BUSES

Back Seat Extractions

When the old double-decker buses broke down the back seat would be leant against the back of the vehicle. (This was because they did not have hazard lights.)

Bunching

The University of Manchester's Manchester Mark 1, was the first stored program computer. The Ferranti Mark 1 was a commercial version. Sir Tim Berners-Lees parents met while they were both working as programmers for it in the Tin Hut at Ferranti's Moston works in Manchester. His mother Mary (1924-2017) learned that she and other women were being paid less than their male co-workers. She was deputed to make the argument that they should receive the same rates. The management accepted the principle of equal pay. Following the birth of her first child, Tim, she worked from home. Among the programs she wrote was one that sought to address the phenomenon of bus-bunching .

During his 2016 campaign to become the Mayor of London the Labour politician Sadiq Khan made frequent use of the fact that his father drove the No. 44 bus. A couple of months later Sajid Javid, a Conservative M.P., was appointed to be local government minister. He was also a Moslem and the son of a bus driver. Khan commented You wait years for the son of a Moslem bus driver to turn up and then two come along at once.

Terminology

Hopscotch - buses on the same route that repeatedly overtake one another.

The maintenance of headway - either the grouping together of buses, or their separation.

Bus Garages & Works

Chiswick Garage

Matt Monro drove the No. 27 from Highgate to Teddington. He was based at Chiswick Garage. He went on to become an international renowned singer. In Britain he is best-remembered for having sung Born Free (1966).

Chiswick Works

Chiswick Works in Gunnersbury had a training school for bus drivers. The facilities included a skid pan and a laboratory. The site was linked to Acton Works, the underground facility, by a foot bridge. The Works closed in 1988.

Location: 100 Bollo Lane, W4 5LX

Fullwell Bus Garage

Fullwell Bus Garage had a sports ground for its workers. During the winter its pitch was used for football and during the summer for cricket. There was also a bowling green. In the 1980s a D.I.Y. store was built on the grounds.

Location: 82 Wellington Road, Twickenham, TW2 5NX

Holloway Bus Garage

Holloway Bus Garage in Pemberton Gardens is the largest bus garage in Europe.

Location: 37a Pemberton Gardens, Archway, N19 5RR

Bus Stops

The bus stop was invented by Thomas Tilling (1825-1893), who ran a bus service that ran from Peckham to Oxford Circus. It helped his service run to a timetable.

Bus Shelters

Double-decker buses are operated along the No. 55 bus route. In 2010 it was the case, as it had been for a number of years, that the roofs of the bus shelters along its course had had decorated potatoes placed upon them. These could not be seen from street level but could be appreciated from the upstairs deck of the 55.

Bus Travel

Princess Alice of Athlone

Princess Alice of Athlone used to live in Kensington Palace and do her shopping in Piccadilly. She used the No. 9 bus to do so.

Location: Kensington Gardens, W8 4PX (purple, white)

Twirlies

Bus drivers are reputed to call users of London Transport 60+ Oystercard twirlies . This is because many of them try to board buses before 9:00 a.m.. When challenged on their attempted abuse of the system, they enquire Am I too early?

Class

Early bus routes were aimed at the affluent middle-class. With time, new routes were developed for the less affluent middle-class. In the 1880s they became mass market.

See Also: CLASS

The Man On The Clapham Omnibus

The phrase the man on the Clapham omnibus was coined by the journalist Walter Bagehot while he was trying to explain the British constitution. It appears to have gained wider currency after being used by the barrister Sir Charles Bowen K.C. during a case in 1903.

Location: 12 Upper Belgrave Street, SW1X 8BA. Bagehot's home. (red, orange)

Deregulation

John Hibbs (1925-2014) was the son of a Congregationalist minister. He became a convinced pacifist. He studied social studies in Birmingham. While doing so he worked on buses. He took an M.Sc. at the L.S.E. in 1954. His dissertation concluded that the transport system needed to be restructured. He became a partner in a rural bus business in Suffolk. The industry was in decline. The firm was acquired by a rival. He went to work for British Rail. Based at Liverpool Street Railway Station, he researched rail traffic in the Eastern Region. He became frustrated at the industry's unwillingness to change. Therefore, Hibbs accepted an invitation to set up Britain's first undergraduate transport studies course at the City of London College (now London Metropolitan University). He moved to Birmingham Polytechnic (Aston University). Politically, the academic was a Liberal. He became a transport adviser to the party.

Hibbs became convinced that the flaws in Britain's bus services derived from the fact that the National Bus Company was a state-owned monopoly. Passengers tended to be regarded as a nuisance by transport managers. Hibbs believed that if bus provision should be responsive to local needs individuals should be able to own and run buses. The Liberal Party proved to be unreceptive to his ideas. He advocated privatisation of buses through think-tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute. His ideas gained traction within the Conservative Party. The Transport Act of 1980 deregulated the long-distance coach market. Nicholas Ridley the Transport Secretary took to wandering around bus garages, asking bus drivers if they wanted to own the vehicles that they drove. The Transport Act of 1985 deregulated bus services outside of London. Chaos ensued. Consolidation ensued. The industry came to be dominated by half a dozen large companies. This state of affairs was not a fulfilment of Hibbs and Ridley's vision. Hibbs advised John Major on privatisation of the railway industry. He argued that infrastructure and service provision should be vertically integrated. However, in the light of a Brussels directive, the government opted to split track and services from one another.

Location: Liverpool Street Railway Station, Liverpool Street, EC2M 7PY (red, pink)

The London School of Economics, Houghton Street, WC2A 2AE (blue, brown)

Destinations

Bus destinations on the front of buses often used to be pub names on them, e.g. Bakers Arms. In 2008 it was the case that they had supermarkets .

See Also: PUBS

The Edible Bus Route

Starting in Lambeth, a group of guerrilla gardeners have been seeking to create a series of food gardens along the full length of the No. 322's bus route.

Website: https://theediblebusstop.com

Night Buses

Night buses tend to run along the older, longer bus routes. In the early 1990s the routes daytime services were split into shorter lengths along which buses were better able to keep more closely to their timetables.

See Also: NIGHT

The No. 7 Ghost Bus

Since the 1930s the driverless, lit-up No. 7 ghost bus is occasionally sighted around Cambridge Gardens and St Mark's Road, North Kensington.

See Also: GHOSTS

Numbering

George Dicks of London Motor Omnibus Company introduced the practice of numbering bus services. The first one was the No. 1, which originally ran from Cricklewood to the Elephant & Castle. Over the years that have been various changes to the service over a length that stretched from Edgware to Bromley Common. The Aldwych to the Elephant service is part of the original route.

In 1920s the Metropolitan Police took over authorising of bus routes.

Routemasters

The mechanical engineer Bill Durrant had been put in charge of London Transport s bus policy in the 1930s. During the Second World War he had used his expertise to design the Centurion tank. In the post-conflict era London Transport appreciated that cars were becoming more comfortable to travel in. It decided to respond to this development by improving the experience for passengers who were riding on its vehicles. In 1951 Mr Durrant assembled a team at L.T. s Chiswick Works to develop the Routemaster, a bus that would address the problem.

The group included Eric Ottaway, who during the war had worked in the London Aircraft Group. This experience had enabled him to develop expertise with regard to the manufacturing of lightweight structures. Durrant appointed Colin Curtis to design the mechanical aspects of the vehicle.¹ Douglas Scott was given responsibility for styling both the bus's external appearance and its interior design.

The Routemaster's aluminium body was fixed onto a chassis-less structure that was composed of small subframes. This made the bus a quarter of a ton lighter than its antecedent had been. Therefore, it could be run more economically than had been the case with the previous generation of vehicles. The internal layout enabled it to seat more passengers than its predecessors had been able to. For the drivers the power steering, hydraulic braking, independent suspension on each wheel, and automatic transmission made the bus easy to drive. Its maintenance could be conducted swiftly thereby enabling it to spend more time on the road than its forerunners had been able to.

The first prototypes went into service in 1956. Two years later commercial production began. It ended in 1968. By then 2876 Routemasters had been built.

At the end of 2005 the final regular Routemaster service - the 159 - ended. Subsequently, two heritage routes were established to meet demand from the public to have the opportunity to travel on the bus.

Thomas Heatherwick designed the Modern Routemaster that was launched in 2012.

Website: https://routemaster.org.uk (The Routemaster Operators & Owners Association)

¹. Somewhat curiously Mr Curtis's love of buses had been engendered by a childhood accident. While he had been cycling, one of the vehicles had run him over.

George Shillibeer

George Shillibeer (1797-1866) was a coachbuilder who set up London's first bus service.

Location: Shillibeer Place, W1H 4DR (orange, yellow)

Steps To Health

In the years that followed the Second World War Britons began to die of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers. The Medical Research Council's Social Medicine Unit's Director Jerry Morris set up a study to investigate the level of coronary seizure rates in different occupations.

In 1949 Dr Morris noticed that his data had revealed that age-for-age bus drivers had markedly higher rates of heart attacks than did the vehicles conductors. The former were sedentary, whereas the latter climbed at least 500 steps every working day. This was the first clear evidence of there being a connection between being physically active and reducing the likelihood of suffering a cardiac arrest. Morris's study had involved thousands of men. However, he was wary of treating the link as being proof. His initial findings were corroborated by data for postal workers. This showed how sedentary ones, such as counter clerks, had demonstrably more heart attacks than did the postmen who spent their working days delivering letters and parcels.

Morris s paper Coronary Heart-Disease and Physical Activity of Work was published in The Lancet in 1953. The idea that health and exercise might be connected to one another can be traced back in the history of medicine to Hippocrates (c.460-c.370 B.C.), however, it was this article that provided the first scientific evidence of the correlation between them. In the United Kingdom its findings were met with widespread disbelief. The newspapers poured derision upon his conclusion and the large majority of cardiologists chose to ignore his work. However, the value of the findings was appreciated in the United States and with time the paper was given its due in Britain.

For a subsequent study, London Transport supplied the researcher with information about the different sizes of trousers that were worn by its bus drivers and conductors. This data revealed that the latter tended to be thinner than the former. However, he was able to establish that body shape was not the factor that determined the level of risk but rather it was the degree of vigorous physical exercise that a person undertook.

Location: The Central Middlesex Hospital, Acton Lane, Park Royal, NW10 7NS.

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Keppel Street, WC1E 7HT. The Unit migrated from the Central Middlesex Hospital to the London Hospital in 1956. Eleven years later it settled at the School. Formally, Dr Morris retired in 1978. However, he continued to work until a few weeks before his death in 2009. (orange, turquoise)

Website: www.lshtm.ac.uk

Sunken Buses

The vehicle manufacturing business Leyland Motors agreed to sell 42 buses to Fidel Castro's Cuban regime. The deal was supported by two successive Prime Ministers - Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Wilson. However, the United States government took against the deal and chose to regard it as being a breach of the trade embargo that it had placed upon its southern neighbour.

In 1964 the buses were loaded onto the East German freighter the M.V. Magdeburg at Dagenham. The boat set sail. However, off Broadness Point, the Yamashiro Maru, a Japanese vessel, collided with her. The German craft sank, taking her cargo with her. Leyland bore the financial loss. No inquiry was conducted into what had happened. A view sprang up that the C.I.A. had been responsible for the Yamashiro Maru's action. The pilots logs disappeared.

The buses were salvaged from the deep. This was done by pumping hundreds of thousands of ping-pong balls into their interior spaces.

David Backhouse 2024