In September, Matthew, who has been a taxi driver since 2011, was presented with the International Association of Transport Regulators’ Driver of the Year award, for raising more than £11,000 to help
Ukrainian refugees.
He set up a gofundme page and organised a trip to Poland to deliver humanitarian aid to refugee camps set up near the Ukrainian border. He explains: ‘One night on TV I saw a guy who had done a trip to Ukraine and thought “if he can do it, I can too”. I kept telling myself “it’s just a drive”, so I called some friends and started putting the word out.’
Matthew and his team finally ended up with seven cabs, one car and one van loaded with necessities such as nappies and sanitary products on the four-day trip, covering 2,500 miles. ‘It went by in a flash,’ he recalls, ‘and it seems surreal but amazing for all of us. When we drove from Warsaw to Lublin and dropped off the first load of parcels, the people couldn’t believe all these electric taxis were reversing in to unload.’
The convoy then picked up families from a refugee centre and drove down to Berlin. The family allotted to Matthew consisted of a mother and her son and daughter. Their flat had been bombed out, the husband was on the frontline and the daughter was very distressed.
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John, another cabbie acting as co-driver, started to do magic tricks and promised a trip to McDonald’s to distract her. ‘They were so grateful,’ Matthew recalls, ‘they wanted to pay for stuff, but we told them we had raised enough money.
‘It makes me feel humble having got this award, you never do these things in order to get things back and when they told me I had won I thought it was a joke. It’s not about recognition but I’m very happy to have got it. It wasn’t just me it was the other guys around me and if you pick the right people, you can achieve anything.
I like to think we did something good. It was good for us, and it was good for the trade, and I felt privileged to be a London taxi driver going through Europe.’
Going forward, Matthew wants to continue as a taxi driver and wants to do the taxi tourist guide training so he can share his knowledge of London with the many holidaymakers he meets working out of Heathrow. ‘People get so excited about being in a London taxi, I’ve never met anyone who says they don’t like the city and they all say they can’t wait to come back again.’
He would also like to continue his charity work and says: ‘When you give to someone else, it’s the most rewarding thing in the world. I’d say to other drivers if you want to do it go and do it – if they tell you you can’t do something, tell them you can. It’s like the Knowledge; people say you can’t do it, but if you don’t give up you can’t fail. If you really want to do it, you can.’
Matthew would like to thank Lee, Ben, John, Andrew, Alex, Terry, Louis, Ian and the two Richards for their involvement in the trip.
