Give Us This Day (65 page)
Four
Snowslide
T
he shock of the bad 1911 midsummer figures had them reeling. Not even the older and least venturesome men in the network had experienced a slide of this length and steepness. They were all aware that they were passing through a bad patch after the relaunch of six years ago, but the consolidated bi-annual returns, privately circulated among them, converted speculation into furious self-questioning.
No region was altogether exempt from the dip, although some, mostly rural territories, seemed to be holding their own better than others. The overall drop in turnover was slight, but that only made the January to June profit margin look more preposterous than ever. For the hard facts were profits had fallen to a miserly five and a quarter per cent, compared with eight and a half in the preceding six months, and sixteen per cent in the corresponding period last year.
George did what everybody expected him to do, calling for regional reports and convening an extraordinary general meeting for the second week in July.
The favourite excuse, of course, went under the heading of “a general business recession.” It had a comforting vagueness and could be laid to the door of German competition, plus the unsettled atmosphere overseas. After that, a close second, came the old whipping boy, the weather, for the winter had been long and wet, particularly in the north and west, and as recently as February some of the busiest regions had had a third of their vehicles in the repair shops. Higson, in the far north, for instance, thought he could be forgiven a falling-off in his rural areas, where the snow falls had been heavy and his quota of motor-vehicles seldom penetrated. But it seemed odd that Bertieboy Bickford, whom all of them thought of as a yokel, came close to finishing top of the regional poll, an almost inconceivable circumstance in these days, for the Western Wedge was jocularly referred to as “the turnip patch” and Bickford, operating in the western peninsula, must have had his fill of sloughed roads and flooded valleys.
The cancer seemed to be located mainly in the flattish, densely-populated areas, where lorries had all but superseded the horse. Industry was still expanding, regions like The Polygon, The Funnel, and the Scottish Lowlands. It was on the figures from these regions that George concentrated during his two-day exile in Adam’s tower, whither he retired as soon as he had ridden out the initial shock.
At first, with regionalised sheets spread the whole length of the trestle tables he had rigged up, he could discern no real pattern in the slump, nothing to show why the blight should have struck so savagely and so quickly. At last he began to see that it was high time he made some sweeping reassessments, not only of national transport trends and Swann-on-Wheels as an enterprise operating within those trends, but also of himself, a man of forty-seven, hitherto of cool judgment and with nearly thirty years’ experience under his belt.
* * *
George had always seen himself as a pioneer, in advance of other pioneers, a man ready to look ahead, so that he had succeeded in pulling something out of the hat well in advance of his viceroys, even the few gamblers out along the network. His tenacity and unswerving belief in himself had gained for them all that impressive start over every competitor in the field. But he supposed now that that start had been altogether too impressive, encouraging him to sit back and live off his fat, and it soon became obvious to him that he had lost his place in the vanguard.
The evidence of these unpleasant conclusions was everywhere, but particularly telling in his newspaper cutting file where he found evidence of advances that would have put a cutting edge on his curiosity a few years back. There were those London “H” type ‘buses, now operated by the London and General Omnibus Company as far as Hampstead. There was news that the last L.G.O.G. horse ‘bus was due for retirement in early autumn this year, and the same company’s spectacular success in the private hire field, where even councils composed of men who had never ridden in a motor were commissioning ‘bus excursions for schoolchildren. There was Morris’s amazing advances down at Oxford, and Austin’s breakthrough with his baby car, that had somehow caught the imagination of a public unimpressed by the impossibly expensive, carriage-built vehicles of ten years ago. But beyond all this there was the flood of new, high-performance foreign cars on the roads— the Renaults and Unics, the Napiers, the Gharrons, and the Panhards—pouring from continental workshops where, he suspected, commercial vehicles, capable of outpacing and outhauling the best of Scottie Quirt’s Swann-Maxies, were already over their teething troubles and promising formidable haulage competition in the near future. Indeed, it seemed that the very name “Swann-Maxie” had an oldfashioned ring about it, like last year’s slang, so that he gave a thought to that other and infinitely more adventurous form of transport—the staggering advances made in the conquest of the air over the last two or three years.
There was no commercial future in air transport, or none that he could discern. A machine that was still unsafe for a man was unlikely, in the foreseeable future, to enter the haulage field. Yet George Swann, his mind conditioned to evolving patterns of transport over three decades, could sense the impact aeroplanes were beginning to make on a public that had for so long regarded the motor as a rich man’s toy. The public mood was changing, year by year and month by month, ever since Blériot made his cross-Channel flight in the summer of 1909, and that human dynamo Northcliffe (quick as a fairground barker to spot a crowdcollector) had initiated his air races. Even ballooning was now no longer regarded as a happy-go-lucky way of breaking one’s neck. The Germans were reported to be making impressive progress with airships, led by that dedicated aeronaut, Count Ferdinand Zeppelin. And here perhaps air haulage was at least a possibility.
Swann-on-Wheels, once accepted by every transport man in the country as first in the field, was no longer “in the frame” as the bookmakers said. Was even in danger of slipping to fourth or fifth place in the national table.
What was to be done about it? How could the plunging downward trend in Swann’s graph be halted, levelled off, and encouraged to rise? Or what common factor could be isolated as the arch villain and placed squarely in the dock? He had often been baffled, but never this baffled. He turned back to his viceroys’ reports, beginning with the Eastern Region facing the North Sea, and ending with the turnip patch, where Bertieboy Bickford, with his assortment of outmoded men-o’war, frigates, and pinnaces was still holding his own.
It was pondering this—Bertieboy’s curious immunity from the slump—that suggested an answer. Not the whole answer, certainly, but a hint that there must be a common factor in the falling off in orders and the sharp drop in profits. Bertieboy, largely concerned with bread and butter hauls over rural routes, and fobbed off with teams and vehicles that were already obsolete in the north and Midlands, none the less enjoyed a built-in advantage over all his rivals with the single exception of Clint Coles, operating on the far side of the Irish Sea. He had, so far as George could discover, no serious competition. Some seventy per cent of his customers (a crosscheck with accounts established this) were either farmers or merchants marketing agricultural goods of one sort or another, and there was something else that seemed, against all probability, to be operating in Bickford’s favour, something that was not difficult to assess if you knew his beat as well as George knew it. Bickford’s territory was served by a very poor road system that had changed surprisingly little from the coaching days. The gradients thereabouts were fearsome. Indeed, it was for this very reason that few Swann-Maxies were seen in the peninsula, and these two factors had to have an important bearing on the exemption of the Western Wedge from the general depression.
He turned back to the detailed reports from The Polygon, The Funnel, and the Scottish Lowlands and suddenly the general pattern of the dilemma emerged. In areas where the ground was favourable to the motor, where distance
s between cities were short, where potential customers were thick on the ground, the amateur was emerging as a successful challenger to the professional.
Not individually, of course. Nobody running a fleet of transport vehicles, powered or horse-drawn, had cause to lose an hour’s sleep over the odd JohnnyCome-Lately who built or bought a single motor-vehicle and advertised himself as a haulier of goods. These people had always existed, even in his father’s day, and they had never succeeded in making a dent in the Swann economy. But that, possibly, was because there were so few of them and most of them were locally based, operating no more than a few miles from the waggon sheds where they kept their decrepit carts and stabled their ageing beasts. A glance at his brother Edward’s report convinced him that this was no longer the case. In the Birmingham-Wolverhampton area alone Edward had listed thirty-seven one-man operators, and according to his son Rudi up in The Polygon, an almost identical swarm of parasites was skimming the cream from the house-removal trade.
Spurred on by a sensation of discovery, he did a rapid cast of the number of one- or two-vehicle operators in these three regions alone and the total frightened him. Country, seaside, and beauty-spot excursion promoters—in several regions summer excursions had yielded a rich harvest for Swann-on-Wheels since they were introduced a generation ago—together with prominent local tradesmen involved in every kind of traffic from haberdashery to undertaking accounted for no fewer than six hundred and eight competitors in three of Swann’s busiest regions!
* * *
His sense of humour returned to him as he thought, with a grin,
Each bug has a lesser bug upon his back to bite him, and that flea has a lesser flea, and so ad inflnitum… The tag prompted him to do yet another sum, this time concerne
d with the number of firms and factories in the Metropolitan area known to field their own motor transport. The result was equally daunting. In the Home Counties, according to the latest check, seventy-four former customers had, within the last two years, announced that from here on they were equipped to do their own haulage.
Here it was then, the elusive common factor that he sought. Lesser bugs proliferating across the country, plus a new breed of merchant who had seen the light that George had seen beside the Danube twenty-five years ago and were using it to find a way towards cutting transport costs.
He went over to the window, propping his elbows on the stone sill and looking out on the view that had always offered his father a challenge, the broad brown curve of the Thames below London Bridge, with its steady flow of river traffic down to the forest of shipping at the docks. He had his conundrum and he had to solve it, before he got bogged down in the slough of generalities that would emerge from the meeting in two days’ time. He thought,
I can’t solve it here. I’ve studied those reports until my eyes ache, and those chaps out there are each concerned with their own patch. It isn’t fair to expect them to see the picture as a whole. That’s my job and, by God, it’s time I tackled it. The line of thought suggested another. He reflected, At the Gov’nor’s age, a man is entitled to live on his memories, but I’m not much more than half his age. Somewhere in the ‘seventies, when he was the right side of fifty, he must have faced a dozen challenges equivalent to this one. I’ll take a walk and get the smell of this damned slum out of my nostrils. He flung himself out an
d down the narrow staircase to the yard, then towards the bridge, thick with horse and motor traffic.
His steps led him via Cannon Street to the top of Ludgate Hill, then down past the Old Bailey and Snow Hill in the direction of Smithfield Market. It was a long time since he had passed this way on foot, but in the days of his heir-apparency, more than twenty years before, he was often on the prowl hereabout, drumming up new contracts among the wholesalers, hoteliers, and restaurateurs who frequented the great meat market from first light.
He had never been much of a walker, doing most of his thinking in cabs or suburban trains once he was clear of the yard, but it was soon apparent to him why his instinct had chosen this particular route through the city’s most congested area on a hot July morning with the promise, by noon, of another scorching day. He was checking, halfconsciously, the city’s traffic patterns, comparing the flow up and down these streets with the groundswell in the same location in his youth, and soon found confirmation about the general drift towards the use of powered vehicles. In the old days these streets were choked with hansoms, four-wheeler growlers, flat drays, and high-slung waggons, some of them bearing the Swann insignia, all moving at a snail’s pace through a complex of thoroughfares laid out in London’s reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1666, when the city’s population was no more than a seventh of today’s. Now, although there were still a few cabs to be seen, and more than half the moving commercial vehicles were horse-drawn, the motor was very much in evidence, and he recognised at least a dozen different makes in his progress between St. Paul’s and the Holborn Viaduct. Squat, hooting taxi-cabs nosed their way through all but stationary lines of two-horse drays and vans, and even the horses seemed to have adjusted to their blare and rattle. He remembered a shoal of urchin crossing-sweepers here, darting between traffic blocks in peril of their lives, but now a single old scarecrow represented the ancient calling. The noise had a different note, too, a more strident, less musical orchestra, punctuated by intermittent toots of the bulb horn and the squeal of brakes, whereas the acrid smell of crushed manure, although still evident, was moderated by the fumes of exhaust and the smell of dust spiralling from the rubber-tyred wheels of the newcomers.
A small tribe of street arabs, mounted on what seemed, at first glance, a string of soapboxes, debouched from Snow Hill at a rattling good pace and sent him skipping into the gutter, clutching his straw hat, and bringing him into contact with an iron lamp-standard. He turned to curse at them as they slowed to a stop but then, screwing up his eyes against the fierce sunlight, he checked himself, for it seemed to him there was something very novel about the six-wheeled conveyance that had come close to upsetting him.