We both worked there for about a year (I think) and then another stroke of luck came my way, next door to where I lived in Beach Road there were a couple called Watts, their house was the old Small Gains school house and they had no children, Ernie Watts was a tight old sod, he grew lovely dahlias in his back garden and he would say to anyone who admired his flowers “Would you like a bunch?" and if they said yes he would pick them a bunch and say to them "that will be two and sixpence" and hold out his hand but the good thing about him was he worked for the Regent Oil Company down Haven Road.
He asked me one day if I would like to drive the tankers as he knew the boss and could get me a start.
Now to get a job driving a tanker then (and even now) was like finding gold dust so I said yes and he got me a start, this was in 1958 and was the start of my most satisfying driving job I have ever had, the work was easy and the money was good. The largest truck allowed at that time on the road was a twenty-four ton eight wheeled vehicle carrying a maximum load of 4000 gallons of petrol or 3600 gallons of diesel and this was the vehicle I drove, the maximum speed by law then was twenty miles an hour (an average speed of 16 m.p.h.)so the furthest we could go in an eleven hour day was 80 miles each way and as we could do the whole job in about nine hours we had a couple of hours free time sifting in cafes drinking dozens of cups of tea.
Regent Oil had the contract to supply aviation fuel to all of the American Air Force bases in England and we went to Lakenheath, Mildenhall, Thefford and Bentwaters in Norfolk, Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire and Weathersfield in Essex.
Then in the early sixties the government raised the speed limit for trucks up to 30 miles per hour and the Oil Company's wanted us to drive at the new speed for the same money but the union said "what will you offer us for driving 50% faster" and after a lot of meetings and discussions they said" all we can offer you is sixpence per hour "so we told them that all we could give them was raising the average speed from 16 to 17 miles per hour and this is what we did until we were brought out by the Texaco Oil Company and we negotiated a productivity agreement for a 50% increase in our basic rate and we drove as fast as the law allowed and as the motorways were being built we went a lot farther and faster.
With the opening of the Dartford Tunnel the area we covered was increased a lot and we could cover all of Kent in a day, before the tunnel was built we had to drive into London and go over Tower Bridge to get into Kent so our range was limited, because of the laws governing to carriage of petroleum fuels whenever we went through the Dartford Tunnel we had to wait for an escort before we could enter the tunnel and an escort vehicle traveled in front and behind a convoy of petrol tankers.
After two years at Regent Oil I became one of the union delegates involved in many an altercation with the firm over money and work practices, I was also the union collector and used to stay back at work for a couple of hours on a Thursday collecting members fees which I paid to the branch secretary every couple of months and received a 5% commission for my troubles.
It was whilst I was working at Regent that Ernie Watts became ill, he never used to eat much on the road just a few sandwiches he brought from home, whereas we used to have a fry up every morning which was eggs, bacon, beans, tomatoes and a fried slice, we used to all drive to the nearest transport cafe (either Bob's of Romford or the Halfway House at Horndon)and we would drive like mad to get a parking space.
Ernie was always complaining about stomach pains and we used to tell him to spend some of his money and buy some breakfasts.
He went into hospital for exploratory surgery and they found he was riddled with cancer so they just sowed him up and sent him home but the sad thing was they pumped him full so full of drugs that he did not know he was ill, when anyone went to visit him at home he sat in his chair, his stomach bloated looking like death warmed up and would say to us "I'm getting better now and I will soon be back at work with you" and finally he died so all his frugal spending habits(watching where every penny went) was all in vain.