Dear Dave,
I have just joined this site. I was interested to see that your father had been a driver for A,J, Gupwell Transport. This company had been established, in 1920, by my father, then 17 years old, and his elder brother, who had been an officer in the artillery during the First World War. My uncle had been aware that the United States Army, which had entered the war in 1917, had used a lot of motor transport, rather than horses. At the end of the War, the Americans decided to leave these lorries in Europe, rather than bring them back to the United States, and they were going cheap. My uncle, L.W. Gupwell, persuaded his father, A.J. Gupwell, who ran a shopfitting company in Birmingham, to purchase about sixty of these lorries, with a view to keeping a few for the shopfitting business and selling off the rest at a profit. However, in the depressed economic circumstances after the War, he found that he was unable to find buyers, so he decided to set up a road haulage business, then a new phenomenon. My father, C.G. Gupwell, who was mechanically-minded, was happy to join him in this venture. The company eventually had depots in Birmingham, London, Liverpool and Manchester and a fleet or around sixty long-distance lorries. My uncle became a prominent member of the Road Haulage Association in Birmingham and, seemingly, was on good terms with Ernest Bevin, then the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union (later Foreign Minister under C.R. Attlee). During the Second World War, the company worked under the Ministry of War Transport and was then brought into public ownership, in 1948, as part of British Road Services. However, the two brothers then established a new company, Gupwell Transport Contracts Ltd, which focussed on short-haul delivery vans, which had been exempt from nationalisation. They eventually built up a fleet of over one hundred vans, operating mostly for the Cadbury-Fry chocolate business, covering much of northern England and Scotland and operating our of depots in Leeds, Gateshead and Paisley. My uncle passed away in the mid-1950s, after which my father took over the running of the company, until he retired in the late 1970s, shortly after which the company was wound up, I worked with my father for a short time at his office in Bradford Street after leaving school in 1962 and before going to university in 1964. During that time, I attended evening classes at the Birmingham College of Commerce and managed to pass the graduate exams of the Institute of Transport. However, after completing my university studies, in 1970, I went abroad the following year in pursuit of work and only returned to the West Midlands in 2014. I should be grateful to read any other stories regarding the Gupwell transport businesses, as I should like to write a paper on this if ever I can find the time. Kind regards, Richard Gupwell