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Bowker Group commercial director Neil Bowker talks to Steve Hobson about its long history
Lancashire haulier Bowker Group acquired Potter Logistics in 2016, making it one of the largest players in the field of specialist chemicals, healthcare and food logistics in the UK, with 200 trucks, 450 trailers, more than 1.1 million ft2 of warehousing and 450 staff.
Like Potter, Bowker is a family firm, founded in 1919 as WH Bowker when Billy Bowker snr returned to Blackburn from the First World War and bought his first truck. Almost 100 years on, the firm is owned and run by the Bowker family, as commercial director and grandson of the founder Neil Bowker explains.
"We were a Blackburn-based business moving cotton between the mills and Liverpool docks," Bowker says. 'We also moved fruit back from Liverpool docks to Blackburn and the surrounding East Lancashire markets.
"We got a big break in 1926 in the general strike. The fruit was at Liverpool docks and needed to be in the market, so we started one of the first overnight services to Covent Garden in London."
Along with the rest of the industry, WH Bowker was nationalised in 1949, at which point it had expanded the fleet to 85 trucks. In 1954, transport was denationalised and Billy Bowker started again with 15 demobbed vehicles.
"The business only survived in the interim as Bowker had warehousing," he says. "My grandfather was the BRS East Lancashire traffic manager but unfortunately he died in 1955. My father was only 11 at the time, and my uncle, who was in his first year in Dublin University, came back and took the helm of the business alongside his uncle Tom. The belief at the time was that the business would fail, but it's testament to him that it succeeded."
Bowker's unde Bill died aged 81 in September 2017 after 62 years at the helm.
Names can be confusing at the family firm, as Neil Bowker explains. "My grandfather was called William and known as Billy; my unde William was called Bill; my cousin William is cabed Bill; and my nephew is also William but called Will," he says. "I'm actually called Kenneth after my father, but my middle name is Neil so I'm...