Shelvoke and Drewry
Encyclopedia
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
manufacturer of specialised commercial vehicles, now defunct. It was best known for its innovative waste collection vehicle
Waste collection vehicle
Garbage truck refers to a truck specially designed to collect small quantities of waste and haul the collected waste to a solid waste treatment facility. Other common names for this type of truck include trash truck and dump truck in the United States, and bin wagon, dustcart, dustbin lorry, bin...
s, which were once the preferred choice of municipal authorities in the UK. It also manufactured fire engines
Fire apparatus
A fire apparatus, fire engine, fire truck, or fire appliance is a vehicle designed to assist in fighting fires by transporting firefighters to the scene and providing them with access to the fire, along with water or other equipment...
, bus
Bus
A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...
es and fork-lift trucks
Forklift truck
A forklift is a powered industrial truck used to lift and transport materials. The modern forklift was developed in the 1920s by various companies including the transmission manufacturing company Clark and the hoist company Yale & Towne Manufacturing...
.
Based in Letchworth
Letchworth
Letchworth Garden City, commonly known as Letchworth, is a town and civil parish in Hertfordshire, England. The town's name is taken from one of the three villages it surrounded - all of which featured in the Domesday Book. The land used was first purchased by Quakers who had intended to farm the...
, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...
in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, it was started in 1922 by Harry Shelvoke
Harry Shelvoke
Harry Shelvoke was one of the founding members of the British coachbuilding and engineering company Shelvoke and Drewry. He was one of the last members to bear a family name that is documented to have become extinct in modern times...
and James Drewry
James Sidney Drewry
James Sidney Drewry was a British engineer, born at Clapton, London.-Family history:James Sidney Drewry was the son of Charles Stewart Drewry and Julia Fava Wood. He married Mabel May Hyde and they had two daughters, Barbara and Christine.-Career:J. S...
, both of whom had successful careers in commercial vehicle design and manufacture.
Its first product was the "Freighter", originally a multi-purpose flatbed truck
Flatbed truck
A flatbed truck is a type of truck which can be either articulated or rigid. As the name suggests, it has an entirely flat, level 'bed' body with no sides or roof...
notable for its tiny wheels and tiller-type steering, but it was soon adapted for refuse collection. SD soon became an established innovator in the field of refuse collection vehicle design, producing vehicles such as the Fore and Aft Tipper, which used a pivoting body to redistribute the load, and the Revopak
Revopak
The Revopak is a type of waste collection vehicle manufactured by the British company Shelvoke and Drewry.Introduced in 1971, the Revopak was in fact a British-built clone of a French Bennes-Ray Superpac...
of the 1970s which used a huge revolving fork to mutilate and compact refuse.
During the Second World War, like most British manufacturing companies, S&D's entire output was devoted to the war effort, producing aircraft parts, equipment for landing craft and tanks, and even a miniature submarine (the Welfreighter
Welfreighter
The Welfreighter was a Second World War British midget submarine developed by the Special Operations Executive for the purpose of landing and supplying agents behind enemy lines...
) at their Letchworth plant.
In the late 1970s, SD went head-to-head with its arch-rival Dennis
Dennis Specialist Vehicles
Dennis Specialist Vehicles is a major British coachbuilder and manufacturer of specialised commercial vehicles based in Guildford, England...
, and began manufacturing fire engines
Fire apparatus
A fire apparatus, fire engine, fire truck, or fire appliance is a vehicle designed to assist in fighting fires by transporting firefighters to the scene and providing them with access to the fire, along with water or other equipment...
through its newly-established Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) division.
In the 1980s, SD became part of the Dempster Brothers company of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, and continued to trade, under the name "Shelvoke Dempster", through the 1980s, although its product range diversified further into front-end loading dustcarts (based on Dempster's ubiquitous "Dumpster
Dumpster
A dumpster is a large steel waste receptacle designed to be emptied into garbage trucks. The word is a genericized trademark of Dumpster, a American brand name for a type of mobile garbage bin...
" system), as well as a licence-built version of Dempster's "Routechief" rear loading refuse body. The company was however plunging deeper into a financial crisis, and by the end of the 1980s, Dempster had pulled out. The remainder of the company was then absorbed into Dennis, and the "Dennis-Shelvoke" name continued briefly, but the company was effectively dead by 1992.
SD's demise was attributed to a number of factors - for instance the deregulation
Deregulation
Deregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain the operation of market forces.Deregulation is the removal or...
of waste collection in the 1980s meant that many municipal authorities subcontracted this activity out to private companies. SD's vehicles had traditionally been considerably more expensive than those of their competitors (largely due to their hand-built aluminium bodywork) and cost-conscious councils soon started investing in cheaper foreign vehicles. SD had also spent huge amounts trying to make money on the SPV venture, and fought an increasingly futile battle with Dennis
Dennis Specialist Vehicles
Dennis Specialist Vehicles is a major British coachbuilder and manufacturer of specialised commercial vehicles based in Guildford, England...
. SD tenaciously stuck with their Revopak continuous loading system for waste collection vehicles, which, although effective, was more expensive to operate due to higher fuel consumption, and authorities looked for cost-saving intermittent-loading dustcarts instead. Dennis launched their "Phoenix" range of sweep/slide style refuse compactor dustcarts in 1979, which, with their lower operating costs, quickly eroded SD's market share.
Despite the closing of the company, many hundreds of SD vehicles are still in service. For example, many fire engines are used at small provincial airports, and many developing countries use ex-British second-hand refuse collection vehicles, most notably on the island of Malta
Malta
Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...
.