Driving days - Mick Parsons

Wood Green memories

Michael Parsons recalls working the "main road" in the 1950s

Chapter 2 - driving at last!

After a couple of years conducting, as described last month, by now it was going into 1960 and I had a car driving licence and I wanted to “go on the front” ie get a bus driver’s licence. I asked the Garage Manager, Tom Newbold, and it turned out that I was one of three conductors with the same idea. Tom arranged for us all to go out with Tommy Flavell, another ex City man, and he would teach us to drive a bus.

We started with the Leyland deckers as they had a synchromesh box and were therefore a bit easier to drive than Bristols. Tommy took us all around Wood Green and Tottenham [there was no driving school at WG] then we slowly went onto Bristol LDs to learn the art of a smooth change with a crash box. The LDs had a five speed box where 5th is an overdrive ratio, selected out of 4th rather than from the main gearbox gate. Therefore it was essential to make sure you did not stop in 5th because it is near impossible to get 4th out of fifth! Six months later we had our test around the west end of London with a Leyland PD2, BD 1139 (FJN 205) and we all got through. Now I was on the front and by this time the Bristol FLFs had started to arrive - the 251 had all the TVXs from 1571 to 1590 (80-99 TVX, later renumbered 2700-19).

When the first FLF arrived at WG in 1960 it was in the middle of the week and it was parked up by the canteen stairs on the left hand side just below the main garage doors, this is viewed from the office. As we had never seen a FLF before and being totally different from the rear platform style, all the shed staff were told to have a good look round her. The bus was WG 1571, 80 TVX, and she went to work on the following Saturday. Beyond this look round, there was no type training, we just went out and found by our own mistakes. We did find that due to the camber on the road at times the doors on the FLFs would not close, or we forgot to close them, so we would get a frantic knocking on the small cab window. [From notes kept at the time by David Lang, webmaster of the fabulous www.sct61.org.uk site, it appears that the initial batch of 20 FLFs were allocated 10 to WG, 8 to SD and the remaining 2 to BD)].

One morning at about 1100 in the summer by this time we had a good few FLFs and we were working back to WG with one. I got into Rayleigh and pulled into the lay-by for the bus stop; I just sat and watched the traffic in my mirrors, waiting for the bell. The bell went and I eased out of the lay-by and into the traffic to turn left down Crown Hill to Rayleigh station. As I straightened up down the hill I got a mass of bells so I pulled into the nearside, opened the doors, got out and went round and onto the bus, when I got on there was a lot of laughter on the lower saloon. My conductor was at the back of the bus so I made my way to him, a woman was stood by the rear emergency door, covered in white as were the punters sitting on either side of the door. By all accounts as I had eased away and turned left down the hill, the woman who had got on at the stop was holding a large cream cake in front of her had got into a slow trot and ran into the back of the bus with this cream cake in front of her. The cake promptly exploded and covered all around her and herself in thick cream! The punters were in fits of laughter as I was! She was laughing and said it was just one of those things and in a way it was her own fault as she should have sat down at the front of the bus. I went on down to the station and phoned Brentwood from a public phone box. They gave us a replacement bus in Brentwood High Street which was an LD. There were comments made about the state of the rear of the bus, so my conductor said when we spoke back in WG. We never heard any more about it and the punters were laughing for a long time about it.

I did earn good money with my double days and on a Saturday night if the office could not get a WG crew to cover a late run in, they would get a Brentwood crew to do it and as I had not long passed my test, they would give me three hours to run the crew back to Brentwood in my car, which gave me a bit more experience in driving. I remember the names of some of the staff - Tom Newbold was garage manager, Mr Amott and Bill Jackson traffic inspectors, Tom Flavell driving instructor/driver, Harry Winsor driver/private hire driver, Johnny Coulton, Tom Day, Harry Brocklebank, Bill Eves and Tom Worrell all drivers, Maureen Askem clippie, John Jackson conductor/trainer, John Clevleys conductor [who every Friday afternoon went up to the canteen and managed to lose his wages playing cards, as you might gather he was hopeless at cards], Pat clippie [did not like late turns] and Charles Jukes garage foreman; he used to come up that garage in a bus like there was no tomorrow! Jim Blazeby did the refuelling and washing of the buses and always wore a black beret. The wash was just inside the exit door on the right and lifted up and down over the bus from the roof of the shed.

The buses that I remember were the 1500s (Bristol Lodekkas, in both LD & FLF versions), the Leyland PD2s, the LSs which we would get now and again from WG and on the shorts from Southend, the L5Gs or as we called them "conker boxes" on the Southend shorts, and the old ex City Coach Company Daimler double deckers. The latter had pre-selector gearboxes which have a change speed pedal in place of a conventional clutch. As many drivers have found to their cost, if you did not move your feet quickly enough, they would give you a kick from the sprung loaded pedal. Woe betide the driver who forgot and tried to ride the pedal like a clutch! (Later when on LT, I discovered that their pre-selectors were air operated and didn't kick back).

Every year WG would send two or three open top deckers ex Southend to Epsom for the Derby and although I never got to go, by all accounts it was a fine day out sitting on the top deck watching the racing and eating the freshly prepared food. I think that my favourite bus was 236 LNO [BD 1541], the 30' long LDL model and I am glad that she is still with us in Canvey Museum and I do thank Craig Mara and his father for doing a good job in looking after her. It is a shame that 320 GPU [WG 1489, illustrated last month] with Cave-Browne-Cave heating never got into preservation as she also was fine motor. I do think that the Lodekka’s were a good tool and well built even with their crash boxes and a lot of what I learnt in those years with EN lasted me for the next fifty years.

To end with, a couple of short stories that took place in my time on EN. A Brentwood fitter was out on test with a Bristol K, having done some work on it, and he took it down the bank through Harold Wood but he knocked it out of gear and eventually the prop shaft came up through the floor and did a reasonable amount of damage, it was a good thing that he was running dead! What the outcome of this was, I do not know. We could not catch the RTs on the Greenline service up through Harold Wood - they would pass us like we were standing still, it was not so bad with 6 pot (6 cylinder engined bus) but with a 5 pot it was quite embarrassing. On one early afternoon start out of WG we had so much layover time in Brentwood that I can remember going to the pictures to see Elvis Presley in G.I Blues and then on another day, spending time window shopping up and down the High Street, but times have changed.

It always seemed a long way home on a dark foggy, rainy night in the middle of winter up through Battlesbridge into Wickford and very few wombles [passengers] about but it was a good job and I did enjoy it. I left the National in about 1962 as I wanted to go long distance HGV driving. I ran for Harry Lebus out of Tottenham and used to do Aberdeen, Inverness and up to Wick and Thurso. That lasted until 1969 when I went up to Manor House [the London Transport Recruitment Centre] as by this time I was married and my late wife June was nagging me about being away too long driving lorries. But that is another story.