Photos
I intend to make available here some albums made up of some of the many photographs I have of the history of the Smith Family of Portland, Smith Coaches and the Isle of Portland in general.
Park Royal Leyland Decker bought for a German company, I drove it over via the truck line ferry Poole, When I got to France and found I had forgotten my driving lic, but the French were so pleased to see a decker and have a ride round the port on the top deck of course, that they forgot to ask me for it.
The old garage in Easton Square now flats
Dads fleet list he made in 1996 it was this list that started the whole search
the foundation for the flats
dorset evening echo
dorset evening echo
Cawlett poster
Dorset evening echo
Cawlett poster
Mr Pope Rodney Smith age 4 Douglas Smith tarring the garage roof in Easton square
R.J.Smith Wedding 1909 Richard the 3rd
R.J.Smith Wedding 1882 Richard the 2nd
R.Smith Wedding 1855 Richard the 1st
This page will also contain a list of the resources that I found most useful when researching into my family's history, as well as providing hints and tips for carrying out your own genealogy project.
Rod's Ramblin's How it all began
There are a number of amusing times in your life that you never forget, and I would like to take a few moments to share some of the best. There’s no doubt that when you’re young you do indeed take silly risks that age later prevents you from doing, but I do honestly think I never intentionally did anything really stupid. Well there was this one time when my mate got plastered and offered us a lift home in his dad’s car and we ended up embedded in a roundabout but I do have a defence for that one, as I was plastered too (lucky I was, or it would have hurt) but fun can be best obtained by winding your workmates up – (The other apprentice at the garage was a old school chum; we did not in fact go to the same class but were in the same year and we soon found out that we both had the same wicked sense of humour) and of course them doing the same to you, I served my apprenticeship at Aitcheson’s Garage, Victoria Square on Portland, which held the police contract for the recovery of any vehicle involved in an accident within a 10 mile radius; something like two to three times a week we would get called out for accidents and probably around the same for normal breakdowns,
Now when you recover a vehicle you have two options; to lift the front up on a crane type gantry that we had fitted on the back of our Land Rover (an A -frame welded together out of old scaffold poles really and fitted with a winch), or you can hook a rope to the offending vehicle and tow it (the much simpler and preferred option). Now we had acquired a cracking piece of rope from a guy down the dockyard that had a huge steel hook on the end; the other end was fitted to the back of our Land Rover which was in permanent four wheel drive, as the gear transfer box was busted and nobody could be bothered to fix it and more importantly it had a 6 cylinder diesel turbo-charged engine which gave it immense power. It would literally pull anything anywhere. I once pulled Chesil Beach Motors’ breakdown truck off the beach that still had the car he was rescuing on the back before he, too, had got stuck in the pebbles,
There is a certain knack to being towed; you need to keep the rope tight, but at the same time allow enough slack for the towing vehicle to do its job. I don’t intend to name names as it’s not my place to do so, but it is of course better to do the pulling than to be pulled. You have control and given the little extra responsibility, more fun, as where you go the one on tow has to go too! Now, for safety’s sake we always, where possible, get the driver of the car to travel up front in the Land Rover leaving my mate or I, (whoever’s turn it was to sit in the broken vehicle and steer). The one doing the towing could at this point have a bit of fun, in that he could drive a little fast, perhaps brake a little quickly or turn a corner a little to fast, all of which would of course challenge the one being towed. The more I did it to him, the more he did it to me the next time we went out and the roles were reversed!
The “Mop & Broom Man” van.
On one occasion I was doing the towing and my mate the steering of, in this case, a broken down van. Now when I say the tower gets all the fun of course the one being towed could have his pay back! He could brake a little hard, making the Land Rover jerk, or he could swing out as if to overtake and pull the back of the Land Rover across the road! This was my mate’s favourite and to be fair he was very good at it, knew exactly how far he could go before the tyres on the Land Rover would lose their grip and we would both swing across the road. As he had done it many times I had no reason to be concerned when on the recovery back to the garage along the Portland Beach road he started doing it again. I would be driving along chatting to the customer (a mop and brush salesman, the daft twit had filled his van with diesel not petrol which had resulted in the breakdown). My mate would start to appear in the off side mirror swinging across the road then back again,
But there was something different about this day. He was, for a start, swinging out much faster than he would normally do, and he left the swinging back much too late for comfort. I shook my fist out of the window at him a few times; he blew his horn and flashed his lights, something he would often do especially if the customer you had in the Land Rover happened to be a female, and he was on his own. Somehow all did not seem quite right and very soon I found out that a very large double-decker bus was coming the other way. My mate was by now completely on the wrong side of the road, practically level with me and something had to give. I waved for him to get back in and he waved for me, I guess, to go faster, which of course I was trying to do, as speeding up should have had the effect of dragging the towing vehicle in behind, or at least that was the norm, but not on this occasion. On this occasion the towing vehicle stayed out; in fact it went out even further!
Then I got a glimpse of my mate’s face and the terror in his eyes said it all. He had no control over the vehicle he was in; the steering was locked solid and with no engine he had no vacuum to give his brakes efficiency. With our fine bit of Navy rope there was no way he could snap it and escape, so realising it was one double-decker bus and one van that were about to come together with me alongside, a decision need to be reached and quickly! I yanked the Landover to full right-hand lock; my mate missed the back by inches, and both of us ended up on Chesil Beach in two feet of soft pebbles! The bus passed our near side with inches to spare as by now the driver had pulled out into the middle of the road. My mate’s face was a picture; the customer was lost for words and a very strange green colour! It turns out the hook we use had slipped off the towing eye and got caught in the steering rack, locking the steering completely! A close shave but a bloody good laugh!
The Girl in the Triumph
On another occasion I was doing the towing. The girl customer, rather than ride “up front” with me had decided to stay in her car, a Triumph Herald, with my mate who was driving. (Never did find out why!).
Anyway with the customer in the towing car (and a girl at that) there was to be no messing about, as the last thing we needed was another complaint to the boss, especially only a few weeks after the “Mop & Broom man” had kicked up a fuss about his van and our escapades towing him. The car had broken down on the Preston beach road and due to the fact that rotor arm drive had snapped we had no option but to tow it. It’s something we did not like to do as the Herald was not the strongest of cars at the front. It did not have a bonnet like most conventional cars, but had two clips, one each side of the front wings, that when undone the whole front, wings, grille and bonnet, would lift up revealing the engine. The problem with this design was that it gave very little rigidity to the front of the car as it relied solely on the front chassis members and one small roll-over bar. Also as each of the front suspension members worked independently of the other it made towing a bit of a nightmare, as if you put too much strain on one side it could pull the steering out of alignment making the vehicle crab (pull to one side) and was expensive and time consuming to fix. Also the Triumph did not have a very good towing eye; they were prone to snap off and in any case our monster hook would not fit through it.
We had a golden rule following the incident with the van, that had been agreed by all; whoever was being towed fitted the towing rope, that way there could be no whingeing if any problems occurred, so my mate fitted the hook and I hopped in to tow him,
I don’t know if you have ever let your mind wander while driving but that night my mate and I were off to Bristol to see a band called “Free” at the Colston hall, and I was thinking about the forthcoming trip, the route I was going to use, and whether it would be a good gig or not. I found that as we drove back though Weymouth and Wyke, all totally uneventful and the Triumph being such a light car and the Land Rover so powerful, that I had by now completely forgotten my mate was on tow behind me! He was so good at being towed that he never snatched the rope once or gave any reason to remind me of his presence, until we reached the roundabout in Victoria Square. I pulled up as you do but before the Land Rover stopped I saw a lorry coming round the roundabout that worked out of the yard next to the garage, and I knew he would want to reverse in to his yard which was going to hold me up.
As it was way past my lunch break, without thinking I let the clutch out gave the beast some welly, “pedal to the metal” so to speak and shot round the roundabout at a heck of a speed. Now the boss, Jack Saunders, was standing outside the garage when I pulled up, talking to a customer about a new car he was thinking of buying, along with him was our salesman Dudley Hinchcliff and the customer’s wife, plus the pump attendant Frank Peach, and a guy buying fuel,
I had a sneaking suspicion when I saw Jack put his face into his hands that all was not well, but jumped out the Land Rover all the same, and wandered round, “All right boss? Something the matter?” He looked at me and as calm as you like said, “Forgotten something have we?” while pointing to the back of the Land Rover which had half a car attached to it by a rope. My mate and the girl customer sat in the other half still at the roundabout with him screaming something about my mother and the nature of my birth!
Can you smell burning?
On another occasion my mate and I, along with our trusty Land Rover were called out to a particularly nasty accident, where a man who turned out to be a local known to both of us, had been flung though the windscreen of his car after running into the back of another and consequently run over by a further vehicle. Unfortunately he was pronounced dead at the scene; we had arrived very quickly and helped the police and ambulance men recover the body and clear the mess. Another guy who was trapped needed some help to get out. After all the mess was cleared away and the police had taken some quick pictures the priority (unlike today) was to get the road fully open and traffic moving as soon as possible. Our experience told us that there was always the chance of some idiot running in the back of somebody else while trying to see what had happened. (It has its own name nowadays they call it rubber-necking) The worst-damaged vehicle so we decided that we would suspend-tow that back to the garage first, the other three plus a van who Lee Lines (Dorchester garage) would come and get, were pushed to the side and left on the pavement, safe from being hit but accessible to us on our return,
We also new that C.B.M. (Chesil Beach Motors, the local Ford agent) would probably get a call out as one of the cars was a brand new Ford, so the rush was on to get the Westminster back and get back for the second one, hopefully in time to get back for the third before C.B.M. had time to do two trips! Their Land Rover was a short wheel base and much slower than ours, plus they had the disadvantage of having to go round the back of the garage to unload, whereas we could stop outside and reverse straight in. All was going well; the car was safely hung on the back; all the normal precautions had been taken and we were off. I was driving and my mate sat in the passenger seat; we were both smokers in those days so what with having known the dead guy and the rushing around we decided to have a fag. My mate was the first to notice.
“Can you smell anything Rod?”
“No, why?” I said, as I glanced in the mirror.
The bloody Westminster was on fire! My mate jumped in the back and was just about to kick the quick-release on the winch when I shouted, “Don’t! Leave it; we can’t drop it here - we are right by the bloody tanks.” Now in those days, along the side of Chesil Beach road the Navy had built some fuel tanks for the aircraft that used the air station. Some were used for fuel for the ships so dropping a burning car within 10 feet was not going to be the best idea,
I yanked the steering over and put us and the burning car well and truly up on the beach. In fact I think we still hold the record for how far one can get a road vehicle up a bank of pebbles even with four wheel drive. It tuned out that the car was an automatic and had jammed in gear when we towed it. Although the gear lever was in neutral the prop- shaft had sheared off and was rubbing against the flange which turned red hot and set fire to the brake-line which set fire to the underseal. Within about two to three minutes of us jumping out there was the biggest explosion you could imagine as the fuel tank and tyres caught fire! Bloody impressive it was too! Mind you, if we had set fire to the tanks the explosion would have been big enough to be heard in France! Somehow our boss Jack did not see that not setting fire to the tanks was a good enough reason to burn out a customer’s car
Some People Never Learn
The Garage, being in Victoria Square, served the Royal Naval Helicopter Flying Training School, which was literally right next door to us. We serviced their fire engines, Land Rovers and all sorts of different vehicles and in the late 70s large numbers of foreign pilots were sent there by their country’s Navy to be trained. Then they could go home and shoot the crap out of each other using the skills that we gave them and, with any luck, the helicopters we sold them! Now the instructors were an odd lot, to say the least. They were young, rich, highly educated and of course bloody good pilots. Cambridge, Harrow, Eton and Oxford were their schooling days, but they had a bit of a chip on their shoulders. Now don't get me wrong, wearing a uniform and having it covered in gold braid does make the man, but when you’re 17- 18 and secondary modern educated, with an “F” word used after every other, when some pompous git says "Hey you there boy my automobile is not performing quite as it should!” he is asking for it, don’t you think? Some were all right mind. I got to know the captain of the base really well and every two or three months he would bring his car in for me to service and a very good tip I got, too!
Our garage, built around 1920, had a piece of equipment unheard of at the time. It consisted of a hydraulic ramp (taken from a tipper truck) which was embedded in the ground, with two ramps welded to the top in a sort of H shape, and a hydraulic pump in an old rusty box that worked it up and down. Now to say it was a bit temperamental is an understatement, but the two things it was guaranteed to do, was to stick four inches from the top and drop four inches before going back up under its own pressure at exactly 10 seconds after it has been raised. Now this was fine for us; after all we used it many times a day, but believe me - the fun we had getting an unsuspecting naval officer in full uniform with his head (we always checked) five inches from the bottom of his car, at the exact moment the car dropped the four inches, was priceless, We had some laugh at that,
Another cracker, was to get the officer to stick his head under the bonnet of his MGB or Austin Healey (they all had sports cars) and having turned the engine over a couple of times with the plug leads off, filling the ports with fuel vapour, reconnect them leaving the ignition on, and drop a penny in the distributor cap, and bang! The mixture would explode in the cylinder on compression and yes, you guessed it; the officer would invariably put a dent in his bonnet with the back of his head. “Good heavens!” you would say “how unusual - never had that happen before”.
Mind you they did have their uses. For a start they were rich compared to us, so if you were a bit short on a Friday night, and one came in on his way home for a weekend leave, the opportunity to earn a few bob tip was, shall we say, handed on a plate! One twit once gave me a fiver for fitting a clutch in 2 hours in his Austin Healey 3000, so he could drive home to his girlfriend in Surrey. What a plonker; only takes one and a half hours at the best of times! At that time I was on a weekly wage of under £6, but, well, you’ve got to have a test run, and there is nowhere better than on the coal yards next to the old railway station, against your mate in a Daf Marathon 55, him in reverse and you in the Healey, customer totally baffled as to what is about to happen to his precious car! Did you know with Variomatic gearing a Daf marathon 55 means it goes as fast backwards as forwards and faster off the start than a Lotus; smashing fun!
Diving Was Short-Lived
Living on Portland, surrounded by water, I was asked if I wanted to have a go at scuba diving and it seemed a logical thing to do. Trouble was at 19 I could not swim; in fact apart from the junior school swimming pool, I never went in the water at all, but I was reliably informed by my a mate that the ability to swim was not a prerequisite of being allowed to dive, due to the rubber suit and air tanks you wore, so I had a go. I did it for two years, and I actually did qualify as a scuba diver, but never really took to it like a duck to water (excuse the pun) more like its a way of getting Lobsters, Crabs, and spear-fishing anything that moved.
Being a boat man was a different kettle of fish that I really enjoyed, so much so that in later life I brought a speed boat along with my brother. But the boat we had in our small diving club was a Gemini, this is a rubber boat now called a Ribbed, it is all rubber, with sides that look like big long air bags; it has a wooden floor and uses an outboard motor. At the time we had a Mercury 85, which was ok but a bit temperamental, and would frequently let you down, at the wrong time; useful when we were in the way of one of the Naval vessels that shared Portland Harbour with us at the time.
Portland was a working Naval base, with many ship of all shapes and sizes coming and going, even Aircraft Carriers and Submarines came regularly in and out, so it was fun to be in a rubber boat dodging in and out of them. After a couple of years we had enough money to buy a new engine, and this was an Evinrude 135, a very powerful 2-litre engine. Of course everybody wanted a go, but being one of the newer members I had to wait, so it was 6 or 7 weeks before I got my turn. It was on a Saturday, the Harbour was quiet, most sailors were nursing their hangovers from the Friday night’s entertainment and the shipping-lanes were very light of traffic, but I was unlucky in that 8 divers had turned up that day, so the boat, even with it new engine would still be sluggish on the outward journey to the dive site of the day, about 2 miles off Portland Bill, near The Shambles Lightship.
I deposited my load and spent 20 minutes watching the buoys slowly being pulled along by the divers below. Now it is customary to ensure that before the dive takes place for everybody taking part to agree on a direction that they are going to travel and that each pair up with another so the boat man knows that each buoy has two divers below. For reasons I still do not know, 6 went one way, and 2 the other, and for me on the surface this proved a nightmare. The boat man is responsible for the positioning of the boat, should an emergency take place. You never know what will happen on any dive, so going with the majority I followed the six and hoped they surfaced first, but no - you guessed it, the two on their own came up first, and one had a problem (turned our his bottle valve had a small leak) he signalled that he needed recovery now!! I opened the throttle full blast, turned the tiller handle, the boat flipped up and within 2 seconds the contents of the boat, and I, were in the drink and the boat was up side down! There was hell to pay! Loads of gear was lost, clothes, watches, and a number of pieces of equipment. It was the last time I was allowed to be boat man, but to be honest I gave up diving shortly afterwards. Why? Well the next weekend I was diving on the Harbour wall, looking for Lobsters and in my excitement in finding a very large one, did not see a particularly large Portuguese Man of War laying on the sea bed (bloody great big jelly fish washed in by the Gulf stream from Mexico) and when I stood on him, he did not, shall we say, see the funny side if it! For what seemed like an eternity, but was only a few seconds, he did his utmost to sting me, in every orifice know to man! Now with the dive suit on I was fairly safe, but this was a particularly big bugger and with 6 foot tentacles, had no problem reaching the only bare skin I had - my face! I knew that if I lifted my foot all hell was going to break loose, so I figured at the time my best bet would be to drop my lead weight belt on top of the bugger, and pull my S.I.L.J. (Self Inflating Life Jacket). It’s obvious to any body now that it was not the best plan after all, as the consequences were to be that without the ballast of a lead belt against my rubber suit and my life jacket filling rapidly with air from the compressed air tank on my waist, I was going to rise to the surface rather quickly. We were diving below 70 ft so decompression would have been a problem, My problem, however, was that I was rising up so quickly that I resembled a Polaris missile, and I left the water looking like one! if a boat had been above me no doubt I would have gone straight though the hull, so diving was knocked on the head and I stuck to fishing from the land and boat and the fact that I am here today is a testament that this was indeed the right decision!
1954 Ariel Huntmaster 650 Twin Shakedown run.
It is all to easy in hindsight to say if only I had?, so when it came to having my first shake down run on the Huntmaster, no doubt if I was doing it again it would be different , Why? well I would practice the fact that your on a bike that’s capable of doing 80 MPH, yet would struggle to stop at 20 MPH, so the use of the gear box and engine to slow you down become apparent, but the gears them selves can present problems, I for instance have been building and riding bikes for quite some time Honda's of various types Suzuki's, Kawasaki, some small, some big, but all with one thing in common ,the gears are on the left, and the brake on the right ,and of course you click up to change up and down to change down, not so the old British thumper, so hurtling along listening to the wonderful sound of the exhaust note, can be concerning when you relies that you need to stop in a hurry ,press your right foot down ,and promptly hear a crunch as the bike jumps up another gear and you go faster,
And who is the bright spark that invented the stay were you put it throttle, I came to a right turn, let go the throttle stuck my arm out (no fancy flashing indicator lights here) the throttle stayed were it was ,and I promptly shot pass the turning ? I also learn that you need to keep an eye on the amp meter (never had a bike with one fitted before) why? Well when the dynamo decides enough is enough you very quickly splutter to a halt (that happened twice)
But there are big advantages first every body stops to look when you go by “Is it the way I wobble down the white line?” “The sheer terror on my face as I know I can’t stop?” or “That wonderful sound that can only come from a twin 650 exhaust note?” which ever it is there is nothing quite like riding and old British motorcycle and you know with all the problems I have encountered over the last 9 months during the renovation, including the horrendous problem of not being able to start the damn thing, for three weeks, it all has been worth it to hear that sound. So if you have a renovation project sat in the shed waiting your attention, believe me its worth persevering and getting her done, as nothing can't be over come and in the end believe me its worth it!