This 1955 advertisement shows how the London firm of Glover, Webb & Liversidge proudly traced its history back to 1720, when it was formed as carriage builders and wheelwrights. Archibald Liversidge, one of whose successors founded the company was a major figure of 19th Century science. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an early professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the University of Sydney.
Glover, Webb & Liversidge remained as body builders with the coming of the internal combustion engine. In 1932, the company introduced the moving floor refuse collection vehicle. This was fitted with a rubber belt floor that was hand operated. This type of vehicle was especially favoured by some of the central London Boroughs.
The company's premises were on the Old Kent Road in London S.E. 1. During the Second World War these premises were extensively damaged in air raids and had to be re-built on the cessation of hostilities. The Company continued as coachbuilders.
Glover, Webb & Liversidge offices in the Old Kent Road prior to the Second World War
The Royal Irish Coach renovated by Glovers in 1959
MOVING FLOOR REFUSE COLLECTORS
These inexpensive refuse bodies were extremely popular in 1930s Britain. A simple "endless" belt of steel slats formed the floor, being suspended on roller shafts at either end. Loading or unloading was facilitated by the crewman cranking the floor manually, with a gearbox providing multiple ratios depending on the weight of the load. The Transport Moving Floor by Glover, Webb & Liversidge was installed in both van-type bodies and semi-trailers. By 1934, a barrier was added to some models, which speeded load ejection at the tip.
Glover's moving floor returned after the war, when it was joined by an expanding lineup of improved refuse bodies offering a greater degree of compaction. It remained popular both as a standard refuse collector, and in the form of extra-large capacity bodies and trailers used for the transfer of municipal waste from central collection points to dumps located outside city limits.
A moving floor semi-trailer used by St. Marylebone in the mid-1950s
Typical moving floor bodies of the 1950s on Karrier trucks
THE TRANSPORT PROPELLER
The Transport Propeller was an advanced design introduced in 1936 by Glover, Webb & Liversidge. Refuse was loaded into an aperture at the front, then compressed and moved into the cylindrical body by twin Archimedean screws. A moving floor conveyor unloaded the body through barn doors at the rear. A novel feature was a positive ventilation system for the hopper to minimize dust. Ahead of its time, the expense of the Propeller may have ultimately been too much for the market of the 1930s.
THE LOADMASTER HYDRAULIC REAR LOADER
One of Glover, Webb & Liversidge's first post-war patents, was for the Loadmaster, a rear loading packer loosely based on the operating principle of the French Sovel system. The Sovel was among the worlds first hydraulic rear-load packers, introduced in the 1930s. Like the Sovel, refuse was first loaded was loaded over top of the packer panel into the hopper. Once the hopper was loaded, the mechanism was activated and overhead rams pivoted the panel forward and upward, pushing refuse from the hopper through a passage into the body. The Loadmaster differed from Sovel in its load retention. A set of prongs retracted during the inward sweep, then extended to retain the load within the body as the ram returned to the loading position.
The twin packing rams, mounted horizontally inside the upper rear section of the body, also functioned to open the packer/retainer plate assembly up and out of the way during unloading. The body was then tipped in the conventional manner. This arrangement greatly simplified the design and reduced weight, since the packing mechanism formed the tailgate, and the hopper was integral with the main body. Perhaps modest by modern standards, the Loadmaster nonetheless delivered superior compaction when compared with moving floor designs, and was relatively inexpensive to build.
1953 Loadmaster on a Karrier Bantam crew-cab
DUAL-TIP FORE AND AFT TIPPER
In the post-war period Glover Webb's product line was expanded to include their version of the fore & aft tipper, named the Dual-Tip. This followed the FAUN design, and was similar to the Shelvoke & Drewry F & A tipper, but did not have the latter's subframe, relying instead on channels attached to the body for forward tipping.
Dual-Tip shown unloading (left), and in upright tip for gravity packing
In addition to hand-loaded household collections, the Dual-Tip could also be used for commercial stops. The video above shows how a standard Palladin bin is emptied; the bin is first coupled to an aperture in the rear gate, then the body is tipped forward allowing the contents to fall in, an consolidating the load in the forward end.
Video courtesy of Michel Ferro
BLENHEIM REFUSE COLLECTOR
Replacing the Loadmaster in 1960, The Blenheim bore an outward resemblance to its predecessor, but featured a revised packer mechanism with a shallow packer blade guided by long vertical links pivoted at the roof of the tailgate. With this arrangement, the packer blade remained at constant angle as it swept the gently curved hopper floor. The hydraulic cylinders remained in the same location as the Loadmaster, mounted horizontally at roof level.
As is apparent from the drawing below, the Blenheim design delivered a packing action much like the "inverted drawer" type packers then in widespread use. However, through the use of the linkage-guided blade and overhead-mounted cylinders, the pronounced rear overhang of inverted drawer designs was eliminated, easing the loading burden of the crewmen. The concept would be more fully realized in the Ramillies model.
