Whitby Morrison, doing business as Whitby Specialist Vehicles Ltd, is a family-run British engineering company based in Crewe, Cheshire. It has been described as "the world's leading ice cream van manufacturer".
History
Bryan Whitby (13 May 1932 - 1 July 2016), born in Cheshire, started out as a bodywork apprentice at J. H. Jennings in Sandbach, and later did national service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. He subsequently worked again for Jennings and at Crewe's Rolls-Royce car works before joining Shavington-based S. C. Cummins in 1955,[1] working on ice cream vans and narrowboats. He worked with Sid Cummins to develop the Direct Drive System,[1] and, after establishing his own company in 1962, filed a UK patent in January 1965 for mobile ice cream producing equipment through which soft serve units were powered off the van's drive mechanism. He built his first ice cream van in 1965. All his ice cream vans afterwards followed this design, previously having a separate electrical generator. This system was known elsewhere as power take-off (PTO), and mostly found on