FODEN NUCLEAR WRECKER
A smiling face makes a big difference in this challenging world and that is exactly what you get when you meet Ken Jackson, one member of the family-run garage team, on the A1, up at Priestbridge, just north of Morpeth in Northumberland.
In lorry terms, the Jackson’s recovery team has been located here since Scammell Pioneer ballast-tractor days. For those of you too young to remember those iconic Scammell heavy-haulers, with their lumbering, un-killable Gardner engines, these were dependable leviathans auctioned-off by the Ministry of Supply from years of war service and the Jackson family built up their heavy-recovery business on the back of these great trucks.
The Jacksons have had an involvement with the British Army for many years partially due to their convenient proximity to the Otterburn training ranges located to the west of their garage in the more inaccessible parts of rural Northumberland. The garage fronts onto the A1 trunk road which runs between Newcastle and Edinburgh, still a single carriageway in many places, despite 30 years of local public protest and equally, 30 years of government procrastination.
Jacksons is a well-respected company, having had ancestors who have run an engineering-based business in the area for 135 years. Ken’s great-grandfather George started up just down the road in the heart of the county town of Morpeth. During the 1960s, there was usually an Austin Champ, fitted-up as a breakdown, parked outside the workshop and on one occasion, as a nine-year-old lad, I grabbed a shot through the car window and ‘WNL 47’ was thus recorded for posterity.
Back in 1886, the sign over
