BILL PETERS spent ten years guarding and driving buses for Liverpool Corporation Passenger Transport department. Some time ago he was invited to submit an article on his experiences to an enthusiasts' magazine. It was so well received that he was persuaded to do more. His book of memoirs, Busman, is the result.
The publisher's blurb says: "Here is a rare insight into a vanished way of life." And it's true. The book has such a wealth of anecdote that it must be interesting even to those who have never or only rarely travelled on a bus. But for those who remember the old rear-loader buses it's a fascinating tale, and especially for old codgers like me, who actually worked on them.
Bill Peters' reminiscences awakened memories of my own of this "vanished way of life". It was a time when buses had no doors and no heaters and an open platform that enabled passengers to drop off at a convenient corner. To boarding passengers the driver was nothing more than a crouching hermit skulking in the half-shadows of his isolated cab. Which was how it should be. If the passengers ever became aware of him it meant he wasn't doing his job properly. The guard was right there among them, though. Some of them were personalities who felt it their duty to lighten the passengers' daily trudge to work.
In the days of sailing ships the rule for crews working aloft was "one hand for the ship and one for yourself." Bus guards, though, needed both hands for the job of issuing tickets and counting change. As a consequence the guard was most often seen, or felt, by his passengers as nothing but an intrusive butt. For most guards one hand was permanently disabled as a steadying device by his habit of carrying a line of pennies in it. This often left a green patina on the skin of the palm. In these pages I refer to conductors generally as masculine. We did have a few clippies—and they were always a pleasure to work with—but they represented only a tiny majority of platform staff of those days. And there wasn't a single woman driver.
According to the dates given in Bill Peters' book he and I served at Speke depot at the same time. I was there two and a half years, from late 1960 to May 1963, only the first six months of which was spent as a guard. It's only in that short time that Bill and I could have crewed the same bus and, with the way the rota sheets contra-rotated, that might have happened only once or twice. Afterwards we might have nodded as we passed on the road or exchanged a few words while queueing for sausage toast in the canteen, but that would be about it.
Nor did I socialise much while I was on the buses, as I was generally too busy grabbing overtime. I visited the recreation club at Finch Lane only once and even my own family didn't see much of me. I was what we called a buck king.
These are some notes of my own memories of that time. It's not a chronologically structured document, like Bill Peters' book, but odd jottings as they occurred to me. I hope they are of some interest, though.

Bill's book is fascinating because it mirrors the hours in the canteen when the old hands would gather to swap stories. That these stories related to life on the trams as much as the buses may seem very dating now, but it also reflects the undying quality of the stories. It does make me feel old, though, knowing that Liverpool's last tram ran only three years before I joined the buses. It is an indication of Bill Peters' interest in the job that he wangled a one-off duty guarding a tram before they finished. It's that sort of interest in the job that shines through the pages of his book. It seems ironic that Liverpool is now hitching its transportation future not only to a new breed of tram, but intends to crew it with a two-man team. The conductor returns.
Bill Peters' story of life on the buses is both poignantly familiar to me and, at the same time, new and informative. As I say, Bill took a real interest in what he did and in the broader aspects of the job and his book shows it. It recalls for me many things I had forgotten and tells me very much more that I never knew. I must confess to the enthusiasts that I didn't have that sort of interest. To me, being on the buses was just a means to an end, the end being to get a good deal of money quickly. Surprising as it may seem, that was quite easy at Speke depot, provided you were prepared to work all the overtime that God and the desk inspector provided. I needed to raise the deposit for a house quickly and virtually from scratch.
At the Labour Exchange in Garston there was a notice advertising vacancies for bus conductors at a basic weekly wage of £9 3s 9d (£9.18).
"That's not much," was my initial response to the clerk.
"But you can easily double that with overtime," he replied, pointing out that: "Speke depot is twenty five per cent under strength, so there's plenty of overtime."
"What about Garston?"
Garston depot would have been very much more convenient, as I lived just off Long Lane.
"No, Speke's the place to be." So Speke it was.
The first thing I found there was that nearly everyone was working a seven-day week. We were booked in on our off-duty days unless we specifically asked for the time off. The same applied to the overtime extras that were attached to normal duties. Again, anyone not wanting to work such an extra was expected to give the desk advance notice. So I became a buck king.
One week I took home £27, three times my nominal gross basic pay. That was quite a week. It included one day on which I worked not only two full shifts, an early and a late, but also squeezed in an afternoon extra. I didn't mean to, but the extra was offered and I found I could do it, so I did. I think that was actually illegal, even for a guard, and I did it only once.
But one young guard outdid me by working a full-blown triple day. He was booked to take out an early 81. Before he left the shed at a little after four o'clock in the morning he accepted an offer to do a late—another 81 duty and, by coincidence, on the very same bus. When he finished his early duty he found that his relief hadn't turned up. So he carried on for another trip, still no relief, then another. Soon he had done the entire middle. Now, having already done a double day, he was his own relief for the late. So he topped the day off by doing the late as well and accomplishing what surely must have been a record, a triple day. He had taken the bus out at four in the morning and stayed on it all day before running it in after midnight. Some going! I'd like to have seen his wage slip for that week, or the faces of the pay clerks who worked it out. He was philosophical about it. "It saved me lugging my box around," he told me.

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.

There were also a few old Crossleys at Speke. In my time they were no longer used in regular service, but relegated to extras duties. By far the best of our buses were the Regent Vs, fleet-numbered A200 and upwards. There were some, mainly older, drivers who claimed to prefer the Regent IIIs to the more modern bus. To me their preference was incomprehensible and they were welcome to them. One of the best of the Regent Vs, A267, has been preserved.
Before I joined the department I'd never been on board a 72 or an 81. Fortunately, though, I was at least familiar with the roads that comprised their routes. The 500, though, was a different matter. I was all right up to Longmoor Lane, but Kirkby was a closed book to me, especially the twisting route taken by the 500. At any depot other than Speke this wouldn't matter. The guard would have years and years in which to become familiar with the route. At Speke, though, we had only months.
When I was accepted for driving school it occurred to me that I had better start memorising 500's Kirkby route. One drawback was that 500 duties were comparatively rare and another was that each duty provided only two trips to Kirkby. I had to knuckle down quickly. So, from then on, once we left Longmoor I spent as much time as I could peering through the front window trying to memorise the route from the viewpoint of the driver.
As it turned out, navigating Kirkby was a doddle compared with some of the football extras. These almost invariably included stretches of the Walton, Everton and Anfield hinterland I'd never covered even as a guard. Then I would rely on signals from a hopefully more experienced guard or, as a last resort, from the passengers.
Speke's short qualification period had other hidden drawbacks as well. One time when I was driving an 81 from Bootle to Speke I started getting a faint and occasional ringing in my ears. Actually, it was more like a clanking. It seemed to be coming from the back of my bus, but since I'd checked we weren't dragging anything I had no idea what it was. One of our drivers was waiting at the Hunt Cross Hotel stop and he came round to the cab.
"Don't you know you've got a rear wheel deflate?" he informed me. "Can't you hear the rings clanking?"
Rings? No one had told me anything about rings. It was an inner rear tyre that had deflated, so I couldn't see it; neither could I feel any difference in the handling of my lightly-loaded bus. That was the only rear wheel deflate I ever experienced, although I did suffer three front wheel blowouts—and I mean blowouts, with an appropriate bang—in fairly rapid succession. It was so rapid in fact, within little more than a month, that I became concerned enough to express my concern in writing to the office. Fortunately, but only by coincidence, I was travelling only slowly on each occasion. I was either pulling into a stop or just pulling away. I remember being told that those tyres were pumped up to seventy pounds pressure. Whether that's right or not, they certainly went with an almighty bang when they blew. There was a legend that a garage fitter had been cut in half when the tyre of a wheel he was inflating blew off the rim. The story was that he had leaned the wheel against a wall and was standing too close to it.
Another legend I heard was the one Bill relates about the bus that bumped into the wall of the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board's building at the Pier Head. In the version I heard the bus was an 80, parked up in first gear with the handbrake off, and was hit by a U-turning 86. As Bill says, the impact jump-started the 80 and it mounted the pavement. In the story I heard it didn't demolish the wall, but nudged it gently until being halted by a more substantial pillar, which stalled the engine. And that's where the perplexed crew found it when they emerged from the Crosville canteen. I'll defer, however, to Bill Peters' version. He not only has notes and diaries to which he can refer, but also a demonstrably better memory.

Deliberately stalling the engine, incidentally, was the generally preferred way of shutting it down. There was a choke that would cut off the fuel supply, but it was comparatively slow. It also sometimes stuck shut, or so I was warned by older drivers. So, rather than risk losing a good bus, I always shut down the engine by letting in the clutch with my right foot hard on the brake.
The canteen was a great place for swapping tales. And the best opportunity was on one of the early morning stand-by duties, the first of which was at 0400. We could be in the canteen for an hour of so on one of these stints, with nothing to do but yarn. Out they would come, one tale after another, honed, polished and, it must be said, embellished, by years of competition with other busmen's yarns.
One memorable raconteur was a driver known as "Flash". If I ever knew his Christian name I don't remember it now. He was "Flash" to everyone. Flash was not only a plausible and gripping storyteller, but an accomplished magician and sleight-of-hand artist as well. I well remember, late one night on a staff bus, Flash performing some of his repertoire with a pack of cards. He stood in the aisle facing backwards, swaying with the movement of the bus. We, his audience, sat all around him and his hands were only inches from our faces as he performed. And still we couldn't see how he did it. His jokes, repartee and legerdemain came in handy on private hires and would result in a hatful of tax-free tips. He would remove the bulkhead window so he could entertain his saloon audience even while on the move.
Flash was also a superb snooker player. I was once drawn against him in the first round of the depot's annual knockout competition. I was given a start of 47, possibly the most generous in the competition, and he was scratch. Incredibly, I beat him by, I think, a single point. It was my fifteen minutes of fame before being whitewashed in the next round by someone not half as good as Flash.
I was not one of the elite drivers who were trusted with private hires. The nearest I came to that sort of thing was driving a sightseeing tour around the docks. My memory of it is very hazy now and I think I did it only once. Liverpool's dock estate at that time was already in decline, yet was still huge and dynamic. The Overhead Railway, the traditional way for the public to view the docks, had been demolished and the sightseeing buses were the LCPT's attempt to fill the gap. I have no idea how I managed to navigate the labyrinth of basins and warehouses. Someone must have sketched out the route for me. Anyway, I did it without incurring any major disaster, which I'm sure I would have remembered.
That must have been a bit of buck, and pretty soft too. But not so soft as that presented to me by courtesy of Flash's son, Terry, who was also driving at Speke. It was late one morning and I'd finished an early. As I passed the desk I heard an inspector say that he needed a driver straight away. I volunteered and he told me that Terry had suffered a front wheel blow-out on an 80 in Banks Road, Garston. He'd hurt himself somehow and couldn't continue the duty. There was a bus leaving the depot with fitters and a replacement wheel on board. Get on it and use that bus to complete Terry's duty. In Banks Road we found Terry nursing a sprained wrist and his bus half on the pavement. The front nearside blowout had slewed the bus against the kerb, which jerked the steering wheel and twisted his wrist. I looked at his running board and decided the only way I could catch up with his schedule was by running out of service to the Pier Head and picking up from there. Which is what I did. The juicy bit was that Terry's duty then finished at Woodend. So, for only half an hour actually in service I was rewarded with four hours' pay at time-and-a-half.

Like his dad, Terry was also a great teller of jokes. His timing and delivery would have made a stand-up comedian of him, but for one serious impediment: he had a lousy memory. It wasn't that he couldn't remember the jokes, but that he couldn't catalogue them in his mind. Once he was prompted with a few cue words he would click in and deliver the joke faultlessly and without hesitation. Fortunately, though, he had a close friend whose problem was the exact inverse. His mind teemed with jokes, but he was lousy at telling them. So, between the two of them, they made a great act.
This friend, Yozzer, lived in a flat in a large house in Darby Road, Grassendale, which some Garstonians may remember for its peculiar roof. It was shaped like an aircraft hangar and made of corrugated iron, which was now entirely rust-coloured. I guess it was a utility or wartime replacement of the original roof. Terry and I had been visiting Yozzer. As we were leaving, probably sometime after midnight, we smelt smoke in the air as soon as we stepped onto the landing. We could see it hanging in the air like a veil. So we started banging on doors to wake the residents and find out where the smoke was coming from. Most tenants answered quickly enough, then huddled in their doorways in their nightclothes waiting to see how serious it was. One tenant, though, was particularly slow in answering. We persisted until he opened his door a crack.
"No, no fire in here," he muttered, and shut the door again. Then, after a moment, he opened the door again and called us back.
"It's in here," he said. And now we could see, in the darkness behind him, a pall of thick smoke. "In the bedroom," he added, pointing the way.
We rushed in and found the smoke was coming from his mattress. The only thing we could think of doing on the spur of the moment was to open a window and throw it out. As soon as it hit the fresh night air it burst into flames and fell like a fireball into the garden below, where it burned furiously. As we opened every window in the flat to let out the thick smoke it seemed incredible anyone could have been oblivious to either the smoke or the fact that the mattress on which he was lying was smouldering. It was the old story, of course. He'd had a few drinks and gone to bed with a last cigarette. It damned nearly was his last.
Terry was the one who performed the amazing and, as far as I know, unique trick of losing both rear view mirrors in the one incident. Bus mirrors were necessarily large and protruding, so it was not unusual for one to get clipped and broken, but I never heard of another instance where two went at the same time. It happened when he was driving a 500 to Kirkby. Terry had just passed Everton Valley and climbed the incline on Walton Road to the left bend at the cinema. On this bend, outside the cinema and recessed into the pavement, was a bus stop. And just as Terry got there a bus was already pulling out. No panic, though. There was room for both of them and Terry continued overtaking. Coming the other way, however, was a city-bound bus, which by coincidence was also being overtaken, in his case by a lorry. Still no problem. So long as everyone steered straight there was room for all. But that wasn't good enough for Sod's Law, which decreed that at that precise moment a private car would roar down one of the side roads to Terry's right and screech to a stop just short of the main road.
The bus driver reflexively swerved away from the car's bonnet, forcing the lorry driver to do the same, thus closing Terry's space. It was too late for anyone to brake. Terry closed his eyes and heard some sort of contact. He opened his eyes, expecting to see one or both sides of his bus rolled back like a sardine tin. For a brief uncomprehending moment he looked from one side to the other, baffled that he couldn't see anything of his bus. Both were folded back and the glass shattered. Unusually for a bus legend, this one could at least be independently verified by the fitters at Walton's Spellow Lane garage, where he pulled in for a replacement vehicle.

One night shortly after I started the job I was guarding an 80. My driver and I had our feet up at the Pier Head and were nattering. We must have been moaning about our rates of pay, prompting him to comment:
"My lad's getting more money than me now."
"Huh-huh?" I replied. "What does he do?"
His exact words, I remember, were: "Oh, he's in one of these 'ere skiffle groups."
Being young, I was interested. "Oh yes? What are they called?" I asked.
"The Beatles," he replied. "Only they spell it BEA..."
"Oh, right. That's clever," I replied. I'd never heard of them. "And catchy. I like it."
My driver was Harry Harrison, the father of George, and his son's "skiffle group" in that winter of 60-61 was still a few years away from becoming the Fab Four.
"They've just turned down ten quid from a club in Southport," Harry told me. "Ten quid! They said it's not enough."
He sounded incredulous and I empathised with him. It was a bit of cheek for some kids banging away at a guitar, a washboard and a tea chest to turn down ten quid.
I don't remember being paired with Harry again before I became a driver myself. But whenever we bumped into each other he'd update me on his lad's progress. He seemed to be doing well, so I presumed that somewhere along the line they must have bought themselves some proper instruments.
It was while guarding another 80 that I had a strange, but not unpleasant experience. The outward 80 turns left from Rose Lane into Templemore with a stop just a few yards further on. My habit at this point was to wait on the platform until I could see if there was anyone waiting at the stop. If not, I would belt upstairs for the fares of those who had got on in Rose Lane. And that's exactly what I did on this occasion. No soon had I taken my first step, though, than the world went suddenly dark, and warmly fragrant. I'd put my head right up a young woman's skirt.
She'd obviously come half way down the stairs and then stopped, waiting for the bus to negotiate the corner. I hadn't heard her footsteps. The skirt she was wearing was high fashion at the time: knee-length and flounced out with several underskirts. There wasn't any actual body contact, honest, m'lud, but it must have been rather startling for the young woman. She couldn't have seen me coming, not with that skirt blocking her view. Pleasant as this memory now is, it was quite embarrassing at the time and thereafter I made sure I looked where I was going.
As a buck king I spent so little time in bed that I soon picked up the knack of catnapping, something that I had never mastered before. I'd always found it hard to drop off before this, even in a comfortable bed. Now, though, I could zizz no matter where I was. One time it happened while I was guarding a very early 72 out of Speke—and standing up! It was cold and dark as we trundled slowly down Menlove on our first trip, picking up no one at all. I propped myself against an upright rail well inside the saloon away from the platform draught and soon succumbed to the soporifically monotonous growl of the engine. My head sank onto my chest and I was away, hands in pockets and still standing up. It was only when the driver braked for the Queens Drive junction that I awoke, wondering where the hell I was.
The junction of Queens Drive and Allerton Road was known as the Allerton Maze. The name was earned by the series of interconnected roundabouts built at the junction, although it might apply also today to the plethora of Speke—andphased traffic lights that have replaced them. Liverpool at that time was well endowed with roundabouts and I, for one, mourn their passing and replacement by damnable Speke—andphase traffic lights. If roundabouts were a recent invention they'd undoubtedly be hailed by council whiz kids as the right-on way to go. As it is, traffic lights are the toys for the boys. But roundabouts have many virtues. They need no maintenance and are appropriate to any amount of traffic, light or heavy, in the daytime or at night. One of their attributes is that they are fail-safe, unlike traffic lights, which bring chaos when they break down. Over the years I've watched one roundabout after another being replaced by traffic lights, usually multi-phased, on a redesigned and dependent road layout. And all with little or no improvement to the traffic flow at peak hours and a worsening at all other times. I wouldn't suggest that anyone in the council has a vested financial interest in installing traffic lights, but there does seem to be a culture among the planners of covering their ass. And why not, when it's at the council tax payer's expense?
Thankfully, there were very few sets of traffic lights in Liverpool when I drove buses. It meant that whenever the traffic was light and there were few passengers to pick up, such as in the early morning or mid-evening, it was quite difficult not to run seriously ahead of schedule. Most of our Pier Head services were given forty to forty-five minutes to complete the trip. This meant an average speed of around 15mph. If a bus wasn't stopping along the way its maximum speed wouldn't be far above average speed. Little wonder I nodded off on the 72.
Those unscrupulous drivers known as scrawpers brought on themselves the same sort of problem. It's awfully difficult not to catch up to a bus in front that's being hammered if you've got no one on board and no reason to stop. I could never see any sense in scrawping. Sure, it would have made things very easy for my guard, but so boringly that the journey would have seemed twice as long—and to the passengers as well.
Becoming a bus driver had never been a boyhood ambition of mine. Only when I'd experienced guarding did it become an attractive career choice. Then I became very impatient to win the red badge and the yellow driving gloves with the cuffs turned back. We all turned the cuffs back, but I don't know why. I'd never done it before and nor have I since. Once I qualified I thought I was the bee's knees and an ace driver to boot. It was only on the buses that I became familiar with the epithet of "Ace". It was used idiomatically, usually when someone's name couldn't be remembered, a sort of replacement for "mate". Another colloquialism that shocked me initially was the use of the word "bastards" for passengers. Busmen would casually say, for instance, that they picked up seven bastards at this stop and another eight bastards at the next. I soon realised, however, that there was no pejorative implication in their use of the term. It was as if they were simply embarrassed to use the proper term, "passengers". I suppose they thought it gave an edge to their tale, in a similar way to the ubiquitous but etymologically useless F-word, which was also used liberally.
Whether I was any good as a driver only others can tell. But I did treat it as a point of honour to give my guard and passengers as smooth a ride as possible. In return I expected my guard to be smart on the bell. Most of the guards at Speke were good in that respect. Just one or two were so slow as to be notorious. They were the ones who also seemed prone to getting themselves trapped upstairs by a flooding influx of passengers at stops that they should have expected to be busy. We expected that sort of thing from a new and inexperienced guard and excused it. We knew also that the poor mutt was also being picked on by passengers who saw some sport to be had when they spotted his brand new uniform and shining white cuff-strips. They'd offer him a large coin or a note and pronounce their destination, even when they knew damned well what the fare was. It was this tough learning process that taught new guards to knuckle down and learn their fare structure by heart, to dirty their cuff strips and, above all, manage to be on the platform at critical moments.
One dead giveaway to a guard's efficiency was what morse operators would call his fist: the sound he produced from the bell-push. If in the cab we heard "ding . . . ding" we knew we were in for a turgid time. An average guard's fist sounded "ding ding"; but the sound I liked best was the staccato: "d-ding", like a stutter, but filled with purpose.
I had a few bumps in my two years driving for the corporation. A bus, after all, is a large target. But only once did my bus suffer any damage—and that was nothing but a cracked side-rail. What's more, I honestly maintain that none of my bumps was my fault, or that I could be accused even of contributory blame. Judge for yourself . . .
One time on a late coming out of the Pier Head a drunk driver ran straight into my back wheel at the Goree junction. So close to the Pier Head did it happen that a mobile inspector was almost immediately on the scene. He got one whiff of the car driver's breath and radioed for the police. While I was occupied giving my details and witness names to one constable, two others homed in on the car driver. I don't know what went on there, but the next thing I knew was that he was being bundled away wearing handcuffs.
"We're just running this one in," they said and slung him onto the floor of the Land Rover and drove off. It was the only time I have ever seen anyone in handcuffs, at least in real life. When the accident happened I noticed that the car had a male passenger in the front seat and two women in the back. Now the women were nowhere to be seen. The male passenger, though, also inebriated and now bereft of a means of getting home, occupied himself looking for the real root cause of the accident. And he thought he'd found it.
"Looka tha'," he slurred, pointing triumphantly to our front indicator boards. "Wa's tharrabou', then?"
We looked. The "via" blind had slipped a little, so it no longer lined up exactly with the "destination" blind. The drunken driver's subsequent court appearance made the columns of the Liverpool Echo, but my name wasn't mentioned.
Somebody once opened a parked car door on me as I passed him in Mackets Lane. This was not as mundane as it sounds, since in this instance the man wasn't sitting inside the car when he opened the door, but standing in the road alongside it. He was actually between the car and my bus. Yet he opened the door onto me as I passed. He was holding a conversation over the roof of the car with a woman standing on the sidewalk at the time, so he might have been distracted somewhat. I heard a faint crump, so I pulled in and stopped. I couldn't see anything untoward in my mirror, nor through the hole in my blind. (I always drove with the blind down, even in daytime). Nothing appeared to have changed. The tableau was still as it was before. The man stood in the road alongside the car and the woman on the pavement and the car door was shut. Then my clippie came running up the aisle waving her arms. "You've hit that car," she shouted through the glass.
"No way," I muttered as I climbed out. If that were so the man should have been meat paste. When I got back to the car I could see that, although the car door appeared closed, it was actually quite neatly concertina'd. The man immediately apologised. Yes, it was his fault. He'd opened the door without thinking. This admission prompted me to shoot what I fondly hoped was a withering "Oh ye of little faith" look at my clippie before starting to look for damage to my bus. Forwards and backwards I went, probably looking like a bad Groucho Marx impressionist, but I could find nothing. Then I noticed a slight scuffmark on the wall of my rear tyre. It wasn't cut or even roughened, just sort of dusty.
It was the woman on the sidewalk for whom I felt sorry. It was her car. It turned out that the man was her gardener and had been about to take her out for a first driving lesson. I hope she subsequently decided to take professional tuition, or at least from someone whose road awareness was better than that of her gardener.
The next one to hit me was a butcher, and not far from the previous scene. I was taking an 81 to Bootle and I'd followed his Rover 90 down Acrefield Road, Gateacre. So slow and hesitant had been his progress that I was glad on bottoming out in Rose Brow to see him head off towards Gateacre Brow on the right. I continued towards the next stop, which was a few yards beyond Woolton Hill Road on the left. Then I heard a crunch. Incredibly, he'd actually tried to turn left into Woolton Hill Road, a road he couldn't actually see because there was a big green double decker bus between him and it! He hit me amidships, so fully half of my bus length was in front of him when he turned the steering wheel.
Speed wasn't a factor, either. He'd led us in a crawl down the hill and when he got out of the way I was already too close to my next stop to warrant speeding up. In this respect I had a great witness. One of my passengers, sitting inside, confirmed that we'd been travelling alongside each other for some time; long enough for him to muse about buying a Rover 90. I suppose he may have changed his mind when he saw how easily the car came to pieces, although they were supposed to be built like tanks. Once again I had to search for damage to my bus. The Rover's headlamp bezel and hubcap were lying in the road and its sidelight was bent and the bumper dented. But all I suffered was a small abrasion of the top layer of paint on one panel, revealing a lighter green undercoat. The panel wasn't even dented. The Rover driver gave me his card. The name on it was very familiar, as it was on the front of a couple of dozen butcher shops in the Liverpool area.
The next time someone ran into me was again in the Woolton area. (Surprisingly, it never occurred to me that Woolton might be my jinx town). This time it was at night and was the sole occasion that my bus suffered any damage. It was winter and I was driving a 72 outward to Hunts Cross along Menlove Avenue. This is a very wide dual carriageway that bends and becomes Hillfoot Avenue at its junction with Woolton Road, another dual carriageway. There are traffic lights there now, but in those days Menlove- Hillfoot was the main road, with permanent priority over Woolton Road.
It was mid-evening, so I was carrying only a few passengers. There was also no traffic about and there was a risk of ice on the road, so I was taking it easy as I approached the junction. As I followed the curve through the junction, however, I caught a brief glimpse of a van shooting straight out from Vale Road, a small residential road behind the motor trader's premises on my left. It was only a brief glimpse, but I got the impression that he hadn't even slowed down for Vale Road's junction with Woolton Road, but shot over the line. I had lost direct sight of him and saw him again only in my nearside mirror, just as he glanced into the side of me. Incredible! He'd ignored not just one major road, but two. I eased to a halt beyond the junction in Hillfoot by the bus stop. The van came charging after me, horn blaring and headlights flashing and pulled up in front. As he passed I noticed that he had two passengers, a woman cradling a baby.
The van driver came storming back, ranting that I could have killed them all and I was going to pay for all sorts of things. Anyway, first things first. I checked that the woman and baby were both all right and then walked him back to the junction. There I pointed out the very explicit road markings that showed he'd contravened not one, but two major rights of way. The evidence was incontrovertible and he knew it. His ranting ceased abruptly and his attitude became conciliatory.
"Okay, chief," he said, becoming suddenly very chummy. He then had the cheek to propose: "Tell you what. You look after your damage and I'll look after mine. And we'll call it quits. Eh?"
Oh, sure! As I took his details I couldn't help noticing that Vale Road, where he'd come from, and the carriageway of Hillfoot, where we now stood, actually form a dead straight line. But that didn't even begin to explain how he'd failed to recognise the superiority of not one, but two dual carriageways. The consequences could have been tragic, especially for his passengers. The way he struck me left him with no escape route. Had he not been able to brake he would have slammed into the solid sandstone wall of the old convalescent home. And there were no such things as seat belts in those days. That wall has taken a few knocks over the years, but usually through speeding drivers failing to negotiate the bend from Menlove into Hillfoot. The installation of multi-phase traffic lights has at least reduced that incidence.
I did say that I'd never had an accident that was my fault. That's because I don't think that what I'm about to confess was an accident as much as an incident. Call me selectively short-sighted, if you like.
It happened on my very first 500 trip when I arrived at the Southdene terminus, the gates of a sprawling industrial estate. There were several bus stands at this terminus. The 500 stand was empty when I arrived, but alongside it was a bus that had double-parked against the 500 stand's previous occupant. And there were other buses before and after my stand. I squeezed in, stopped the engine and made my way to the tea bar. It was there that one of the drivers greeted me, pointing to the double-parked bus.
"Oi! What about that, then?" I couldn't see anything.
"What about what, then?"
"That! The platform."
Only then did I notice that the rubber edging to the curve of the platform of his bus was sticking up. It seems I'd caught it with the rising back part of my rear tyre and that's why it was sticking up, rather than knocked off. We trod it back into place, but he said he'd have to report it. Fair enough. I gave him my number but never heard any more of it.
And while I'm in the confession box I'll hold up my hand to rear-ending another bus at one time. But I still maintain it wasn't my fault and, since there were never any repercussions, I can only presume that Hatton Garden agreed. It happened on an icy morning near the end of a peak hour trip to the Pier Head. I pulled into the James Street stop behind an 86. Ahead of us our traffic was being held up by the policeman on point duty at the Goree junction. So, when the 86 and I had offloaded and got the bell, we merely inched downhill on the footbrake. Now just past the stop was a large patch of ice, which I couldn't see. The bus in front was sliding, but I could neither hear nor see his wheels locked. Everything looked normal. Then I too got on the ice. So, ever so slowly, the pair of us drifted downhill, wheels locked and sliding. Inevitably, of course, the 86 got off the ice before me. His front wheels gripped and he stopped. I didn't.
Our speed was so slow that the impact was little more than a nudge. My bus suffered no damage, as usual, but his rear panel got dented and the rear riser to his stairs slightly buckled. The 86 driver must have been on an extra or the first half of a split, as he tried to wangle running in to Garston out of service. An inspector overruled him, though. He put the chain across the stairs and told him to run in as a single-decker instead.
One of the advertised perks of the job was free travel on LCPT buses while in uniform. This doesn't sound now like much of a deal, but it led many busmen to virtually live in uniform. I never seemed to have mine off, but then I was a buck king. I was on duty so much it wasn't worth changing between tacks. We were supposed to charge foreign busmen, such as Crosville types, but we didn't. We observed an unwritten law of reciprocation, as Bill Peters says.
A cardinal rule for guards was never to take a fare from a nurse. I broke the taboo because nobody had told me about it. I was still very green when I earned a reprimand for doing so from a colleague who happened to be travelling on my platform. I felt awful, as if I'd despoiled an angel. I'd have paid nurses' fares out of my own pocket rather than commit that sin again.
Most of us didn't charge uniformed police officers either. I don't suppose policemen travel much on buses in uniform these days, but it was common then, when the world and his wife travelled by bus and uniforms were still common, even fifteen years after the war. National Service had been phased out, but our regular armed forces were still large; and there were no restrictions on their travelling in uniform in those days before the Northern Ireland troubles. Most police officers travelling alone stayed on the platform with the guard. Policemen were not supposed to be exempt from paying the fare, of course, but my view was that it was well worth a couple of pence to the corporation to have a uniformed policeman riding shotgun. Coppers for coppers, as it were.
Bill Peters comprehensively and elaborately describes the uniform we wore. It was of military cut and was supposed to be worn in military fashion. The peaked cap, for instance, was supposed to be worn on duty. With our shiny badges and buttons and half-belted greatcoats with epaulettes, some looked ready to go on parade. It was all so very different from today's busmen's attire, which is minimal in terms of uniform and hardly distinguishable from civvies. Yet, for all the comparative elaboration of our uniform, we never felt self-conscious wearing it-a legacy, probably, of the war.
Something else that Bill Peters writes about so interestingly are the extraordinarily short routes that were operated in Liverpool in those days. One he doesn't mention, though, was the 66, which at one time was a very short trip indeed. It used to go from Garston to the old tram terminus in Woolton's High Street. In my day it had been extended to the Belle Vale housing estate. The 66 was a Garston duty, but some of Speke's extras included a trip or two on the road. It was a route that got busy only when taking women to work at the Howard Ford (Bear Brand) stocking factory in Woolton. On Sundays its only real purpose seemed to be taking mourners to Allerton Cemetery. It was a pleasant leafy route, but must have been as boring as hell as a permanent assignment.
One thing that surprised me when I first went on the buses was the extraordinary capacity of some of my new colleagues for arithmetical computation. Not only could they work out exactly what their return would be from a successful compound bet on the horses, but, more incredibly, anticipate to the penny what they expected in their pay packet. The job's extraordinarily complicated mixture of overtime and penalty payments determined that the bottom line on a pay slip would never be the same twice-ever. I regarded the ability of anyone to work out these computations to be on a par with mastering quantum physics.
Years of traditional haggling between unions and employer had wrought a painfully complicated wage structure. On one side the department was keen to avoid blanket pay rises, while on the other the unions demanded compensation for the job's particularly unsocial hours. The compromise was a system of penalty payments. Anyone working, for instance, before 6am on any day, or after 1pm on Saturdays or any time on Sundays earned extra money. Split middles were a bane to us, but made valuable economic sense to the department as an efficient way of dealing with two separate daily peak hours. However, a system of minimum payments for morning or afternoon call-outs ensured we were not dragged away from home for just an hour or two. Morning overtime reaped a minimum of four hours at time and a half and a minimum of three hours at overtime rate in the afternoon, irrespective of how little work was actually done.
As far as I was concerned calculating what I was due was simply too much for my grey cells. I ended up doing the overtime and letting the office wallahs worry about how much to pay me.
Not everyone was keen on doing overtime. Some consistently refused it and most did only what was offered. Bill Peters seemed to fall into the latter category. It took commitment and dedication, however, to be a buck king, a real grabber. For instance, Bill reproduces his work schedule for the month of July 1963. It shows that he reported for duty every single day of the month, which means that he worked four rota days as overtime, plus eight extras. Daunting enough, I suppose. But Bill would have been booked in on his rota days and those eight extras all appear to be duty-attached. On the evidence, then, Bill appears to be what I called a passive overtimer. A buck king, though, had to be aggressive. I would have worked at least twice that number of extras and some of them would actually have been converted into double days. That's a buck king for you.
There was, however, some overtime I wouldn't do. I would never go guarding once I was on the drivers' sheet. I'd never have heard the end of it from the regular guards, of course, but mainly I couldn't bear the thought of strapping on one of those damned TIMs again. With my old Ultimate even Wyatt Earp couldn't have issued tickets faster than me. With the TIM, though, I was more like Walter Brennan.
The speed and ease of the Ultimate did, however, have one drawback, as Bill Peters mentions. It was too easily operated accidentally by passengers' elbows, bags or umbrellas. And of course Sod's Law meant that the most likely lever to be flicked was on the right hand end of the machine, the saloon side, which was the high denomination key. Also, most such inadvertent issues happened during one of the mass exoduses at the end of a trip when it was impossible to get rid of legitimately, being imprinted with an inappropriate stage number. So we soon learned to protect the levers with a judiciously placed forearm.
One night early in my career as a guard I ran into the depot from a late and found myself in a dilemma. I wanted to catch a particular staff bus, which I could see already ticking over outside the window. But I had yet to work out my waybill and, most imperative of all, I was bursting for a pee. Two out of three were manageable, but not all three. So working out the waybill lost. My cash was already counted and bagged, so I threw everything into the paying-in bag, including the unworked-out waybill, and deposited it. I got my pee and caught the staff bus.
I expected a reprimand, but none came. So, from then on I never again wasted time working out a waybill. Like my wages, I left it to the office wallahs who were going to do it all themselves irrespective of whether I'd already done it. Even in the few months left to me working as a guard I must have saved quite a bit of precious personal time and caught a few staff buses I would otherwise have missed. I sometimes got short notices, of course, but not often and never for anything heavy.
When I started driving all Speke's buses, even the Crossleys, were an improvement on the crash box bus on which I'd learnt. But it didn't take me long to find my preferences. They were the Regent Vs. Of these there were a few I particularly liked, which meant usually that they were fast. ("Fast" in bus language is, of course, a relative term. All our buses were governed to a top speed that couldn't match even the old trams). Bill Peters picks out A247 as being the fastest he ever drove. It was coincidentally while driving A247 that one of our older hands was stopped by the police for speeding.
"Do you know you were doing 47mph?" he was asked.
"Was I?" he replied. "It's a bloody good bus, then, isn't it?"
Apparently the officer had already been pacing a car when our hero in A247 came along and overtook them both. The cop had to let the car go just to catch up to the bus. I have no idea what happened over it. The police were generally tolerant with us, but I think he'd have been lucky to get away with that one. A247 was a favourite of mine, too, but I wouldn't claim it was actually the fastest at Speke. I think that honour went to A262 or A263. Either of these beauties, with a following wind on the straight and slightly downhill stretch of Hillfoot Avenue and the gas pedal welded to the floor, could nudge nearly 50mph.
Another bus Bill Peters singles out was one he calls Speke's "Silver Bullet". This was the unpainted, anodised aluminium-clad A221. But there were two "Bullets" at Speke in my day and they were both damned fine buses. The other was A229.
A couple of times Bill Peters mentions starting a bus in second gear, rather than first, which he calls a crawler gear. I find this surprising, since I don't recall it being taught at Edge Lane. It was something I myself did at one time, picked up from watching my dad drive the family car. I stopped it when a driver whose skill I particularly admired condemned the practice, saying it put undue wear on the clutch plates.
When I passed my car test, I'd never had any formal driving lessons, so going to Edge Lane was good for me. The Highway Code I used for my car test in 1957, incidentally, still contained illustrated whip signals for drivers of horse-drawn vehicles and instructions for overtaking trams on the nearside. Bus school corrected some of my wrong and sloppy habits and instilled some valuable ones. I can still hear our instructor's voice close to my left ear:
"Don't forget, lad. A foot that isn't pressing the gas should be hovering over the brake." It was sound advice that could save a vital second in an emergency. And:
"Don't weave around parked cars on the left. Get out and stay out. You're in and out like a bride's nightie." I'd heard of "up and down like a bride's nightie", but his misquotation helped to instill into my mind what was, in any case, good driving practice. One vital difference between driving cars and buses that was drummed into us at Edge Lane was the height factor. Car driving is mainly two-dimensional, but the height of a bus added that vital third dimension that was supposed to become ingrained into our subconscious. For most of our service lives it was something we didn't normally have to worry about. But it could be a matter of life and death if we got unexpectedly diverted down a country lane or were allocated a private hire duty. Such top-deck accidents were not uncommon in those days and, in fact, only a few years ago a tragic incident of this type happened in Cheshire.
I once came across a corporation bus on Aigburth Road that had had its top deck demolished, not by a bridge, but a mobile crane. Strange as it may seem, this kind of accident wasn't very uncommon in those. It was all to do with the design of the crane. When the jib was stowed for transport by road it stuck out some way in front of the vehicle and, unfortunately, just at the same height as the top deck of a bus. In the case I saw the crane driver had tried to emerge onto Aigburth Road from a side street, ironically called Tramway Road. By the time he was far enough out to see his jib was already too far out and protruding into the main road's airspace. I don't know if the bus driver had no chance to avoid it or if the threat it represented didn't register with him. In any event, the jib made a right mess of the upper deck. There were no deaths, but I think some passengers suffered injuries.
First gear on the buses we drove was not synchromesh and supposedly could be engaged only when the vehicle was absolutely stationary. I found, though, that it slipped in sweetest if the road wheels were just moving-what I think was called a "rolling first". It got me into trouble one time on the 81s. There used to be a halt sign at the Woolton Road end of Childwall Park Avenue. To have to come to a full stop was absurd, since visibility to the right-the side that mattered-must have stretched a good third of a mile along arrow-straight Woolton Road. So, at this junction I habitually used a "rolling first" rather than come to a dead halt. Then, one day I'd got only fifty yards down Woolton Road when I was overtaken by a police car and flagged down. I then suffered a humiliating tongue-lashing with a full load of passengers rubbernecking. That was worse than the subsequent £5 fine for "failing to observe a traffic sign". I thought the added licence endorsement was a little over the top, especially since, by the time the case came to court, the "unobserved" traffic sign had been uprooted. A new roundabout had been installed at this very junction. It still exists. Visibility up and down Woolton Road is thus slightly diminished, but now I can whip quite legally at 30mph through a junction I was once fined half a week's basic wage for taking at 1mph.
Our rear-loaders were easy to drive. The controls may have been heavier than those of a car, but they were also simpler and more direct. After mastering the crash box the next thing to challenge even qualified car drivers at Edge Lane was reversing-and especially the reverse turn.
First the crash box. Edge Lane's method of teaching us to handle a crash box, was archaic, even for those days. It was nevertheless familiar to anyone who had been on a drill square in the forces, which meant pretty well all of us. So, where it had once been:
"Hup...two...three...Down...two...three," now it was "One...Gas...Clutch..." and so on.
Neither was this learnt in the cab of a proper bus, but in a classroom mock-up. Four or five seats were arranged on a platform side-by-side, each equipped with dummy controls, which we learned to handle by rote.
Eventually we got out onto the road in one of the corporation's few remaining crash box buses. We took turns driving, with the instructor standing close behind leaning through the open bulkhead window space and the others sitting in the saloon. In this way everyone could pick up tips from the mistakes of the guy behind the wheel. I'm not sure why we spent so much time mastering the crash box, as I don't think there were any such buses still in service at that time. Nevertheless, it was on that bus that we spent most of our tuition time and on which we ultimately took our test. We learned also to use a preselector box before being familiarised with a more modern eight-footer. We were told we'd be given a bus loaded with sandbags so we could experience how a fully-laden bus handled, but we never were. Neither did we go skating on a skidpan. This was disappointing, since I'd seen a film showing London Transport trainees on a skidpan and it looked like fun.
Learning to drive a crash box may have seemed pointless at the time, but it gave me a sense of gear discipline that has stood me well ever since. Even now, driving cars with full synchro boxes, I still toss up the engine revs to catch the next gear when changing down. It must have saved me a lot of clutch plate skin over the years. It also served me well during twenty subsequent years in the motor trade when I drove some dreadful old crocks with little or no clutch left. But a crash box wasn't much fun, either. The technique involved matching your engine revs to the road speed of the gear you wanted to engage. This meant that at the very time you wanted to get into the next gear quickest-when going uphill, for instance-you had longest to wait before changing up, since your road speed seemed to be dropping as quickly as your engine revs. Sod's Law. Another technique I picked up on the buses, although not at Edge Lane, was heel-toeing. It was still widely used at that time, especially by crash box lorry drivers. It enabled them to brake and blip the throttle to change down a gear at the same time. It sometimes still comes in handy even while driving my car.
Reversing a bus, and especially in reverse, took all of us a while to master. It involved some bodily contortion if the driver were to get the necessary clear view of the platform and the kerb beyond. Reversing into a side road started, as with a car, with stopping beyond the road at an appropriate distance from the kerb. Then came the tricky bit. The only way we could both see the platform and still handle the controls was by turning in the seat and leaning back against the cab door. So, rule one: first make sure the cab door's shut. Having noted where the kerb line intersected the platform, we were then supposed to manoeuvre the bus so as to keep it there through the turn. If we could do that we would end up properly positioned in the side road. Simple enough in theory, it proved very difficult in practice. A botched attempt could be remedied by continuing backwards until we got ourselves once more parallel and appropriately close to the kerb. Once we braked to a halt, though, we would be indicating to the examiner that we thought we had completed the exercise. So we had to be sure we'd got it right; and our instructor kept drumming into us one simple but vital guiding principle:
"I don't care how far you reverse up the bloody road. Back up to the bloody Pier Head if you have to, but don't stop until you're in line and the proper distance from the kerb. Is that clear?"
We earned normal pay for the time we spent at driving school, but we didn't receive it straight away. The corporation held on to it until we completed two years' service as a precaution against fly-by-nighters. A red PSV badge was a valuable asset and a passport to employment anywhere in the country. Drivers' pay was a little more than that of guards, taking our basic past £10 a week. Of course we still moaned about our pay rates, older drivers recalling that busmen at one time had pay parity with the police.
Not many of us owned cars in those days and few of those who did used them to travel to work. The situation is quite different today, as my modern photograph of Speke depot shows. One of our guards, though, owned a magnificent Triumph Roadster, with huge headlights and a long, long bonnet. It had a dickey seat-the only post-war car so equipped-with its own hinged windscreen. It was supposed to be Triumph's answer to Jaguar's contemporaneous series of successful sports cars. But, although it looked dashing and sporty, but was actually woefully underpowered. This guard lived in Grassendale and he gave me a lift to Garston a couple of times, but never in the dickey seat.
Another car owned by a guard was a three-wheeler Reliant Robin, the saloon version of Del Boy's yellow peril in Only Fools and Horses. This guard gave three of us a lift to Garston one night. We were apprehensive that it was a large load for a little car and our fears seemed grounded when we got to the first roundabout. We bounced around it on two wheels at a time in a series of wild over-corrections until thankfully emerging onto the straight of Speke Boulevard. Garston suddenly seemed a long way off, especially with another roundabout looming. He took that one a little easier, though, and we got to Garston without further incident. During my later stint in the motor trade I drove several of these vehicles, but the memory of that night stayed with me and I was never happy on three wheels.
That second roundabout, incidentally, at Speke Hall Road on the corner of the old north airfield, featured in a canteen tale that did the rounds while I was at Speke. It was said that one of our drivers was approaching this roundabout, which was nothing more than a slightly domed patch of grass, on an outward 82C along Speke Road one night. As he got close to it the driver turned to check that no one wanted to get off at that stop. Someone usually did, as it was a connection for the 81, but this time he'd got no bell. The platform was empty, but in turning he'd noticed something that grabbed his attention. I should explain that the bus he was driving was a Regent V, the front saloon seat of which was a five-seater fixed to the bulkhead and facing backwards. Sitting on the foremost forward-facing seat on the nearside, where the driver could see her clearly, was an attractive young woman. That alone was an attention- grabber, but the clincher was yet to come. She first turned to check that the guard was nowhere near. Then she hoisted up her skirt and started to adjust her stocking suspenders. And, thinking she was unobserved, she took her leisurely time about it, too. This made our hero on the front a very happy driver, but also lose his awareness of time and occasion. He came back to the real world with a bump-actually, a series of bumps-when he took his bus over the roundabout instead of around it. Anyway, that was the story. That roundabout was always scarred with tyre marks old and new, wide and narrow, so there was no way of checking. Maybe it was true, maybe not. Nowhere more appropriately than our canteen did Mark Twain's dictum apply: if the legend doesn't match the facts, print the legend.
Embellishment was not the sole preserve of bus crews, however. Late one night, on my last Speke leg of a limited stop 500, I recognised one of the passengers boarding in Lime Street as my wife's grandmother. I glanced backwards a couple of times on the journey to see her sitting on one of the long seats, chatting with my guard. When she got off at Garston I slid my window open and called out to her:
"Don't you let on to junior relatives any more?" She peered up at me.
"Oh, Good God," she said. "I might have known it was you."
I waved, shut the window and went on. In the depot I told my guard who she was and mentioned her parting riposte.
"Oh yeah," he said. "She wanted to know if you were in a hurry." And that might have been that, except that by the following weekend she was holding the family spellbound with an adventurous tale of derring-do in which she was the heroine who clung with both hands and for dear life against the threat of being projected off her seat, onto the platform and into the dark abyss beyond. The way she polished that story she'd have been at home in our canteen.
I never owned a car while I was on the buses, but I did for a short while run a Ford Thames 10/12cwt van. I bought it with an aerated idea that I could convert it into a motor-caravan. I got as far as installing some bench seats in the back before the complexities of the plan overwhelmed my competence. One day a driver saw me in it and asked if he could hire it for a weekend. Its unorthodox internal configuration made it a handy utility vehicle for carrying either large loads or more passengers than would fit in a car. After that several other workmates at one time or another slipped me a couple of bob to use it.
There was in those days a gorgeous little clippie who worked out of the depot at Dingle. She was an absolute stunner and also puzzlingly younger than her fellow clippies. Our paths crossed, alas, all too infrequently. Then, one day, I saw her at a turnaround somewhere or other. I was transfixed by the vision. Then our eyes met and I smiled nervously in my charming, boyish manner. Slowly, as in a dream, or a Cadbury's Flake commercial, she detached herself from her companions and made her way towards me. My heart pounded as she sat down close to me and murmured softly:
"Are you the one that's got a big van you hire out?"
Splat! Coming down to earth so abruptly was painful. Still, there was some solace. She couldn't drive, so she needed me along with the van. I reckoned I could look forward to spending some quality time with this goddess. Had I known what was coming I'd have left her severely alone.
She gave me an address in Wavertree at which to pick her up an evening or two later. I knocked and she opened the door. With her was a woman in civvies whom I recognised as another clippie. They climbed aboard and off we went with the friend giving me directions. I still didn't know what the job was, nor yet did I particularly care. That started to change a little when the friend's instructions brought me to a halt outside a street-corner police station, still somewhere in Wavertree. The friend led the way inside, past the desk and up a flight of stairs to a flat on the first floor.
"What are you taking?" asked the goddess, once we were inside.
"Oh, that and that and that," replied the friend, pointing to various articles of furniture.
"Did you see that one downstairs?" whispered the goddess, conspiratorially. "He's on the phone now."
"I know," said the other. "We'll just have to be quick."
Warning bells started to jangle in my head.
"What's going on?" I asked, my voice rather more falsetto than I would have liked. The beautiful one filled me in. Her friend, apparently, was unhappily married to a cop and these were their married quarters. Now she wanted out of the marriage and was doing a flit. I got the impression that the husband was not aware of this development in his domestic life and that he was unlikely to be happy about it. The fact that one of his colleagues downstairs was at that very moment presumed to be informing him of his problem, with its consequent airing on the police grapevine, was quite unlikely to put him in a good humour.
There were other considerations also. Was the furniture she planned to remove indisputably hers? And, as the only male of the trio, would my role be misinterpreted? I started looking around for escape routes, like a good trained driver, when the goddess hailed me:
"Come on! Get hold of that end."
So, I was committed. Never in my life have I moved furniture so fast, nor been held back by such apparently slow and unconcerned helpers. Eventually, however, they decided they had everything and we left. The next time I saw the goddess she barely acknowledged me with a brief and impersonal flick of her hand. It didn't matter, though. I'd learnt a valuable lesson in how dangerous beautiful women can be.
I was twenty-three when I started on the buses and some of the clippies with whom I now found myself working were already familiar to me, at least by sight. Those who had come from Garston had only a few years previously ferried me to school on the 80 route. Most of our clippies had several years' service behind them. One such was May. She'd worked the trams along Bowring Park Avenue and, of course, she had a tale to tell.
Before the M62 was built, Bowring Park Avenue was a dual carriageway with a dedicated tram track running down the middle. One wintry evening on an inward journey the trolley on May's tram bounced off the overhead power cable. Powerless and without lights the tram drifted to a stop, with its trolley hanging over one side like an overgrown fishing rod. Trolleys sometimes became detached and it was normally no big deal. In this case, though, the trolley's handling rope was unusually short and couldn't be reached from the ground. One passenger volunteered to try to reach it through one of the small upstairs windows of the tram. By stripping to his shirtsleeves, he managed to get his head and one arm through far enough to grab the rope and pass it down to the crew waiting below. The lights came on again and the motor started, but the passenger stayed where he was. He was stuck. Even May and the other passengers tugging at his rear end couldn't budge him. He soon started complaining about the cold and it was decided that the only solution was run the tram into Green Lane depot where the whole window could be removed. So that's what they did, hoping he wouldn't die of wind-chill on the way, or be decapitated by any street furniture. Well, anyway, that's the story May told me and it had a happy ending. And yes, to any tram buffs, she did say Green Lane and not Edge Lane, which it now occurs to me might have been a more logical destination.
Life on the buses was, unfortunately, not all funny stories. While I was at Speke we suffered the tragedy of losing two young drivers in one dreadful accident. Two others, both guards I think, were seriously injured at the same time. The incident was actually witnessed by one of our drivers on an outward 82C. It was late evening and he had just left Aigburth Vale southwards along Aigburth Road when a small car overtook him, failed to negotiate the left hand bend and ran straight into a lamp standard. The car was completely demolished, and the driver and front seat passenger were killed outright. It was the following morning when most of us heard about it, one way or another. The local press carried a photograph of the shattered remains of the car, which showed how amazingly lucky the two injured guards were to have escaped being killed also. The depot was stunned by the loss of two young, good-looking and popular guys. One of them, I remember, was a keen and talented snooker player who habitually wore a waistcoat, which even then was becoming rare as everyday attire.
One odd story that did the rounds while I was at Speke could also so easily have ended in tragedy. It concerned the crew of an 80E. This was a short supplementary that followed the 80 route between the Pier Head and Ullet Road/Smithdown Road. Very early one cold and icy winter morning the crew set off up Ullet Road on their first inward journey. They picked up no passengers along Ullet Road, so there were only the driver and guard aboard as the bus turned into Croxteth Road. That's when the wheels hit ice and the back end started to drift. The guard was unaware of what was happening, possibly being preoccupied. When the back wheels hit the kerb he was catapulted off the platform and onto the pavement, where he was knocked unconscious. His alarmed driver leapt out of the cab to go to his aid and slipped on the ice, also being knocked unconscious And there they both lay in the cold silence of the winter morning darkness, with not another soul around, until being discovered by the crew of the next bus to come along. That's the story exactly as I heard it.
When fog or ice struck it was usually left to individual drivers to decide when to call it a day. And on the whole they demonstrated quite extraordinary persistence. Of course, if fog and ice combined, then it was silly and virtually suicidal to persevere. One time during the severe winter of 62-63 freezing fog descended swiftly, catching everyone unaware. As the reported accidents mounted Hatton Garden took the unusual step of ordering everyone back to their depots. Generally it wasn't timidity that forced drivers to opt eventually for the depot, but the fact that their schedules had got shot to hell. If a driver was still somewhere in the south end at a time when he was supposed to be leaving Bootle for his last run there was hardly any point in his trying to get to Bootle. Even so, most drivers would try to fit in some sort of short trip that would get at least some stranded passengers home. Even in the most inhospitable circumstances everyone usually pulled out all the stops to provide each route with a proper last bus service, especially those from the Pier Head.
One night when thick fog was forcing crews into the depots early a call went out from the Speke desk for a volunteer crew to take an 82C out of service to the Pier Head, where there were scores of stranded passengers. The incredulous silence that followed was eventually interrupted by a low growl:
"All right, give it 'ere."
It was Johnny W., a softly-spoken character who possessed both the profile and the padding walk of a Red Indian. This unlikely character, though, was probably the fastest driver in the depot.
"How did Johnny get on?" was what everyone wanted to know the following day.
"He put the fear of God up his guard," we were told. Apparently, Johnny had simply got into the right hand lane on Speke Boulevard and then stayed there with his foot hard down all the way to the Pier Head.
"He reckoned there wouldn't be anyone there, on that side of the road," the shaken guard is said to have reported. Johnny got back safely, but it seems ironically appropriate that as Johnny looked like a Red Indian, his guard should resemble a paleface.
Probably never a day went by without someone somewhere in the city getting hurt on or by a bus. Whenever it happened the crew had to submit reports and witness details to the desk. The driver also had to inform the police, as required by law, if injury was caused by "the presence of a vehicle on the road." The exact meaning of this phrase was, however, subject to interpretation and was often a grey area of uncertainty. For instance:
One evening going into the city I pulled into the Lewis's stop. It always took a while to disgorge passengers there, but this time we were so long I was beginning to nod off. Then a man banged on my bonnet. I slid open my window and he shouted:
"There's someone hurt upstairs." I handbraked the engine and got out.
Upstairs, a young woman was nursing her knee. She said she'd twisted it getting up for the stop. She insisted that it wasn't my fault. The bus had already stopped and the knee was weak from a previous injury. She refused my offer to call an ambulance. When she was able to stand I helped her downstairs and she limped off. That, as it turned out, was the end of the matter, except that it still had to be reported, both to my own desk and to the police. It was my bad luck that she was on my bus when she suffered a recurrence of an old injury. But at least she was actually a passenger at the time she twisted her knee, unlike the next example, which involved what can only be described as a former passenger.
I was driving an 82C along Speke Boulevard on an outward trip to Eastern. It was dark, about 9pm and, as usual for that time of the evening, there were only a handful of passengers on board. I was a couple of minutes early so I was taking my time. When I got a bell for the middle stop (Metal Box, I think) as I was actually passing it, I didn't do what I might normally do, go on to the next stop. Instead, I slowed and stopped just beyond the wide factory entrance. I watched in my nearside mirror as a fairly heavily-built, late middle-aged woman alighted onto the grass verge. Then, instead of crossing the road (there were no houses on this side of the boulevard), she stood on the grass, apparently waiting first for the bus to move off. It was probably this unusual behaviour that made me continue to watch her in my mirror as I pulled away. I saw her put one foot in the gutter and crumple into a heap in the road.
I pulled up and went back to help her. The guard and I sat her on a long seat, where she insisted she was all right and refused an ambulance. But, just to be safe, we took her name and address and noted her injury: a grazed knee. As I helped her off I asked my guard to get witness names.
Back at the depot I filled in a report form at the desk. "There's no need to report it to the police as well, is there?" I asked.
"Dunno, lad," said the desk inspector. "Call in at Heald Street on your way home and ask them."
So I did. And the desk sergeant there decided that because my bus had deposited the woman where she'd fallen, the accident was "due to the presence of a vehicle on the road." So that was another hour of my own precious sleep time lost. The report was a fairly thick booklet and the sergeant insisted on filling it in himself, slowly and in block capitals with the stub of an oft-licked pencil. Even that was not the end of it, though.
A few weeks later my guard got a note from the office saying that a passenger in the saloon had accused him of ringing the bell "too quickly". I was indignant at such a gross perversion of the facts and insisted on seeing our own depot inspector. He listened and told me he'd pass everything I said to the office. My guard never heard anything more of the matter and I've always presumed that my intervention helped to quash the allegations. Since reading Bill Peter's book, though, I now suspect that Hatton Garden went for the easy option of paying off the woman without charging the guard.
Something that puzzled me when I first started on the job at Speke was the number of drivers I saw walking around wearing bicycle clips. Yet I never saw any of them actually riding a bike. The clue I failed to pick up was that it was winter and someone eventually had to explain it to me. It was to protect their legs from the blast of icy air that rushed into the cab through the holes around the foot pedals.
"The only way to keep your feet warm is to keep the blood going down your legs warm," I was told. "The clips keep the warm air in and the cold draughts out."
It was a tip that that became valuable later. When I first went driving it was warm spring, but when winter came I remembered the tip with gratitude. Summer is a good time to learn a new career, as Bill Peters says, when the drivin' is easy. It was great driving with the door and windows open. I found that the bulkhead separating the cab from the engine compartment alongside often became too hot to touch. In my naivety I consoled myself with the notion that although it was uncomfortable in summer, it would be welcome in winter and make the cab snug and warm. But I reckoned without Sod's Law. When winter arrived, that same bulkhead was as cold as a gravestone and the cab was anything but snug. Icy draughts got in everywhere, especially around the foot pedals. The door was kept firmly shut, but some hand signals were necessary, so its little window had to stay open. I soon started to tuck my trousers into my socks and wear multiple layers of clothing. I also invested in a pair of fur-lined ankle boots, slightly oversized so I could wear two pairs of socks.
Something in the cab that I initially found amusing, but soon learned to appreciate, was the control knob for the traffic indicators. It was a huge translucent orange disc mounted on the steering column, about four or five inches in diameter and shaped like the head of a jellyfish, with a little nodule on its milled edge. Turn it and the whole disc flashed synchronously with the indicators, which, incidentally, we could also see in our mirrors. The disc also emitted a loud clicking, so it was pretty well impossible to leave the indicators on inadvertently. Just to make sure, though, the disc operated on an escape mechanism that slowly returned it to the central off position.
Bill Peters writes about a notoriously unpleasant road inspector whose patch was on Queens Drive and was nicknamed "Waybill" because, as Bill says, it was the only word he ever uttered to the guard. Now, Bill's description of this character intrigued me, because I remembered exactly such a character. But for the life of me I couldn't recall his being named Waybill. The problem was that, for a time, I couldn't remember the name by which I knew him. Then it clicked: not Waybill, but Billy. The etymology was suddenly apparent, resolving at the same time a forty-year-old mystery. It had always puzzled me why such an obnoxious character should be referred to by such a friendly diminutive as Billy. So that was one mystery cleared up; but there was another. Why was Bill Peters calling him Waybill and not Billy? The answer seems to be that Bill Peters was an ex-PAR man. PAR had operated the 81s before Speke was opened and it was they who coined the original epithet. When some of these PAR men, like Bill Peters, transferred to the new Speke depot they brought the nickname with them. If non-PAR men were unaware of the origin of the nickname, then they may have corrupted to the easier diminutive of Billy.
Other inspectors may have been as strict as Billy about enforcing the schedule, but at least most of them were friendly and congenial about it. One of these was Big Ginger, the timekeeper at Garston. He wasn't big so much as tall. He knew by heart the times of every bus on every route that went through Garston, including the Crosvilles, and probably the postman and the butcher's boy too.
He'd allow us to be a minute or two early, but even then make an elaborate show of looking at his watch as we passed. Anything more than that, though, got his long legs flapping his coat tails as he covered the ground amazingly quickly. Once he was alongside the cab, his head nearly at the same height as ours, our only defence was an inaccurate timepiece.
"I've got fifteen here, Ging." It was a forlorn hope.
"And I've got twelve, and it's mine that counts," he'd reply.
Nowadays we take for granted the accuracy of even the cheapest quartz watch. But in those pre-quartz days the only reliable timepieces were expensive. Anything was useless or, at best, temperamental. A vibrating AEC steering wheel could defeat any wristwatch, though, and most of the older drivers used pocket watches. I bought a cheap one, but it was useless and I eventually slung it. Thereafter I did as many others did and slip my wristwatch into my top pocket.
If we were early and we knew Big Ginger was on duty at Garston the most we could hope for was to find him preoccupied with a driver on the other side of the road. It was a wide road at that point, a dual carriageway with a dedicated tram track running down the middle. Even so, Ginger's long legs could get him from one side to the other quickly enough; otherwise he'd get you next time.
Bill Peters recalls that the 80 route was routinely referred to as "Brodie". I remember this, but I didn't know until Bill said so that naming a route in this way was unique. It does seem strange that a whole route should be referred to by just one of its roads. The 80 was originally a Garston depot route and perhaps it was an easy way of differentiating it from the other routes, the 8 and 33 trams and their 86 and 87 bus replacements. That doesn't explain, though, why those other routes weren't called "Aigburth" or "Mather". Perhaps someone knows the answer.
What Bill doesn't mention is that the 80 route was also known by another, rather more pejorative, label: The Red Cross Road. I didn't understand this until an old hand explained with a question: "Haven't you noticed how many old people live on Brodie?". Come to think of it, I had. In fact, the 80 route was known for having two morning rush hours. No sooner had we got the shop and office workers into the city than we were filling up again with pensioners, who emerged from their garden gates brandishing bus passes. It happened on all routes, of course, but never with such concentration as on Brodie. One of the consequences of this was that Brodie became notorious for slow loading and unloading. Most guards were ready to help anyone who needed a little help, but they had to be careful, since some resented what they saw as uninvited interference.
Corporation buses in those days displayed the route number in a window above the platform as well as on the front and back. One time an 80 pulled into the Booker Avenue stop. First in the queue was an old dear who seemed to be having difficulty lifting her foot to platform height and at the same time holding up everyone else.
"Hang on, m'luv," called out the guard. He reached up above her head and began vigorously winding the route indicator handle. "I'll just lower the platform a bit. There you go. How's that?"
Up she got, easy as pie. "Thank you, young man," she said. "That's much better. I wish all the buses had a handle like that."
If I hadn't enjoyed driving buses I don't suppose I'd have been able to keep up the amount of overtime I did. It was interesting working with the public, especially when it was to a degree I could control by shutting myself away in the cab. It was never apparent to me, therefore, why it was drivers who suffered stress and not guards. I found guarding the more stressful of the two jobs. My guess is that the disparity had more to do with the sedentary nature of the driver's job than with any stress. Guards also risked violence from the public much more than drivers.
Some years after I left the job I worked with a woman whose younger brother was then a guard at Speke. He was attacked one night on duty and kicked several times in the stomach. He never recovered, but developed cancer of the stomach and was dead within the year.
I personally experienced no aggression during my time on the buses (other than from a fellow driver who once threatened to duff me up for a reason that now escapes me). Canteen tales on the subject often centred on one or other of the pubs dotted around Speke housing estate. The one with the fiercest reputation was the most inappropriately-named Dove and Olive Branch, on Hale Road. The department had actually ceased sending buses past the Dove and Olive when I joined, but I don't know if the reason for that had anything to do with its violent reputation. In my time only Crosville's H1 (the old 120) to and from Warrington via Widnes still went along Hale Road. The Dove and Olive is now gone, bulldozed to make way, I'm told, for general aviation development at the airport.
One of our drivers was diagnosed as suffering from stomach ulcers. He wasn't old, mid- to late-twenties perhaps. He was put on a milk diet and carried a flask everywhere. He was prohibited from eating canteen food and cut a sad figure watching the rest of us tuck into spicy sausage toast and washing it down with strong canteen tea. I couldn't figure why he particularly had developed the complaint. He seemed as laid-back as any other driver in the depot.
The only times I felt myself tightening up was when I was running in and trying to make up a few minutes to catch a staff bus. With a good guard it wouldn't be a problem and we'd work together. Occasionally, though, the guard wasn't all that good and it would be like trying to run through mud. That was frustrating.
Come midnight and Speke housing estate would become Brands Hatch as buses emptied, turned at Eastern and raced for home. That's when a good bus was really appreciated, as its driver wellied it and steered it hand-over-hand through the boulevards, roundabouts and chicanes of the largely deserted estate. Guards would brace themselves somewhere safe while they bagged their cash and filled in their waybills. Technically, those buses were still in service and occasionally we'd come across someone at a stop sticking out his hand. We'd pick him up and he'd be treated to something like a fairground ride.
On these run-in trips guards were supposed to check that there were no passengers left on the bus before abandoning it in the passage leading to the bus wash. Sometimes a drunk was found upstairs, fast asleep despite the tumult of the final run-in. It was a common claim among guards that one day they'd open the window above him and leave him on board to go with the bus through the wash. But in my time only one guard professed to having actually done it. I don't think anyone believed him.
The staff buses were timed rather eccentrically. They started off regularly enough at half-hour intervals from about 2330. But about one o'clock in the morning there were two nearly together and then nothing for a couple of hours, when they started bringing crews in for the early shifts. The odd thing, if I remember rightly, was that that last staff bus was due to leave before the last 81 arrived in the shed.
Of all the Speke routes the one of which I was least fond was the 81. Unlike the city-bound routes, it had no crescendo and climax to give crews a sense of achievement and satisfaction. It was a dribbly sort of road, starting nowhere and ending nowhere, yet for the entire length of its route the bus was always quite full. The reason for that was that it was a feeder, crossing several city routes. So each major stop saw lots of passengers getting off and lots getting on. It was a slog, lacking the drama of three bells or the relief of a Lewis's exodus when the bus would bounce to the pounding of the feet of exiting passengers. The bus's relief as it rose on its spring was almost tangible, as if it were taking second after a job well done. The Lewis's stop fed Lime Street, which in those days alone boasted four cinemas, all within spitting distance of each other. It was also the nearest stop for south end passengers to the two big ones, the Odeon in London Road and the nearby Gaumont.
I suppose it could be said that the 500 also went from nowhere to nowhere. But each 500 trip was like two 82 trips back-to- back. And the 500 at least went through the city centre, so it had a climax in the middle. The overriding attraction of the 500 for crews lay in its being a limited stop service. That meant less braking and fewer gear changes for the driver and luxuriously more time for the guard to collect his fares. It stopped at only every third or fourth ordinary stop and between Dingle and Lewis's, where the 82s got hammered, the 500 didn't stop at all.
The 82C was generally a pretty busy duty, being routed as it was through heavily populated suburbs like Toxteth and Aigburth. At peak times it could be three bells at nearly every stop Even at other times an outward 82C would completely refill at Garston-and get hammered again at the factory stops along Speke Boulevard. I've seen 82Cs arrive at Eastern with their wheel hubs glowing dull red in the darkness of winter peak times.
One last word on stress. People not familiar with the job sometimes asked if the responsibility for the lives and welfare of a few score passengers weighed heavily. Quite honestly, though, it wasn't something I ever thought about. Passengers to be were generally not so much precious souls as heavy bums that cumulatively altered the handling characteristics of my bus.
Accidents mostly come in two ways: you hit something or something hits you. In the latter case I reckoned there was little I could do about it, so there was no point in worrying about it. In the case of the former, then it was I, the driver, who was statistically most likely to get injured. So, if I looked after me I looked after everyone. It's only what anyone does driving by himself in his car, so what's stressful about it?
Guarding was very physical. I don't know how far I walked in total during a typical duty, but it's fairly easy to calculate how high I climbed. Assuming an eight-foot flight of stairs is climbed fifteen times, say, on each trip of an eight trip duty, then that takes a guard to nearly a thousand feet-three times the height of Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral-and that burdened with a ticket machine and a bag full of those old, heavy, pre-decimalisation coins. All that exercise and the bonus of plenty of fresh air on the open platform made guarding a healthy occupation. Driving was much less so, but even so the driver of a rear-loader benefited more than his modern counterpart. We at least got out of our cabs at the end of the journey, if only to go to the canteen or wander around the back to talk to the guard. These days they've generally got nowhere to go, so they stay in the driving seat. Sure, they may take a leisurely stroll up and down the saloon to check for lost property, but that involves climbing not even a single stair. Then, from what I see, it's back to his seat with the newspaper and another sandwich.
The modern job strikes me as having a built-in recipe for stress that I don't think I could handle. The interminable number of traffic lights alone would set my ganglions a-jangling if I was even half a minute behind schedule. If on top of that, stop after stop, I suffered a stream of passengers who had no idea where they wanted to go I think my teeth would soon be ground flat. And all this without the safety valve of a partner with whom to let off steam.
This relative insularity is not down to one-man crewing alone. Deregulation of bus services seems to have exacerbated the change. In my day pretty well all the bus crews we met during a duty were employed by the same firm, the corporation. It provided a common bond that encouraged socialising at the end of each journey. And the firm made sure we had canteen facilities at each terminus. They may have been spartan, but they were welcoming and relaxing places to spend our breaks. Now drivers are from different companies and there are nowhere near the same number of canteens. So there's no incentive for a driver to get off his bum, open the door of his heated bus and go for a stroll. Sure, his "office" has improved immeasurably and I envy him his sleek, comfortable vehicle with its power steering and automatic gearbox. But the job has also lost the strong social element and the invisible bonding that happens among a large body of people wearing the same uniform. The heart of the job has gone.
Bill Peters' book contains an illustration of one of the rather grand half-dozen purpose-built mobile canteens owned by Liverpool Corporation. Not all termini were graced by such tea-palaces, though. In fact, I think the only one I ever used regularly was at Bootle Station, at the end of the 81 run. We had rather less grand facilities at Western and Eastern in Speke and nothing at all in Hunts Cross or Halewood. At Eastern we used the shell of an old single-decker bus. Its axles stood on concrete blocks and the body was wrapped around at ground level with a sheet-metal skirt. It was supposed to stop rats, but all it did was provide them with a refuge from the boots of marauding busmen.
The canteen at Western Avenue consisted of two sheds nailed together. Busmen could stand and be served at the hole in the front bit or sit down in the one round the back. Now there's nothing at either Eastern or Western and the latter isn't even a terminus any more. There's just a patch of grass to show where someone once made a living out of serving busmen with tea and toast. They may not have been rated by Egon Ronay, but in those cholesterol-carefree days nothing tasted so delicious as their hot, dripping bacon or sausage toast, washed down with strong tea from thick, off-white cups with handles.
It was in that canteen at Western that I first met (or, rather, first heard) Peter. It was during the morning rush and the place was packed, but I'd managed to get a seat. So I couldn't see the owner of the voice that briefly pierced a pause in the hubbub:
"And there was I, peering through the heliotrope . . ."
That was all I caught, but the cultured, almost theatrical voice and the precise grammar and unbusmanlike topic took me by surprise. He couldn't be a graduate on a summer job; it was the wrong time of year. Eventually I met him. He was a driver at Speke and spoke French and German fluently. He read Latin, was knowledgeable on classical music and literature, a talented pianist and a gourmet and expert cook. I asked him why he'd chosen such an unlikely occupation and he replied that it was a job that didn't require him to wear a tie. It sounded like a leg-pull, but on reflection I don't think I ever did see him wearing a tie.
In fact, he was one of the most casual dressers I've ever met. In summer he wore tee shirts under his uniform jacket and in winter roll-neck sweaters. The latter, combined with his battered service cap and a remarkable ability to grow a full set of King George whiskers literally within days, made him look more like a U-boat captain than a bus driver. When I left the buses I didn't see him for some years, until one day he joined me at the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo. He'd left the buses when the Atlanteans started to come on stream at Speke and subsequently spent several years driving an oil tanker for Regent. I notice that it was the advent of the Atlanteans that prompted Bill Peters also to leave the buses. I wonder how many other good and experienced drivers were lost to the department because of them.

A conductor's active and physical life may have kept him fit, but it also exposed him to the risk of mishap. I discovered this while still fairly new to the job and was lucky to escape injury. I was guarding an outward 82C and was still upstairs when we got close to the Lark Lane stop on Aigburth Road. It was a major stop that was best met on the platform. So I needed to get downstairs pronto. Just as I reached the head of the stairs the bus hit a dip in the road and the deck fell away from beneath me. It also altered my trajectory and, instead of hitting the next tread full square, my heels simply clipped its edge and I ricocheted onto the next step down, and the next one, and the next one. It was a rainy day and the stairs were wet and I went down them all, meeting each on the edge with unbent knees. My spine was like a snooker cue playing with my brain. Fortunately, I retained a sliding hand-hold all the way down and landed on the platform still upright and without spilling any cash. My eyeballs were bouncing, but at least I hadn't rolled off the platform and into the road.
Only one guard ever injured himself on the back of my bus. It was the result of an unhappy combination of circumstances. Sod's Law again. We had taken an 80 out of the Pier Head and were approaching the Fenwick Street stop in James Street. Ahead of me was a Triumph Herald, being driven very slowly by a woman. My guard was standing on the platform anticipating the Fenwick Street stop where he could see a few people waiting. None of them wanted an 80, however, so I drove on. It was at that moment that several things happened together. My guard left the refuge of the stairwell and prepared to go into the saloon to collect fares just as a van braked made an expansive, but totally unnecessary, signal to the woman driver to carry on. At which she, inexplicably, put her foot on the brake. So I stopped as well-not sharply, since I was well behind her; but at a bad moment for my guard. He expected acceleration, not the reverse. It caught him completely off balance, facing forwards and not holding on to anything. Worst of all, his feet were too close to the saloon step. So he pitched forward into the saloon. He didn't fall far, because of the height of the saloon floor, but I heard the crash as his Ultimate hit the deck. I turned to see him lying face down and motionless. I stalled the engine and ran round. When I saw that he hadn't moved my blood froze.
"Are you alright?" I called, anxiously. To my relief he answered straight away.
"Yeah," he said, his voice slightly muffled. "Give me a lift."
He was stuck, with his shoulders wedged between the footrests of the two long seats. His arms were crossed underneath his body, which had saved his face, but now he couldn't get up by himself. I grabbed him by the only thing available-his crossed straps-and lifted. Up he came. He assured me he was all right, but he was concerned for his cash, which had spilled out of his bag and was now spread all over the floor of the saloon. The few passengers and I helped him to retrieve it. I asked him if he wanted to put in a report.
"God, no," he said. It was just one of those things.
I saw him in the canteen next day and noticed a faint and oddly ring-shaped mark on his forehead. He insisted it was nothing and, indeed, it disappeared in a day or so. We never worked out why it was such an odd shape, though, and he couldn't even remember doing it. Thereafter he took to calling me "Killer", but it was without rancour. We were paired several times after that and he never tried to swap duties. He did turn the incident into a canteen tale, though, which he polished up somewhat. In his embellished version of events, which I later overheard by chance, I had indeed picked him up by the straps, but then found him too heavy and dropped him again! He also claimed that-despite spilling his cash all over the saloon, or because of it-he ended the day with more in his bag than was indicated by his waybill.
Two hundred Atlanteans had already arrived in Liverpool while I was working at Speke. They were allocated to other depots and were operated by traditional two-man crews. We knew, though, that the unattractive proposition of one-man operation was on its way and it caused the departure of drivers from Speke in numbers that the depot could ill afford. Guards, too, could read the writing on the wall. There wasn't the despondency one would expect today. Jobs were easy to come by then, a situation made even easier by the arrival of the new Ford plant at Halewood with its considerable opportunities. The plant was recruiting and training thousands of workers at unprecedentedly high rates of pay. Guards were leaving the buses to go "on the brush" at Ford's for the princely sum of £14 a week. That was at a time when our basic wage at Speke was still hovered around £10. Drivers were rushing to sign up with Silcock and Colling, the company operating the franchise for moving new vehicles off the production line. Some of these cars were put on trains that ran right into the factory grounds, but scores of drivers were needed for road transporters or to take new cars straight down the road to the compound on the old timber yard site.
When the Atlanteans arrived at Speke I'd already gone. The job had only ever been a short-term project with a specific objective and it had served its purpose. The extraordinarily severe winter of 1962-63 served both as the catalyst to my determination to leave and the provider also of the opportunity. Domestic small-bore central heating with boilers no bigger than a fridge and slimline steel panel radiators was all the rage, especially since grants were available under the Clean Air Act 1956 to help defray installation costs. A friend of mine had jumped on the installation bandwagon and his company was doing so well that he now needed an office manager. I had the appropriate skills, so he propositioned me. He said he would match what I was getting on the buses-until, that is, I told him I was clearing well over a thousand a year. He blanched, but it didn't matter. I'd had enough of the buses anyway. I was so keen to leave shift-working behind that I settled for a lower income and normal office hours. Never again would I have to rise at 2.30am to catch the staff bus that left Garston at 3am and then trundled around the entire south end of the city before eventually arriving at Speke a few minutes after 4am.
My entire association with buses ended immediately I left the job. I got a car and have never been without one since. The next forty years' evolution of the bus service happened without my knowing much about it. I seldom thought about them and can't remember ever riding on them.

As I read Bill Peters' story I was also qualifying for a bus pass. Between the two I became aware of how very different the job now is, yet in some ways still the same.
Only a handful of buses now gather at the Pier Head. They huddle together where the old Crosville canteen was and where a gleaming new glass Porsche showroom now sits. They no longer encircle the Victoria Monument either, and nearly all the old depots have been bulldozed, including Crosville's on Edge Lane. Only Speke survives.
Being on the buses now is probably as different from my job as mine was from the days of the horse-drawn trams. I'd forgotten that when I was driving buses the last Liverpool tram had departed only three years earlier. In my day an old timer's reminiscences would be met with the rejoinder: "Yeah, yeah; and you had to feed your own horse."
The modern bus is comfortable and quiet to a standard that was associated in my day only with long distance coaches. Some route numbers seem familiar, but they're not really. I can catch an 82, for instance, in Hale and ride on it to Halton Lea, in Cheshire. This bus snail-trails around Ditton and Widnes and takes an hour to get there. It's ten minutes by car. The 500 still exists, but no longer goes to Kirkby. Now it's an airport express, with John Lennon at one end and another snail-trail around the city centre at the other. I don't have any figures, but there seem to be as many buses on the roads as there ever were. Yet they don't run as frequently as in my day. The 82C was a seven or eight minute road and I'm told that the 26-27 belt was as little as three minutes. Nowadays no road seems less than fifteen minutes, with most being thirty minutes or an hour. These days if you want to catch a bus you have to read a timetable. In the old days you simply turned up at the stop, knowing you wouldn't have long to wait. Our concern was that the bus might be full. The sort of duties that Bill Peters describes, which regularly carried eight hundred to a thousand passengers would be impossible for a one-man bus The biggest change of the last forty years is that for most of us buses are no longer part of our everyday routine. In the old days the sudden suspension of the bus service through industrial action or inclement weather would bring chaos to our cities. Now it seems only a few would even notice and even fewer be actually affected. And, of course, deregulation of bus services has all but ruled out comprehensive industrial action. It's ironic that trams, the very vehicles that buses once replaced in a wave of modernisation, are now seen as the way forward for public transport. Ironic, too, is it that the proposals include the return of the conductor. Once again will we see the two-man crew.

© Bob Hogg 2003