Portugal Pioneer

Ron Chapman has a strong feeling he drove the first British artic in Portugal on his first trip to the country in the summer of 1968

- John Wright

A good sense of fun, not taking himself too seriously, but always wanting to do a good job pretty well sums up 82-year-old former driver Ron Chapman – who has a feeling he may have been the first British artic into Portugal, even though the prize he got from his boss turned out to be an enormous and not particularly deserved rollocking.

It was the summer of ’68, the Flower Power era, when Ron stumbled onto his newfound pioneer status as Jumpin’ Jack Flash topped the charts and Mick Jagger was 25. Ron was 33 when he drove into the London depot of Westonsuper-Mare-based AD Forsey Transport in Coin Street, Blackfriars for a return load to the West Country and home, fresh from a delivery from Zeebrugge in Belgium.

Ron – who drove for Forsey’s from 1957 till the firm finished in 1990, then other companies until retiring in 2001 – remembers the day. “While hanging about for the load supping large mugs of tea with our shunters (guys that tipped and loaded our night trunk vehicles) and dock runners (those that oversaw the loading of chilled and frozen meat from London docks), one of them asked how I’d fancy going to Lisbon.

“The furthest I’d ventured was northern France and Holland. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said, ‘that’s the other side of Europe. I wouldn’t have a clue.’ A fortnight later, I realised he knew something I didn’t. I was messing about in the yard, trying to look busy, when one of the directors asked me how long it would take to go to Lisbon and back. Off the top of my head I said:

‘About 12 days.’” Unbeknownst to Ron, this trip would take a month – which, even if he came back full, would cause consternation enough.