business card in the weighbridge at the docks so that he could be contacted.

“The card was there for two years. My father went on holiday, one of the bosses covered him at the weighbridge and saw the card. When my father returned they told him, ‘we’re going to have to finish you up’, he said, over a perceived conflict of interest.

“Well, their loss was our gain, he became transport manager. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to us. In no time at all we were up to 18 wagons. Even after being let go, my father would not let us encroach on Carmichaels work. He said that you have built this on your own merit and will continue to do so. There was a lot of work offered that we turned down.”

CHANGING LANES 

It would take the Winter of Discontent of 1978–79 to slow progress of John SL Watson Haulage. Within nine months the fleet halved to nine trucks but the recession quickly turned around and John was looking to get into another sector; truck-mounted cranes.

“I bought a Leyland Boxer four-wheeler with a HAP crane and flatbed and the business began to diversify. Everything we bought after that had a crane. We were one of the first in Scotland to acquire a Moffett Mounty forklift to go on the back of the lorry so we could unload out own freight on site. We got the fleet back up to 18 vehicles; six four-wheelers, six eight-wheeler and six artics,” explained John.

In 1990 Jimmy Watson retired aged 66. The following year his wife May passed away and in 1996 tragedy struck again. “My father came in every day, and he was run over by a lorry that was working for another business based here. He died of his injuries,” John recalled. “It knocked the heart out of me. At that point we considered growing the business but we decided to chop it back.”

Customer agreements were not renewed and by 1999 the fleet was again halved. As the general haulage fleet wound down John bought a 16.0 tonne tipper-grab wagon and started to trade as Clamshell Hire. The truck worked motorway maintenance projects on the M77 and M74 extension between Carlisle and Guards Mill.

John and Susan’s daughter Angela Ross joined the company as financial manager in 2003, taking on the role that her mother and grandmother had occupied for many years.

He ended his association with Marley Tiles and by 2005 John ran just one truck. After persuading former employee Tom Gibson to return, and bought a second vehicle and in 2007 John and Susan’s son James “Jimmy” Watson joined the business.

Jimmy had grown up with the business cleaning and greasing the trucks over the weekend as a kid. He’d attended Stevenson College in Edinburgh to do a City & Guilds in Motor Vehicle and Engineering Management and train as a motor mechanic. In 1992, aged 22, Jimmy left and spent 10 years in Dublin and then five in London working as an actor and producer. “I came back to Glasgow with my family,” Jimmy explained, “I started to do the odd driving shift and work as a labourer, then I started to get more involved.”

One of his first projects was a costing exercise for the coffee shop (see sidebar) and then the transport business. He saw an opportunity to restructure and grow it, and set up a website to promote Clamshell Hire.

The catalyst would be the 2008 recession. Previously, as a haulier the 1979 recession had resulted in losing work but as a hire business it grew because companies in construction cut costs by offloading assets.

Jimmy explained: “A lot of businesses sold their grab wagon because they’re only using it two days a week, and realised it was more effective to hire us than operate a grab wagon themselves. Through the website larger companies came to us. Our trucks went from two-to-three days a week to working five days a week. I started to offer work as a broker to a lot of smaller independent businesses without websites.” 

STEADY GROWTH 

When one company he offered work let him down Jimmy started to put the business he attracted through Clamshell Hire. “We grew at a lorry a year. By 2013 we built up the fleet to where it is today,” he said. “The tipping point was to have our own mechanic, so I didn’t rely on outside forces to look after the vehicles.”

Today Clamshell Hire run seven trucks available for hire with drivers. Six are 8×4 tipper-grabs; three are DAF CFs and three Renault Keraxs. The seventh wagon is a DAF CF 6×2 flatbed with an Altas crane.”

Jimmy’s policy is to buy second hand vehicles, which makes depreciation less of an issue. “It also means we can employ a mechanic full time and be a bit more reactive to any maintenance that is required, and not be in a position where we reply on a third-party to do the work when they can fit us in,” he said.

John recruited Drew to work on the trucks in 2011 after he’d retired from running his own fleet of tippers and concrete wagons, and had offered John a home to park his very first truck 50 years ago.

Buying six-year-old trucks and working them for five years works. Now the plan is for the purchase age of the next trucks to be younger without compromising on service and support. With the trucks on a six-weekly inspection regime having seven vehicles means six are available at any one time. “We are a small business and it’s about service, which is a priority,” said Jimmy. “It allows us to provide an uninterrupted service.”

The tipper-grabs tend to work in a 100-mile radius of Glasgow through the central belt, although the trucks can go further afield if required, and the truck-mounted crane goes to the west coast islands. Jimmy said: “We have such a broad spectrum of customers, you can be busy with one for six months then the nature of their work stops and you start working for someone else.”

Paula McBride is the accounts manager. With Drew in the workshop, Clamshell Hire employ Andrew Nicol, Gordon Brisbane, Les McCormick and Ricky Cameron as drivers with Richard Cameron (Ricky’s son) in the yard and as the second man when required, and Sam Stewart working part time and is the “keeper of The Bothy”. Jimmy, John and the transport supervisor George Brooks also drive when required.

“On Friday you look at the book for the week ahead and there are gaps everywhere, then you get to the next Friday and wonder how you fitted it all in,” explained Jimmy. “We react and support other businesses when they need an extra vehicle, or one has broken down, or they are too busy, that’s where we come in.”