The New Hotel Entrance

Slippery slope for this driver after his initiative is rewarded with a dose of the white stuff

- Bill Dean

 

When I first started up as an owner driver, one of my first contracts was delivering doll’s prams. This was in long ago, pre-electronic days. Back then every bride had to have great big, coach-built, gleaming chrome carriages for the new arrival seven months after the wedding. These were the size of small cars and could hold up to four children, a week’s shopping and a hidden bottle of ‘cooking sherry’. Every Saturday young mothers would rumble down the High Street, proud pavement panzers, scattering pedestrians in panic until they met their “bestie” pushing their monkey. The two would then reduce the town centre to a standstill as nothing could get past.

Young girls wanted this symbol of female empowerment. There was a big demand for doll’s prams. Daughters wanted to copy their mothers, push their ‘babies’ down the precinct and smash into shoppers’ ankles at random. This was even though they cost more than the Hornby Flying Scotsman with real smoke.

The firm I delivered for had started out making carrycots. They worked out of an old mill, long gone, in Manchester. The owner had also offered a folding, wheeled frame to turn his carrycots into prams. But when compared to the Silver Cross baby carriages all the new mothers wanted, the combination just didn’t sell.