Last updated 13:35, Thursday, 10 April 2008

In the long-gone pre-tachograph days when Dave Bulman drove scores of thousands of miles on the run from Aberdeen to London and back, truck drivers were men of a special breed.

Dave Bulman: He wanted to become a draughtsman but his sisters needed financial support so he earned money as a heavy goods vehicle driver

They had to be physically strong, to cope with controls that lacked power assistance. They had to have stamina to drive for many hours on end. They had to have the resilience to cope with often freezing winter conditions in cabs that lacked heating. And they had to have the skill needed to get the best out of lorries lumbering on the meandering A and B roads before motorways.

Mr Bulman, who was 82 when he died at his home in Kirkoswald, could tell many a tale of the three-days-each-way journeys that sometimes saw him driving all day and all night. He was regularly delayed by heavy snowfall on the old road up Shap Fell and he said that on this particular stretch of road he could count the surface chippings through the holes in the cab floor!

It was sometimes so cold that it could almost reduce grown men to tears.

He could also tell of the camaraderie that existed among truckers in those times, with their vehicles often travelling on convoy and with everyone willing to help out in emergencies.

Yet David George Bulman, always known as Dave, never set out to be a truck driver or to have his own trucking business, as he later did.

Born in Maxwelltown, Dumfries, one of eight children, he went to school in Beattock, where his father was the headmaster and then to the Moffat Academy. In the army he served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in Egypt, where his duties included motorcycle despatch riding and he emerged unscathed, to return home with the ambition of becoming a draughtsman. However, he had sisters who needed support so earned useful income by becoming a heavy goods vehicle driver instead.

He drove for a man called Robbie McCallum on the Aberdeen to London run for several years, covering a huge mileage in all weathers and all conditions and it was on one of these trips that his life changed completely. One of his sisters had become a nurse in Leeds and he stopped off to see her at the Cornmarket. She brought her best friend, Wyn Hannan, along. Wyn later became Dave’s wife.

They had to set up home in either Aberdeen or London and they chose the latter and there he established a crane hire business. Then, in 1967, he went into partnership with his brother, Jack, who had a milk round in Penrith and they bought Kelso’s haulage business in Lazonby. Initially he drove for the firm, all over the north of England and south of Scotland, delivering animal feedstuffs that he collected on regular runs to Liverpool... and the D and J Bulman Ltd company became well known.

It achieved fame when it was one of the very first to invest in suction and blower trucks, using machinery that would vacuum up the grain feed into the trucks at one end of the journey and blow it out into farmers’ feed bins or silos at the other. This saved a lot of handling and was cheaper for the farmers, although feed was still delivered in the traditional bags to those who preferred the older ways. The automated method was the subject of a Tomorrow’s World television programme in the early 1980s, when a Bulman wagon was featured on screen.

At the time Britain’s biggest family-owned firm of feed manufacturers, Criddle Billington, was one of D and J Bulman’s biggest and oldest customers, with its mill on the Kingstown Industrial Estate in Carlisle.

Jack Bulman died in 1979 but Dave carried on working until he retired in 1995 and then he was free to concentrate on his bowling, with the Lazonby club and the Carlisle indoor club. He was good enough to play for the county side and he went on many tours, all over the UK and Ireland.

On these tours he was known as ‘the entertainments manager’ because of his great developed sense of humour.

He was three times president of the Lazonby Bowling Club and was a member up to his death. He was still bowling a month ago, when he was runner-up in a tournament in North Wales.

Although bowling was his passion he was a great all-round sports enthusiast and a Carlisle United FC shareholder.

At Lazonby Primary School he was a volunteer who helped children with their reading and he was the village Father Christmas for several years.

Mr Bulman leaves his wife, two daughters and three sons, four granddaughters and four grandsons, four sisters and two brothers.

He was cremated privately in Carlisle and a celebration of his life took place in the Pennine Gallery at Rheged, Penrith, on Sunday.

Walkers’, Penrith, made the funeral arrangements.