SIX OF THE BEST
If your house was on fire, what’s the one valuable you’d want to save? Don’t worry about any form of life or limb as they are all okay but what tangible keepsake would you brave an inferno for?
But hurry up – you don’t have time for a brew so you can think about it – your place is on fire.
To Andrew Smith, the question that arose just a few years back was – for him – a ‘no brainier’. The building in question was an old storage warehouse and he was aware that virtually everything of note had already been moved to their new Denny HQ in Winchester Avenue. However, that didn’t stop him beseeching the attending fire officers to let him go back inside and save something which was simply irreplaceable: “At first they didn’t want to let me in but eventually, the fire officers relented,” recalls Andrew. “And they even used the fire tender to tear the building door down so I could drag the Steer out to safety using a forklift which was in there. It might sound crazy in wanting to save a motor that had hardly turned a wheel for more than 50 years and all we used it for was a storage bench, but I had to save it – it’s Wull’s old motor.”
The rusting wheeled Steer was certainly saved from total incineration that night while a knock-on decision following the fire was to see its subsequent stunning restoration. Which, as we all now can testify, has meant for one heck of a happy outcome – and that’s not just for Wull.
Busy Denny
With a current fleet size of 25 motors, James Smith (Denny)
