John Wagstaff and I go back a long way. We were both pupils at South London’s Dulwich College, often under the same unlucky teachers, and we have always kept in touch since those post-Paleolithic times.

John’s love of the omnibus has been a main theme in his life (apart from his family, of course). He has dedicated his working career, indeed in his youthful words, ‘sacrificed’ it, exclusively to this monarch of the roads. For many years John owned an Exeter number 60 complete with Leyland 0600 diesel engine. His bus collection (viewable to the privileged few upon appointment) is worthy of inclusion in any celebrated transport museum. In 2019, two year after he’d hung up his uniform for the last time, John added another book to the list he’s written (mostly about buses and their crews; for example his volume on the London Country Bus). Titled ‘Are you going straight?’ it’s an autobiography and relates in a perfectly engrossing manner, the threads in which his life has been closely interweaved with that of Flanders’ and Swann’s ‘big six-wheeler, scarlet painted, London transport, diesel engine, ninety-seven horsepower omnibus’.

The title ‘Are you going straight?’ refers not to the abandonment of any suspicious undercover activity but to a question ‘Does this bus go straight on down this road?’ often asked by passengers (not ‘customers’ as I hasten to refuse to write in defiance of this unfortunate adoption of a word now used for travellers on public transport.) The question reminded me of my stint as a bus conductor many years ago with Eastern Counties which served Cambridge and its environs. In that situation the question asked, which almost became a mantra, was ‘does this bus go down Mill road?’ I don’t know why everyone seemed to want to go down Mill road, there’s nothing particularly fascinating about it apart from the Fish ‘n Chip shop, but evidently it was a preoccupation for many of those waiting at the bus-stop. In his autobiography, a book enhanced by lively and amusing artwork by Ellis Tomkins and Fenella Cardwell, chapter six is dedicated to the author’s six-week spell as a bus conductor, indeed a lightning one.

(Mill Road, Cambridge)

The references in John’s chapter to Gibson roll-ticket issuing machines, shift patterns and visits by ticket inspectors, who instilled greater fear in me than in any passengers, brought back several memories of an employment which I still regard as a significant episode in my life. At the time I was a post-graduate research student in social anthropology at the university’s King’s college. Although this might have sounded an enviable situation to be in I was increasingly disheartened by it. A second visit to a remote area of the Indian Himalayas where I was studying a village of the Pahari people was fraught (although I managed to send a letter about the ‘Pahari’ postman to the ‘Beckenham Historian’ which John still edits after more than forty years) and my previous confidence in pursuing an academic career became somewhat eroded. Indeed, fast forwards to three years later and I found myself happily married to my teenage heart-throb Sandra and working in Victoria Station and in the Tower (not as an inmate I hasten to say) as an information clerk with the London Tourist Board. (I should add that I did return to the academic world later on as a lecturer, this time in information technology, in a further education college which was part of Greenwich University).

My experience as a bus conductor taught me many invaluable things. There was the discovery of what a full-time working life really was like and how privileged I was in having a Cambridge college as my Alma Mater.  The hammer-head beams of the Great Hall’s gothic splendour were replaced by the less spectacular shabbiness of the bus-crew’s canteen. Gowns were substituted for employee uniforms crowned by that green-edged badge issued by the Metropolitan Traffic commissioners (alas, no longer dispensed) which still remains one of my proudest possessions. The shift system was, as John observes in his book, a perfect alternative to the nine-to-five job most people have. Afternoons off, morning lie-ins and mini-breaks of three days or more enhanced our work routine besides disciplining me to accurate time-time keeping and dependable alarm-clocks!

(Eastern Counties Bus Garage, Hills Road, Cambridge)

Of anecdotes relating to my time on the buses I can still recall a few: the instance when a new driver from Canada took the wrong turning on his first journey out of Hills Road garage and landed me and some confused passengers in the complicated maze of an industrial estate in Cherry Hinton (from which we did eventually find a way out). Then there were the first occasions when I had to work out my waybill at the end of a tiring shift and found that the figures between tickets issued and fares received still did not tally after the third attempt, causing me to be late and hungry getting home. My breakfast on one occasion, having missed my customary meal before setting out, was the egg boiled in the bus’s radiator which the driver offered me after the steep (for Cambridge shire) ascent up Babraham’s Gog Magog hills.  Above all I remember the amazing camaraderie and sense of humour of the bus crews who, often underpaid and under-appreciated, kept up their spirits.  It made such a change from the somewhat stiff and demeaning behaviour of several College dons in those days.

The buses I conducted were all ‘Bristols’.  The Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company started in 1908. In 1955 this part of the business was separated out as Bristol Commercial Vehicles Limited and finally closed in 1983 when production was moved to its then parent company Leyland. I stand corrected by John Wagstaff’s  comprehensive knowledge of these matters but I suspect that the bus I conducted was the the Bristol Lodekka,  a half-cab, low-height, step-free double-decker bus built by Bristol Commercial Vehicles in England. Of interest to the author of a book which describes his work-experience with London Transport’s Unit for Disabled Passengers it was the first operational production bus design to have no step up from the passenger entrance throughout the lower deck in use for passenger service. For me, however, the Lodekka had one slight disadvantage: I would always have to be present on its rear-door platform to manually open the folding doors and then close them again when the bus continued its route. This meant that there was no time for me to dawdle on the top deck when a bus stop was approached.

In less digitally proficient times I was called upon to announce the arrival of each bus stop as the vehicle approached it. I remember on one occasion a passenger became irate with me because I had not made clear when the bus stop was reached. I replied that I did announce ‘Norwich Street’.  I mentioned this fact to one of the other conductors on my return to the garage. ‘Many of these passengers only know the names of nearby pubs’ he answered. ‘’Next time say ‘Devonshire Arms’. I remembered this valuable piece of advice and decided to memorize all those pubs near to the bus stops, replacing them in place of the street names, in my announcement to the often bemused passengers.

Sadly a lot of these pubs have since vanished and, together with them, the disreputable pub crawls many of us undergraduates would indulge in.

One of the highlights of my career as a semi-lightning conductor was when I had a route that carried me into the pastoral landscapes of Cambridgeshire. I loved to see the fields, thatched cottages and country churches. It was truly what one conductor quipped to me, ‘if you want a job where you can travel and meet people then become a bus conductor.’

On an early shift I would motorbike down to the Hills Road Garage in pitch darkness and often freezing autumnal cold to be greeted by my work colleagues with warm smiles and a joke or two (often at my expense!).  Happy days indeed!

Despite my own prognostications and to the surprise of several of my peers who were engaged on research in their ivory towers I turned out, according to the testimony of the bus drivers, to be an efficient conductor respecting the route timetable and coordinating to a T with the man at the steering wheel. (No Eastern Counties women drivers yet then…)

I conclude that even if I didn’t become the conductor of the London Symphony orchestras – I still harboured this childhood delusion – I remain entirely satisfied to have become for a memorable period of my life a conductor of ‘Eastern Counties’.

‘Are you going straight?’(ISBN 978-1-5272-3859-6) is published by Scotforth Books. price £14.95