Transport of delight

Think of London and the large, red, double-decker bus looms large and clear as one of true sights of London. Here's to taking a closer look at these taken-for-granted icons of England.

WHENEVER I think of London — and I was there just before Christmas — is a place that always cheers me up. Not that I’m down in the dumps or anything like that.  I can’t really put a finger on why that particular euphoria should exist — perhaps it’s just good, old-fashioned nostalgia shining through.

As a matter of fact, the Fall family lived well outside of London, in a place called Hatfield in the county of Hertfordshire. That town’s claim to fame (Hatfield) would have been the De Havilland aircraft factory headquarters that spawned the likes of Gypsey and Tiger Moths, Dragon Rapides, Mosquito fighters, the Comet series of passenger airliners, and eventually Blue Streak missiles — to name just a few.

Every Sunday morning we would pile into dad’s company car, a Jowett Javelin, and 40 minutes later would be walking around Chapel street market in the Borough of Islington, North London. If my brother and I had behaved ourselves reasonably well that week, we’d all jump on a London Transport (Regent III) RT* bus and travel deep into the heart of the City to spend the afternoon feeding peanuts to every creature we could entice at Regent’s Park Zoo.

Bus conductors back then must have been exceptionally fit. We’d watch him in amazement helter-skelter upstairs and downstairs collecting fares and issuing tickets in a whirr of hand movements, how he knew who had just jumped on and where they were seated, I often used to marvel. Dad always knew where to find me, though: stood behind the glassed-off driver’s compartment watching his every move as he wrestled with the biggest steering wheel I’d ever seen before or since — while deftly shifting gears.

What a skilful and responsible driver he was. He “chauffeured” 56-seated passengers — 30 upstairs and 26 down below — another eight (overflow) were allowed to stand at the back of the bus on an “exposed-to-the-elements” platform. All of them, rather alarmingly I thought, clutching on for dear life to the vertical pole fixed to the floor and ceiling, as it lurched and swayed it’s way across London town.

Was the driver aware he had a mighty 9.6-litre diesel engine coupled to an ultra-smooth Wilson pre-select-type gearbox under the engine cover? He would certainly have needed to remember, though, his bus was extraordinarily long at 38-feet, as he deftly manoeuvred the RT along Marylebone Road, past Madame Tussaud’s on the corner of Baker Street — just so we could give the animals their lunch.

The RT proved something of a global celebrity in the early sixties thanks to the British pop star Cliff Richard and his bunch friends, who used one in a film called Summer Holiday. If you saw the film (and who hasn’t) thought that film-star bus might have been a ubiquitous Routemaster — now you know differently!

There might well be red letter boxes to be found on street corners, red phone boxes spotted everywhere (and mustn’t forget the Chelsea Pensioners in their red and gold uniforms, or the Beefeaters protecting the Queen’s property at the Tower of London) but nothing for me quite captures the sights and sounds of the iconic red London bus — no matter what series it is.

*The London Transport RT bus is still used around the City on very special occasions, while 2009 was the 70^th anniversary of the RT (Regency III), first used in London in 1939. Nearly 7,000 of them were manufactured by AEC. Surprisingly, a round-the-clock fleet of 150 were in use for the duration of the Second World War. Well, Winston Churchill and his war cabinet, along with advice from Jan Smuts, had to get to Whitehall to make those necessary plans somehow!