At 90 years of age, Don Gordon is a true patriarch of Hauraki Plains and Thames Valley trucking. His sons Craig and Nigel are both well-respected transport engineers today.

Don’s career in trucking predates World War II and is a fantastic tale laced with the key attributes of men of his era – an eye for opportunity, graft, innovation, and above all else incredible resilience and stickability. It all starts in 1934…

I was born in Waitara in Taranaki, but I never lived there. My father, John (‘Jack’) and mother Edith moved up to Paeroa on the Hauraki Plains, taking work digging drains and clearing rushes for Rasmussen Brothers.” Don Gordon looks at the notes he’s prepared, and that alone says it all. If you’re going to do something, prepare and do it the best you can … even at 90.

“Prior to Taranaki, Dad had worked as a gold miner in Waiomu on the Thames Coast. He’d also been an apprentice jockey earlier on in Gisborne and rode in the Auckland Cup in about 1918.”

The move north brought them closer to Edith’s family – she was one of 10 children, four boys and six girls, to George and Annie Sarjant.

In 1905 George and Annie had moved from Paeroa onto a farm at Netherton, about 10km northwest of Paeroa over the Waihou River. Most linehaul and North Island truckers today will know it as the wee settlement with a school, Ballance Fertiliser store, and a deep drain immediately adjacent to SH2.

“She was the worker, that’s for sure. He was a Pom, a real dealer. He must have done okay at some point because in 1927 he bought a new Stewart 6 truck – G Sarjant and Son – and eight years later in 1935 he went to the States with the Rasmussen brothers where they saw Diamond Ts for the first time.

“The first Diamond T arrived home in 1936 and went to my father Jack, officially – J Gordon C/o G Sarjant. When the second arrived in 1937, Jack took that one and George’s son Gilbert the ‘36 model.”

Of George and Annie’s four boys (George, Joe, John, and Gilbert) it was Gilbert who had the eye for trucks and he was now under way as G H Sarjant operating out of Netherton. The work profile centred on rural support and servicing the local dairy factory to and from rail, and river ports where the finished product was shipped to Auckland. The business evolved and Sarjants Transport, as the high-profile brand Gilbert’s business would be best known as, commenced in 1945.

Netherton to Auckland was a three-hour trip back then, and uncommon as this might be in the context of New Zealand’s trucking history, Gilbert was not well served by the International trucks he ran. His father George strongly advised a change to Diamond Ts.

“World War II, halted the arrival of any new trucks, and it wasn’t until 1947 that my father replaced his truck with a brand- new Hercules-powered Diamond T 509. I still own the 509 today, along with a 221D and 80S. It runs beautifully. They weren’t big trucks by today’s standard, but my word they were big trucks then.”

At its peak the Sarjants ran approximately 14 resplendent examples of the Diamond T brand.

Keen as a razor

Don’s own driving career began in 1945 at age 11, driving a truck while his Uncle Joe trimmed hedgerows standing on a scaffold he’d erected on the back. Don quickly learned the benefits of smooth operation.

“I wasn’t allowed to drive until I had a trade, so I did a carpentry and joinery trade at Roberts Brothers in Paeroa. By 21, I’d had enough, and went back home to the business.”

While J Gordon and Sarjants Transport operated as independent transport companies, there was the obvious closeness being family, best exemplified by the common Sarjant signature base colour – bright red. The point of separation in the liveries was the stripe – the Gordon’s being white, and Sarjant’s blue.

In 1956 Don bought his father Jack’s business and within months became a subject of interest for the Transport Department.

“They gave me hell! The Diamond T on class 2 roads was allowed six tonne on the rear axle and four on the front – that gave you your 10. You guessed your weight while loading and they weighed you on the roadside. I needed to get out of the Diamond T to sort this out.

“We went to Auckland and stopped at Spencer Allen Motors in Manurewa. I told the chap who I was and that I was interested in buying a Commer. He said ‘No Mr Gordon, you’re too far away’. I said ‘that’s okay, if you don’t have any faith in your truck, I certainly don’t want one!’. Gilbert said ‘what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘I’m going to buy a Leyland’, and so went to Henry Smith at Leyland Motors in Ellerslie, and ordered a new Comet 105.”

Three months later it was here.

The Comet was a great machine … and so was Don. Together the pair were the dynamic duo. The rural work profile was different from that of his uncle, more farm gate to farm gate rather than supplier to farm gate. That said, Don wasn’t shy, and did win a coal contract to service Te Aroha Thames Valley Dairy Co factories in Te Aroha and Paeroa, ex the Clifton mine in Maramarua. This incurred the ire of the Gordon/Sarjant’s commercial arch rivals, the much larger Brennan & Co Transport based in Paeroa.

“I unloaded the trailer with a square mouth shovel and tipped the truck.”

Hand-loaded sand from the dunes of remote Whiritoa on the Eastern Coromandel, to putting 42,000 bales across the deck of the Comet in one summer with best mate and hay baling contractor Colin Mudford, Don Gordon was unstoppable. “Sixpence a bale ($1.38 in 2024) – tuppence (46c) for each of the two helpers, a penny (23c) for the bale loader, and the rest was mine. The Comet ran on the smell of an oily rag doing that also. I almost bought a second truck at one point.”

The call home

Don’s uncle John Sarjant was a bulldozer operator come engineer who spent much of his time in land clearing work until his bulldozer was seconded for World War II, succumbing to the clutches of the Pacific Ocean. He teamed up with Alan Dawson, forming Sarjant and Dawson Engineering, that would go on to become well-known transport engineering business Dawson Engineering on Hauraki Road Netherton. The business still flourishes today as Smythes Engineering Ltd under the ownership of brothers Warren and Nathan Smythe.

John’s untimely death at only 59 rocked the family and Gilbert called Don in to help. Sarjants Transport was now up to 14 trucks and Gilbert suggested Don sell his licences to Sarjants, take a shareholding in the business and come into the fold proper as No15. It was 1959.

“I was transport manager, tyre man, and general go-to. I have to say I really enjoyed it.”

The next six years would reflect a business run with passion and everything in its favour.

Cattle, freight, fertiliser, and the inputs and outputs from multiple dairy factories dotting the region including the big new Kerepēhi site. Cattle and dairy products to Auckland, freight and bagged fertiliser back. Oh, and carting the fertiliser bags in the cattle crates was common.

The original Sarjants Auckland depot was one bay in Stembridge’s Town and Country facility by Turners and Growers on the waterfront. Eventually it moved to the Strand, Parnell.

A fastidious owner, exemplary presentation, and a smart fleet. Sarjant’s was a ‘brand’ within the industry. Post the Diamond T years, Leyland became the marque of choice with Comets and then LADs, and Ergomatic cab variants dominating with their mammalian-based model designates reflecting the configuration – Beaver 4×2 and Hippo 6×4. Trucks, trucks and trailers, semis, and A-trains – they were all there.

The company had some real feathers in their cap over the time. The awarding of a Shell bulk fuel contract servicing the Hauraki Plains on the back of superior service in the drum and packaged products. They were also awarded a share of the NZ Co-op Dairy coal contract. “We did a portion of our allocated monthly tonnage every day,” says Don. “That way we weren’t trying to get it all done as the monthly deadline approached. When it came time for a restructure in the wake of smaller factories being closed, that approach served us well.

“I remember Saturdays were busy getting the fleet sorted out for Monday’s loadouts at the various sites. One time I had Neil Sunderland tow two trailers to Kerepēhi from Netherton (10km) with the second trailer only shackled on. Ray Watmough, the local traffic officer, saw him. Boy did I get a smack on the hand for that! Mind you, I saw Gilbert tow a three-axle trailer to the same location behind his Pontiac.”

Netherton was always home base, and in time some real innovations and amenities reflected the company’s success and soul. They had an early Toledo weighbridge to make sure farmers got just the right amount of fertiliser – useful for defending roadside weigh inaccuracies also.

Office manager Joe Weedon had been a coms man in the war and worked for the power board prior to Sarjants. He erected a super antenna that meant Don could talk to the fleet on the radio telephone wherever they were … as well as Invercargill, and the Hawke’s Bay. Far away carriers looking for their trucks would ask Don if he could call them so they could find out where they were.

Then of course real innovations like the famous spread three-axle coal trailer with its bevelled bins to prevent coal jumping out in transit or loading under hoppers. The 2.5m first to middle and 2.4m middle to third axle spread with lifting centre axle concept needed months of preapproval before getting the green light to build. They built it while waiting so final on-road sign-off could be done the day after the approval to build came through.

“It worked beautifully on the coal. We had three in the end, the coal trailer, a lift-out side unit, and a stock trailer. On the winding roads of the peninsula they weren’t so good. We could cart 26 tonne on class II roads with it.”

Although a lot of work was either licence exempt (Coromandel Peninsula), or exemptions had been won, there was no shortage of combat with the regulators. “We spent a lot of time in court and on one occasion even had Sir David Beattie QC acting for us.”

At the end of the day, it was all about culture and Sarjants had it in spades. Gilbert was happiest in the yard among the trucks and men and Don says his ability to spot something wrong on a truck was legendary. The ritual end of the week was being picked up by Gilbert, driving into Paeroa, everyone ordering fish and chips from a shop owned by a former employee, a few beers in the pub, then picking up the fish and chips for all to take home.

The uniform was a black singlet and shorts and every driver wore a badge with Sarjants Transport on it. At its peak the fleet numbered 26, and it was one of the great incubators of wheelmen who would go on to become legendary names in their industry and/or craft – Watchorn (Bert), Jordan, Peacock, Pennell, Mason, Harris, Slatter, Mathieson, Scott, Wriggly, Lees …

Hard work, long hours, and a charismatic leader. And then…

The bombshell!

“I hadn’t been told anything about it, but Gilbert had been talking to Brennan’s and a deal had been done. The fleets were coming together. I was devastated. It took the wind right out of my sails. Honestly, I shed a tear.”

It was October 1965 and the two great rivals in Hauraki Plains cartage, Sarjant’s Transport and Brennan and Co Transport, had merged to form Provincial Transport Ltd – its livery a blend of Brennan’s green and Sarjants red, with a white stripe as the mediator.

While such a coming together would raise few eyebrows today, six decades ago it was a big deal. Brennan’s was a bigger operation than Sarjants and dated back to the previous century. The combined number at the time of the merger well exceeded 60 trucks.

Don was made Netherton depot manager initially until the brand new state-of-the- art depot was opened on Grey Street Paeroa. He moved there to take up an operations management role. The facility is still there today as a multi-tenant transport hub on the left as you leave Paeroa heading north on SH2.

“I was operations, fleet, communications, accidents, and new ventures. The coming together was not without its tension and acrimony between the fleets, especially in Auckland where the Brennan’s depot became the new Auckland depot.

“It really did break Gilbert’s spirit in the end too. I remember him sitting at his desk one day, head in hands. By the early 70s I’d had enough. I was gone.”

At its peak Provincial Transport had 105 trucks and multiple depots throughout the greater region. It ran through until 1991 when it merged with Heatons Transport to become Provincial Heatons. That entity was bought by Thames Freightlines in November 1992, forming Provincial Freightlines.

Logging off and logging on

Provincial Transport had a small log truck operation established by Don around 1973 with an LAD Leyland (the truck is owned by the McLellan family now) fitted with log gear he’d sourced from Mike Lambert, and a Leyland Hippo TG6 Ergomatic cab model that Tauranga logging contractor Matt Hale had owned and used for a forest block at Whiritoa on the eastern Coromandel.

Joe Brenan had never been excited at the thought of a log division after a bad experience previously in Taumarunui. Two days after Don quit with nowhere else to go to, Gilbert visited and offered the opportunity to buy the log truck business.

“I scraped enough gold together to pay them, and off we went. DG Gordon Ltd.”

Based in Paeroa, and working from the New Zealand Forest Service, the Coromandel was certainly Tiger country for a couple of Leylands. The major client was the local Mataora Mill in Waihī which became the Smith and Smith mill in 1974.

But another truck was in the mix. “Unbeknown to a lot of people I had ordered a Kenworth when I was at Provincial Transport. But I ordered that in my name, because I knew somewhere along the line we were going to be into logging.”

Years earlier, Gilbert Sarjant had visited the Brisbane Truck Show and returned describing the massive trucks he had seen. ‘We’d never need anything like that here,’ he told Don. When the US equipment did start arriving on our shores in numbers, Don and some mates went to an expo held at Claudelands Showgrounds in Hamilton.

“There were these two big trucks. They were massive, and I said, ‘I’m going to own one of them one day’. That became my ambition.”

When the original Kenworth arrived, specced with a Cummins 350, 13-speed Roadranger, and a low-speed Rockwell back end for the Coromandel, Don went into Gilbert’s office and said ‘You better come and have a look at what I’ve bought’.

“He was just amazed. He’d never paid more than $21,000 for a new truck and this had cost me $44,600. We didn’t actually need three trucks at that time. Financially it was difficult, but I had a fantastic arrangement with a couple of local farmers and my finance company; we got along quite well.”

As they did everywhere else, the new generation of big trucks upended the norm. Previously formidable hills on the Coromandel like SH25A were now of little consequence. The Kenworth monstered the climb in around 10 minutes, compared with the LAD’s 28. Driver Ken O’Dwyer could pass Don in the LAD on the way over the range, unload at the customer site, put the trailer up, and then pass him heading back for the next load with Don still working his way over. “I was loaded to 32 tonne gross also and he was 40. When we went into the logging business I knew the only way to make money … was not with the Leylands.”

Interestingly, the big new addition to the fleet had one early issue, being an intermittent engine stop. “It could happen anywhere and anytime. It was traced to a bottle top planted in the fuel tank.” However, much bigger trials were just around the corner.

Two fires, the first in the Maramarua forest, followed some time later with the raising of the Mataora mill in Waihī, each brought the fledgling operations to its knees. Although each fire more-or-less triggered the end of a Leyland, the Mataora event was by far the worst, representing 60% of the company’s work. It called for desperate measures. First Don found work for his two men, then rolled up his sleeves and took work at the mill stacking timber and helping with the rebuild. His wife Carole worked locally, all in an effort to make ends meet and keep ‘the big red bonnet’ in play. And that they did.

The opening of the new Fletchers mill at Kopu near Thames in 1976 would have a significant impact on the region’s forest industry including DG Gordon Ltd. The mill’s arrival was impeccably timed in terms of the trucks that would serve its appetite for wood from the arduous topography around it.

A slight hiccup occurred six weeks into its life, when it was shut to correct issues that had revealed themselves in operation. This left a posse of highly leveraged contractors high and dry. “At four o’clock one afternoon I was told to be at Tauhara weighbridge [Taupō] at four o’clock the following morning. I had nowhere to stay and was told we were carting to Napier, followed by a local into Taupō, and one to Mt Maunganui in the afternoon – five days a week. Thankfully I had an old driver who worked for Deadman’s in Taupō, and I stayed with him.”

Daunted by the fact he’d only been to Napier once prior to this, the Kenworth certainly came into its own. “Especially with the low-speed diffs. I was rapt with those.”

Although it wasn’t Don’s fault that he was there, his presence wasn’t greeted with enthusiasm by everyone and on more than one occasion he was turned away from his assigned loadout skid, needing to ask for an alternative location.

He spent six weeks on the Taupō mission before returning home after the Kopu restart. The Smith and Smith mill in Waihī was also performing well by then. Don had a D Series Ford on site with an innovative swap body system servicing the mill’s needs.

As demand and reputation both soared, one Kenworth became two became three. The second W-Model (No.3) was a 1976 model – Don drove it from new; and the third (No.5) a 1977 W-Model – Ken O’Dwyer drove this originally. No.5 towed a three-bunk A-train combination, converted later to a dolly and trailer longs unit. In case you’re wondering, No.3 cost $78,000 and No.5 $99,000. Imagine trucks increasing in price by a half every 18 months now?

Don did actually intend for there to be four W-Model fleet trucks, however lead times on delivery became more than an issue and so a Bedford TM4400 (No.6) sporting 318hp Detroit Diesel 8V71 power found its way into this red and white Kenworth stronghold. It’s worth noting the TM was around half the price.

“It did a good job. The only thing was the original exhaust was underneath. I went to a firm in Thames to make up a muffler behind the cab and I couldn’t hear myself talk! So, I took it back and told them to take the original General Motors one apart and replicate it. It was better … I could hear myself at least. It was comfortable and quick, and with the suspension it had, it would go places the Kenworths wouldn’t touch.”

In 1978 Fletchers offered Don a contract based in the Bay of Plenty. Don took No.3 and moved into a caravan park at Mt Maunganui for a little over six months. “It was great fun, especially at Christmas.” Henry Lingman (Snr) tookover from Don and drove that truck as a fleet driver before signing up a new W-Model (No.7) as an owner driver. In time Henry moved on as an own account operator.

Long hours and the daily stresses of running a small business reached a zenith, and saw Don make a snap decision one day while having lunch at home in Paeroa. He had a two-loads-per-day contract servicing Smith and Smith from the Wairapakau Road area in the Kaingaroa Forest, weighing on the way home at the Waipa mill on the southern outskirts of Rotorua. Don and Ken would do one load each, sharing the early start of 1.30 – 2am. When Ken fell ill, Don found himself doing doubles day in and day out.

“An old mate Ken Ray walked in while I was having lunch between loads. He had a business up north with a partner running milk tankers. He asked me if I had a trucking business for sale for his partner, and I said ‘Yes!’

“As it turns out the guy was a bit smart, he crashed the truck, and I was never paid out entirely. Sometimes I regret the decision – life’s a bitch like that sometimes. I was getting tired. I know Craig was devastated but I wasn’t in the position to say to the boys, ‘here’s the business’.”

Building on the past

Don went back to his original trade, taking a job with Hawkins Construction building new cool stores at the Kerepēhi factory.

The family bought a place in Whitford as work plus dancing lessons for daughter Thyrl made Auckland a more logical option. Don lived there alone during the week for a year prior to the family moving up, and later they relocated into Papatoetoe. Don had been working for Hawkins based at the Glenbrook Steel Mill near Waiuku but then took on a role selling Michelin tyres for Avery Wood throughout Waikato and the Far North.

“When George Moore of Fletchers Transport passed away, his wife Heather and son Gary asked me to help so I moved into an operations role. That was hard going and after two years I was done.”

Barry Lunny at Modern Carriers got wind of Don’s availability and hired him into operations there. He stayed for two years also.

That role marked the end of road transport for Don Gordon. He spent his final 10 years back in building and construction for Hawkins. He worked for nine and a half years and on the international and domestic terminal build in Mangere, split with a six-month spell as quality control on a hotel build in Auckland Central. “I was 2IC – you name it, I did it.”

Retirement for Don and Carole has been back in the Bay of Plenty in Papamoa.

Don Gordon is testament to the adage good character is the result of effort, challenges, and great role models. Don has had all of that – a strong-willed man whose entire life was spent in the cut and thrust of operational and coalface roles, his only desire to do right by those he served, whether customer, business, or family.

Although the Kenworths lived up to expectations, when asked his favourite period in it all, he says, “Getting the brand new Leyland Comet. It was a real lift up.”

Hey, whoever forgets their first brand new truck, and when it’s able to live up to the ambitions you have, it’s better still.

Don Gordon – no time for stopping.

DG Gordon Driver Roll of Honour

• Leyland No.3 1966 Hippo LAD – Ken O’Dwyer, Don Gordon
• Leyland No.2 1971 Hippo TG6 Ergonomic cab – Ivan Carter
• Kenworth No.4 1974 W-Model – Don Gordon, Ken O’Dwyer, Rex Savage, Brian Hunt
• Kenworth No.3 1976 W-Model – Don Gordon, Eric Thorburn, Henry Lingman
• Kenworth No.5 1977 W Model – Ken O’Dwyer, Merv Sturmey
• Bedford No.6 1978 4400 – Don Gordon, Eric Thorburn
• Ford No.2 (year not known) D850 – Ivan Carter