It is awesome now, in what seem to be the twilight years of British manufacturing industry, to recall just how many factories there were in those days in the southern suburbs of Speke, Garston and Hunts Cross.

Dunlop's alone employed several thousand people and in due course became matched and surpassed by the car plants of Triumph and Ford. Factories lined Speke Hall Road, Edwards Lane, Woodend Avenue, Fleming Road, Goodlass Road and Speke Boulevard. There was Howard Ford's stocking factory in Woolton and Garston's "under the bridge" area boasted not only an industrial estate, but also a thriving docks system. There were dutch barn type storage buildings in the timber yard that were said to possess the largest unsupported spans in Europe.

Speke depot's services—and especially the peak time extras—served all these factories as well as feeding the shops and offices of the city. There was a difference, though. From the factories it was a short haul back to the depot, whereas those that had gone into the city faced a ten-mile journey, empty and unprofitable and using up valuable fuel. In the afternoon these same buses would trek back into the city, equally empty and unprofitable.

The wastefulness of this system was highlighted by the Suez crisis in 1956, when a solution became urgent. The answer came in the conversion of a bombsite at Cleveland Square, off Paradise Street, into a daytime bus park. Crews could dump their vehicles there after the morning rush and all get ferried back to their depots on one bus.

So, some of Speke's morning extras finished at Cleveland Square and some of its afternoon extras started there. Those crews would board a ferry bus to Cleveland Square. We were paid for our ferry time, of course, but the system nevertheless saved a lot of money in fuel costs.

Those rear loaders did nine or ten miles to the gallon and Speke depot was ten miles out of town.

Not all depots were that distant, but over the years Cleveland Square must have saved the corporation a considerable amount of money. Even so, Cleveland Square didn't completely eliminate the nine o'clock rat race of empty buses heading out of the city for their home depots at Garston and Speke.

Down Aigburth Road they would zoom, gas pedals to the floor, with the guards stretched out on the long seats.