Harold Wood Sons Ltd Bulk Liquid Transporters
A Memory of Heckmondwike.
I am looking for info on what has happened to a very large firm I worked for decades ago now, namely Harold Wood & Sons Ltd, Wormald Street, Heckmondwyke. It was a very, very busy firm of bulk liquid haulage contractors. Having recently returned to my home town of Brighouse after over 30 years working and living in Cheshire I have been retracing my youth and when visiting Heckmondwyke I was surprised to find that people I talked to had no idea about Harold Wood's at all. It was a huge firm and having visited the site the blue railings are still there but the Offices/Canteen/Huge Garage complex have been demolished and been replaced by other industrial buildings. I would love to hear from anyone who worked for HW's or from anyone who can tell me what became of them. My time with them was in the very early 1960s and it was the firm that gave me the spur to my ultimate job for the rest of my life with ICI Mond Division (Chemicals).
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Kind regards: David
Way back in the late 50's i had a mate, Don by name, who worked for Shellmex BP red green vehichles, big Bedford and Leyland artics. Opposite the depot was some waste ground, backing up to the railway marshalling yard. On this waste land, up to 15 eight-wheeled tankers used to park; AEC eight-wheelers with one or two Atkinson eight-wheelers. These were dark blue tankers, Harold Wood of Heckmondwyke and Cleckheaton. I suspect these vehichles were on contract to Berry Wiggins at King's North. It seems possible these vehicles were subjected to vandalism and/or theft, as it was possible to find police foot patrols on duty.
Hope the above may be of use to you.
Regards Mick
Sometime in the mid 1970s the NFC was reorganised and Woods was joined with Pickfords Tankers division, based in Stroud, and Caledonian Bulk Transport, based in Immingham, in a new holding company within the NFC, called Tankfreight. The new HQ for all three businesses was moved to Harrogate, in about 1975, although all three companies operated separately for years after this.
Woods had two basic parts to the business, what they called spot hire [somebody rings up and orders a tanker of specific capacity, to do a particular job] and contract hire - a company like ICI or BP agrees that a vehicle will be run by Woods but work exclusively for the company. There was a depot near every ICI site and Woods also worked for most of the oil companies around at that time, so had depots dotted all over the country.
I started work in the traffic office at Heckmondwike in 1977. At the time it was situated in a block of portacabins just inside the main gate [to the right as you looked in] but after a few months we moved to the 1st floor of the main block. I moved around to various jobs in the main building, then transferred in 1979 to the head office in Harrogate, where I worked until 1981.
As a part of the privatisation programme of the 1980s, the National Freight Company became the National Freight Company in 1980, and then the National Freight Consortium in 1982, when it was subject of a management buy-out.
It was decided that the NFC was too big, so bits were then sold off, and in 2000 it merged with another firm and the new business was called Exel Plc.
Harold Woods name disappeared in about 1985, I think, and the deport was sold off some time shortly afteer this.
I did my HGV class 1 training with Harold Woods, back in 1980. They became part of Tankfreight (NFC) for a few years before closure.