BORN FREE
It’s a modern-day profession that is crying out for new recruits and if the truck driving industry ever wanted anyone to champion their cause then 72-year-old Mick Bailey is the man. Having spent his life working for a small number of hauliers based in the West Midlands’ Black Country, Mick’s face is almost continually smiling as he reminisces about those happy days of yesteryear. True, not everything was sweetness and light as his wife Pauline succinctly puts it, Mick could well have been killed one night while resting in his bunk.
Mick wouldn’t change a second of his life working the open road and in truth it was probably health reasons which forced him to take up such a job: “I worked in a garage for four years when I left school,” he says, “but the job just made me ill. I didn’t realise that it was being confined inside the workshops that was doing my head in. Once I started driving, that illness just disappeared – and ever since, I have loved working away by myself on the road.”
Mick says there are two particular guys he has to thank for opening his eyes to such freedom: “I had a job when still at school cleaning out the buses of Nash Coaches at Smethwick and one of the coach drivers, Les Minty, seemed to take me under his wing. And it was when talking and riding out with him that I discovered what it was like to be behind the wheel.”
Mick says he never fancied coach driving – and the problems of dealing with passengers – but it was the vision of John Beckett that underlined how good a wagon driver’s
