Warwick Ward....making dreams come true!

We live in a very diverse world but in the traditional sense it is still quite unusual for a young girl growing up to have an all consuming interest and fascination in articulated lorries, low loaders and trucks of all shapes and sizes. However, for Jane Whitely-Grant “trucks” always were and always will be her first love (second of course to husband George that is!).

Jane takes us through the story.....”As a little girl growing up I vividly remember my Dad driving us to the south coast of England for summer holidays. We used to set off in the middle of the night on an adventure all excited as most kids are. When we stopped at motorway service stations for some reason I was always drawn to wanting to look around the heavy haulage parking area and stand on the foot bridge watching the trucks thunder by underneath me. I found it fascinating and there began my lifelong love of trucks, lorries and heavy haulage – I absolutely love it! I think people see trucks and lorries as just traffic but they are the wheels that keep our economy turning; practically everything we use on a daily basis relies on road haulage and this is taken for granted.

To be honest, I always harboured a dream of being a long distance lorry driver but as it often happens in life fate takes you in other directions and it never happened”. Jane instead went into the family business and along with her Mum runs a unique and very successful shop on Sharrow Vale Road in Sheffield called “The Front Parlour” selling collectables and vintage clothing which has been a permanently fixture in Sharrow Vale for 36 years and is well known to locals and much further afield. When Jane met husband George he even encouraged Jane to follow her dream by gaining her HGV licence but by this stage with work and home commitments she felt the time had passed her by and she wouldn’t want to spend long periods of time away from home.

So where do Warwick Ward fit into this story you might be asking? Well, Janes’s husband George is a long time friend of Warwick Ward MD Ashley Ward and having met Jane quite a few years ago, Ashley was intrigued by her love of lorries, trucks and wagons. Warwick Ward have historically always sub contracted their heavy haulage but as the business grew exponentially year on year, the need for them to own their own low loader and tractor unit was becoming ever more obvious particularly given the need to do more and more demonstrations for their franchises Case and Tana. Taking all this into account owners Ashley and Matthew felt the time was right to invest. So after much deliberation an order was placed for a brand new DAF XF510 FTT tractor unit and a Nooteboom trailer capable of hauling 80 tonnes of heavy metal all over the country! When Jane got to hear about this she was like the proverbial kid in a sweet shop and she made no secret that it would be a dream come true to have a ride in this brand new wagon. Last year was Jane’s 50th birthday so Ashley felt it would be a nice touch if Warwick Ward could make it all the more memorable for Jane by ticking that box for her.

Anyway, some months went by and finally the big day arrived when the new truck rolled in to Warwick Ward’s headquarters in Barnsley. It is probably true to say that by this stage, Jane had thought that it was all a bit of a pipe dream as Ashley had not mentioned the new truck since the middle of the summer of 2014 but true to his word, Ashley phoned Jane with an invitation to accompany Warwick Ward driver Derren “Digger” Heath on one of the DAF’s very first journeys - a return trip to Middlesbrough!

Jane was beside herself with excitement to say the least and the day went fantastically well. Says Jane: “I am so grateful to Ashley and the Warwick Ward team for making a real dream come true. I can honestly say it was one of the best days of my life and I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity and experience. It was great chatting to Digger throughout the journey and the DAF unit and trailer is truly awesome and a thing of beauty as far as I’m concerned”. Says Ashley Ward “for us it was a real treat to see how genuinely excited Jane was to be given this opportunity to live out a dream and an absolute pleasure to be able to make her day in the way it obviously did”.