Wagons welcome travellers back home

Feb 23 2009 by Peter McCusker, The Journal

ONE of the region's best-known companies will soon start work demolishing one of its biggest eyesores. Peter McCusker speaks to its chairman.

IT is a source of huge pride to John Thompson when people tell him they know they are nearing home when they see one of his wagons.

With Thompsons of Prudhoe having 150 trucks on the roads of the North East, this level of recognition is understandable, and to capitalise on its profile, Thompsons has a prominent advertising pitch in the arrival lounge of Newcastle International Airport.

The people of Gateshead will soon become even more familiar with the grey Thompsons trucks when the company begins work demolishing the town’s Get Carter car park next month.

This is just one of many high profile jobs the Tyne Valley firm has undertaken in its 60-year history, including such Newcastle landmarks as the Binns store, Westgate House and the Central Library.

For a company so much a part of the North East business culture, it is a little surprising to learn the history of the company starts in the North West.

John Thompson is understandably proud of the history of the firm, of how his father started it in 1948 and of how he and his brother Billy built it up over the intervening years,

This devotion to the company’s genealogy is highlighted in the publication of a hard-backed book of the company’s history to celebrate its half century entitled Thompsons of Prudhoe – the First 50 Years.

His father Bill and mother Madge, of farming stock, were born and bred in Cumberland and moved to Manchester to look for work.

“It was like moving to Toronto for them”, Thompson says wryly, reflecting on how different life would have been back then for country folk in fast-moving Manchester.

His father eventually secured work hauling coal on canal barges – a protected occupation during the Second World War. After the war, following advice that trucks would be in great demand, he bought one, and in 1948 secured work delivering lime to farms across the North West and North Wales.

When his employer, Lythgoes of Warrington, decided to expand nationally and open a depot in Billingham, the family moved north and eventually settled in Prudhoe.

Thompson, who is now in his sixties, recalls: “We lived in a semi-detached, number 49 West Road, Prudhoe. We did not have a front room, just an office.”

The business was the family’s life; both sons joined the firm as a matter of course when they left school and Thompson recalls his pride when his father bought him his first truck in 1960.

“It was a three-ton Bedford. I called it the Bug and its registration number was NTY 129. I’ve got a thing about vehicle numbers. I can easily remember them,” he says before recounting a series of numbers of many of his other notable trucks.