Even as a driver I quite regularly
did double days. Not to have eight hours off between shifts was definitely illegal.
But Speke was so desperately short of platform staff that the desk inspectors
were consistently forced to turn a blind eye to the rulebook. Otherwise a full
bus service in the south end would have been impossible.
One of our drivers, another buck king, did set the cat among the pigeons once.
He queried his wages and took the matter to Hatton Garden. We heard that one
of the big-wigs, the traffic manager himself, saw the bottom line on the driver's
pay slip and turned purple.
"How can a driver get more than me without breaking the law?" he wanted
to know. He couldn't, of course. So there followed a rigorous clampdown. In
future, overtime would be allocated by the book. And so it was, for probably
almost a whole week. But, when buses were being regularly left in the yard for
lack of crews, things soon settled back into the old routine. The desk inspectors
just had to be a little more circumspect and devious in their arrangements.
Bill Peters' story is a mine of information about the variety of buses serving
Liverpool in those days. And these are not just LCPT buses, but those of the
foreign invaders like Crosville, Ribble and St Helens Corporation. To me even
other LCPT depots were foreign territory. The only ones I ever saw were Garston,
PAR, Walton, Edge Lane and Dingle. They were all dark and miserable places,
dustier and more ancient than the trams for which they were built. They made
me appreciate my own bright and modern depot at Speke.
As Bill Peters says in his book, Speke was unique among Liverpool depots in
not allocating its platform staff to a particular route. We did all the routes
that came out of Speke—72, 78, 80, 81, 82 and 500—enjoying a rotation
of roads and crewmates that must have been the envy of other depots. Even the
desk inspectors enjoyed greater leeway and flexibility through the system.
One of the first characteristics I noticed about life on the buses struck me
quite forcibly. It seemed that not a day dawned without my hearing someone tell
someone else in the canteen that someone they both knew had died. At times it
seemed that the buses were the new Somme. It was depressing and perplexing until
I realised that these men had been drawn to Speke from a number of other south-end
depots. Between them they knew, or knew of, a considerable number of busmen,
a great many of whom were probably long retired. Also, I was young and had never
before worked with such a mature workforce. I adjusted and in the end got used
to hearing about the latest who'd run in to the Big Depot in the Sky.
If the other Liverpool depots seemed alien to me, so did the buses they drove.
Only once, thankfully, did I drive a preselector bus in service. I don't know
where it came from; I was given it for an extra. Not having driven one since
bus school I found the concentration it required quite sapping. Then there were
the Leylands and Daimlers, which were north end buses. I liked nothing about
them. Someone told me to watch out for the clutch on a Daimler, as it could
"spring out". I had no idea what that meant and certainly never experienced
anything like it, but I was made wary nevertheless.
The buses based in Speke were mainly the ugly bullnose AEC
Regent IIIs and the elegant
Regent Vs and a few of the intermediates which I presume were Mark IVs,
fleet-numbered A101
to A109. These intermediates looked like Regent IIIs but felt and sounded
like the Vs. They were often used on the 500 run, for which they were very suitable.
We had only those few of them, but I liked them.