The Competitor

By the time he quit school at 15, hardworking Derek Wiscombe had earned and saved enough money to buy out his former employer, an itinerant firewood dealer. During the next two years, with the help of an ancient wagon and an agreeable white mare named Gypsy, young Derek managed not only to get along, but to expand his business as well. Besides selling firewood in the Newcastle suburb of Jarrow-on-Tyne (guaranteed wagon-to-hearth delivery), he took on trucking jobs, even transplanted hedges.

Derek's own enthusiasm was unflagging, but aging Gypsy was not so durable. Some weeks ago, realizing that his old mare could no longer "pull the big loads

I want," Derek bought himself a secondhand truck. That meant applying to the Newcastle authorities for a carrier license.

Last week Derek's application for a trucking license was reviewed at a public hearing. Representatives of the district's biggest trucking companies were on hand to state their views on the undesirability of admitting a competitor to their ranks. "This boy," said a representative of powerful Tyneside Removals Ltd., "is the type that might well work right around the clock. In five years he might replace us in the town." Warned a lawyer for Pickford's Ltd.: "While I hardly think he is a threat to Pickford's, one must remember that my firm was also started by an enterprising young man with a horse and cart." With the big truckers' legal eyes boring in upon him, Licensing Authority John Hanlon found an easy way out of the impasse. Young Derek Wiscombe had worked too hard at his menial tasks to bother keeping his accounts straight, could produce' no documentary evidence that his services were needed. Hanlon forthwith denied the application.

Sadly Derek sold his truck, bought some ledgers, and went back to work with his horse and cart. Said he, in a forthright and unwitting commentary that revealed much about what is wrong with Britain's economy and its laws for the protection of the entrenched: "If they work as hard as I do, they've got nothing to worry about."

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