Drivers who handled cargoes of wool for Bradford had to be tough. They needed arms like Popeye to wrestle with unpowered steering, starting handles and a manual jack.

They needed, too, a certain amount of sympathy for machinery, since the lorries were not always mechanically perfect, and a great deal of skill in handling wool - a tricky cargo at best and a positively dangerous one at worst.

Wool, after all, is almost a living thing. It varies in thickness and density and its handling quality depends on who has packed it. Wet or dry, it could squirm in the hessian bales and settle during the journey.

Piled three tiers high, and on bumpy roads, a truckload of wool could sag to one side if not properly loaded and roped, and this could tip the whole lorry on its side.

A single bale falling off could be hazardous in itself. Botany wool came in bales which could weigh up to a fifth of a ton. It might be a soft delight in a pullover, but in bulk it could kill you.

Loading was heavy work. The small towns in Devon and Cornwall had little experience of industry and in many of them wool bales were shoved by man force up planks and into the back of the lorry. Farms could be a better prospect - tractors often had winches to take some of the strain out of the job.

Then it could take up to an hour and half to rope and sheet the load, rain or shine. Often drivers would set off for home soaked to the skin, with rudimentary heating in the cab and on a seat that was little more than a slightly-padded wooden box. The wool, too, became soaked, and had to be unloaded and unpacked urgently on arrival. Wet wool could catch fire spontaneously.

It wasn't all Yorkie bars and smirking at young women in sports cars in the old days.

The economics of carrying wool by road brought the canopy into existence - the load-carrying bit which jutted over the cab.

Jack Bell, whose transport firm had pioneered road transport within the UK for wool in the 1930s, reckoned the five bales or three 'squares' on the canopy paid his drivers' wages.

But it meant they had to work harder for their money. Loading the canopy was tough and the extra weight over the front wheels made steering even tougher.

Bell prospered. He did deals with firms like Kassapians, Vincent Hall, P C Andertons and E Suddards, moved his premises to Water Lane in Thornton Road and bought bigger lorries.

The War came in 1939 and Jack Bell found himself under the control of the Ministry of Defence, as a Depot Supervisor as part of the Ryburn United organisation.

Ryburn, cheerfully admitting they knew nothing about Bell's business, handed it back to him and let him get on with it.

All the hazards of peacetime driving, meanwhile, became magnified with the arrival of the blackout. Hauliers had to cope with unsignposted roads and headlamps with apertures the size of three postage stamps. Even during the day, white, dense fog in the West Country would give way to the sulphurous, yellow smog as you arrived in the Midlands and headed north.

Bradford's smogs were lethal. With the approach of winter, more and more people died of bronchial and respiratory conditions. The numbers fell with the arrival of spring.

After the war, in 1948, the government nationalised long-distance road haulage and British Road Services, with its wheeled lion logo, came into being. Jack Bell had an official put in over his head at Water Lane, stuck it for two years, then baled out and started an engineering and wagon body-building business in Windhill. Then he started to rebuild his haulage business.

When the wheeled lion drifted into history, Jack Bell was back in business. Though he had only one wagon, he sub-contracted. In 1957 he moved back to Thornton Road. In 1960, with a growing fleet, he moved back to Water Lane itself.

But it was the last flourish. Bradford's main trade was to start to die visibly in the 1960s, hit by cheap imports, lower wage costs, particularly in the East, and a complacent lack of investment reflected through much of Britain's post-war industry. Bell's, along with other family-run businesses, eventually lost its identity in a series of amalgamations and take-overs - but not without leaving some memories.

Leo Horsfall, who remembers Bell's from their heyday when he would bunk off school to go with his driver uncle on his journeys, says:

"When I relate stories to anyone who wasn't about at that time of what I remember of the rough job and the hard men who were the long-distance lorry drivers of the early days, and of my own experiences, it always dismays me to see the look of disbelief on their faces."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.