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 distances 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 concerned 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 and 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 r
attle. 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.
It was more than an urchin's soapbox, of the kind one saw in every city and suburban street where youngsters were at play. To begin with, it was non-rigid, its steering apparatus housed on what looked like a small, elevated raft on which the steersman sat on a biscuit box nailed to the main structure. Behind him, carrying a total of four passengers—three girls and a boy—was the carriage itself, two linked fish-crates with the glitter of scales still on their boards, and he noticed also the astonishing lock the design of trolley gave the steersman. Using his right foot as a means of propulsion, he brought the whole thing round in a tight circle as he shouted in high, nasal Cockney, "Everybody aht! 'Arry, Floss, 'Arriet—look sharp, an' stand by ter tow her up for the nex' trip!"
Three of the tiny passengers scrambled out. The fourth, a little girl of about five, sat hugging her knees and crooning with glee as the older boy added, "Orl right, leave Ada be. She don't weigh nothing." He seized the looped cord fastened to his steering box preparatory to hauling his trolley up the incline.
George sauntered over, saying, "Hold on there—just a minute, boy. You've got a nippy little runabout there. How'd you come by it?"
The older boy, who wore a cloth cap with the peak at the back, said, with that mixture of amiability and insolence only met with on the streets of the capital, "Well, I didn't nick it, gov. Ast the kids if you like. Knocked 'er up I did, lars night." And then, with a craftsman's pride in his work, "She ain't bad, is she? Turns in'arf'er length and seats the 'ole bleedin' fambly. Get aht of it, kid, and let the gent'ave a proper squint at'er."
The sole remaining passenger climbed out and joined her brothers and sisters as George, bending low over the steering platform, peered between biscuit box and foremost fish crate to observe that the front axle was part of a perambulator, with its original wheels bolted to the chassis. He moved along its length and inspected the coupling, a length of steel wire running through a pair of sizeable staples and then turned to the engineer, saying, "She's first rate. Best I've even seen and I'm in the trade. Where did you get the idea for that steering-gear?" He had been on the point of saying "articulation," but realised that the word would mean nothing to the boy, who had clearly arrived at a means of improving the lock by the application of common sense.
"Well, I 'ad the pram chassy and I thought I'd try it on for a change. There's five of us, see, and Mum won't let me aht if I don't take the bleedin' tribe. My ole 'bus woulden take no more'n three an' you coulden turn 'er on the pavement." He gave George a long, speculative look and added, half-mockingly, "You wanner try'er, gov? You c'n take over for a tanner."
George Swann was probably the only middle-aged man in London who would have accepted such an offer. He said, chuckling, "Why not? Can you leave the girls with your brother for a minute?"
"I c'n lose the four of 'em fer a tanner," the boy said, and with a brief, authoritative nod at his brother and sisters, he began lugging his trolley up the slope to a point where the pavement levelled out.
It was a very narrow side street, free of traffic for the moment and almost clear of pedestrians. The few that were there were obviously Londoners to a man and acclimatised to eccentrics, for they gave George no more than a glance when he seated himself behind the driver and went shooting down the hill at the pace of a fast-trotting horse.
They had almost reached the waiting children and were slowing down appreciably when George shouted, "Bring her round—full circle!" and the boy did, leaning heavily to his right as the linked soapboxes swung the full width of the pavement and stopped. He said, warmly, "My word, she's a corker!" Then, extricating himself, "What's your name, boy?"
"'Ere, what's the catch? No names no pack drill my Dad alwus says."
"All right, no names. What'll you take for her as she stands?"
"You got kids? You wanter buy it?"
"I've got kids, and I'll buy if you'll deliver. How about five bob, and an extra shilling for delivery?"
The boy now looked more suspicious than ever, but then, having tried and failed to guess his patron's motives, he grinned and said, "You're 'avin' me on, ain't yer?"
But George rummaged in his trouser pockets and brought out two half-crowns and a shilling. "I'm not having anybody on. Here's the money…" Then it occurred to him that so original a boy deserved an explanation and added, "Do you know Swann-on-Wheels, the hauliers?"
"'Course I do. Everybody does, don't they?"
"Do you know Swann's depot, in Tooley Street?"
"You bet."
"Well, my name is Swann and I deal in everything on wheels. Here's your money and you've given me an idea worth more than six shillings. I'll go to ten if you'll have that soapbox in my yard inside the hour. Now will you tell me your name?"
"'Ardcastle," the boy said, pocketing the silver, "but I still don' know what you're at, gov."
"I'll tell you, Mr. Hardcastle." But then, to George's mild distress, the smallest of the boy's sisters began to blubber, and was at once joined by the girl he had addressed as Ada who wailed, "But it ain't yours to sell, Arty. It b'longs to all of us, don't it, 'Arriet?" And the eldest girl said, in an aggrieved tone, "We helped yer make her, didden we? We did, didden we?"
"Yerse, yer did," said Arty, with unexpected mildness, "but I c'n start knocking up another the minnit we get 'ome. The back'arfo' that pram's still in the yard, ain't it? Besides, you c'n 'ave a tanner all rahnd if you'll give me an' and over the bridge. Then yer can buy enough gob-stoppers to make yerselves bleedin' well sick, so 'old yer row, will yer?" He turned back to George, "Ten bob it is, then? You coming wiv us?"
"Er… no," said George, wrenched from a speculation of a network served by a fleet of Arty Hardcastles. "I'm going ahead by cab to make sure you aren't turned away at the yard gate, but before I go, and in case we miss one another, would you mind telling me when you leave school?"
"In a fortnight, thank Gawd."
"Got a job lined up?"
"Sort've. My Dad's a porter at Smiffield. Reckons he c'n get me taken on as an errand boy with 'Enson's, 'is firm."
"How much will that pay?"
"Arf a crahn a week. Couple o' bob more in tips maybe. Depends on me rahnd. West End's all right, 'otels especially, but the 'olesalers is stingy. I know, see, I done a bit o' delivering before school summer-time."
"Well," George said, "I can pay you twice that, and you can start on a suburban round where some of my vanboys make ten shillings a week in tips alone if they look lively. Here's my card. Show it to the Tooley Street weighbridge clerk, but don't part with it. Give it to your father and get him to bring you along first week of the holidays."
The boy took the card and examined it carefully. Then putting his fingers in his mouth, he produced the most earsplitting whistle George had ever heard. A taxi-cab, bowling along the Old Bailey, braked hard and George said, "Thank you, Arty," and walked towards the cab.
* * *
Unlike his father, George was not, and had never been, a man of quick decisions. In this respect at least they were complete opposites; whereas Adam would
, almost invariably, act upon instinct, George would contemplate each factor in any problem and then form a pattern in his brain. Once formed, it was seldom subjected to adjustment.
It was so in this case. The pattern had been all but complete when he was nearly overset by Arty Hardcastle and his articulated soapbox in Snow Hill, but he had been unaware of it. The final piece in the jigsaw was missing and without it the pattern was not applicable. Now it was, however. Arty, turning that tight circle on the pavement with his full load of passengers still safely seated, had struck the spark that had fired George's train of ideas; for it occurred to him on the instant that here was the real answer to all that niggling local competition and that formidable drift of trade away from wholesalers and manufacturers converted to the notion of owning their own transport and saving costs.
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