Roy Larkin

Thanks for all the welcomes. I look forward to contributing as and when time allows.

Hello, I'm Roy. My interest in old vehicles has been with me as long as I can remember, from the days of short trousers and being willingly dragged round steam engine rallies in the '60s. In those days cars were the schoolboy passion, but that interest was overtaken by lorries in the early '70s when I entered the road haulage industry at the tender age of 20 as an owner-driver. Interest in the lorries developed into a growing interest in road haulage history, which then led to WW1 quite by accident. Various articles on early Scammells for Vintage Roadscene led to an article on the Subsidy Schemes (1,000 words if you can find enough!). Well 1,000 words ended up at 5,000 and finding enough meant the bug had bitten and, whilst civilian road transport is not forgotten, most of my research these days is the solid tyre era. Not only the Great War itself, but the events leading up to it and the immediate post-war period with the affect the Great War had on the road haulage industry and social history. For my sins, I also took on the job of editor for the Roads & Road Transport History Association quarterly Journal. Previous tinkering at restoring an Austin K4 and a Scammell Mechanical Horse are now long in the past, replaced by the far more sensible option of warm house, clean documents and photographs, while filing cabinets have replaced the cold garage and the computer the spanners and grazed knuckles. I still love the vehicles, still attend rallies in the monsoon rains and muddy fields and have utmost respect for any restorers but it is now the 'how they were used', 'what they did', 'how they developed', etc. that is so fascinating. It's just a shame everything started going wrong when some silly sod started putting air in tyres. Quite by accident an article grew into a book. An even bigger accident is that it has buses in it, as for years I've been known for a distinct lack of interest in anything to do with buses. But, a bus is only a lorry with a livestock body and it is only the incidental tool in telling just part of the story of motor transport in the Great War.