Just looking back through some of my old posts I see I have quite a few that involve bus driving anecdotes. My life working for the bus company was in many ways a major career mistake but what the heck, there isn’t anything I can do about it now and it gave me a lot of material for my novel and various short stories.
I think it was round about 1977 when I first got a job working for the bus company. I had packed in my job as an insurance clerk and left to tour Europe for the summer. After a month in a place called Lloret de Mar in Spain I got fed up and returned home. My dad wasn’t happy about me doing nothing all day and not coughing up any rent money so I went for what I thought would be a short term job as a bus conductor.
I spent a few weeks at the GM Buses training school in Ardwick which I loved. We had lots of fun learning how to use fare tables, learning fare stages and giving out tickets. It was a little harder when we began to do it for real but there was a great feeling of camaraderie at the bus company and that was cemented by going to pubs after an early shift and playing cards, pool and snooker as well as drinking lots of beer.
After about a year as a bus conductor I was sent back to the training school to learn how to drive a bus. In those days we trained in old back loader manual gearbox buses, sat in a small cab at the front and steering with a huge steering wheel and having to double the clutch to change from first to second gear as those old gearboxes weren’t fully synchromeshed.
The moment I climbed up into the cab I felt at home and I loved my time in the driving school. Every morning we used to check the bus over and top up the oil and water if required. Then our trainer would choose somewhere in the vast Greater Manchester operating area for breakfast. We might have a drive to perhaps Oldham garage or bus station. I’d start off and our trainer Bill sat behind me in the first seat. The window to the cab had been removed and Bill would give directions and off we would go. His main instruction particularly on narrower roads was to ‘ride the white line’ because our big bus needed the room, car drivers in smaller vehicles didn’t.
Bill knew all the canteen staff in all the canteens in Manchester. Sometimes we might just have a tea and toast for breakfast because on the next run Bill might designate Stockport as our next destination as the new canteen there always served up something good for lunch. To be honest though, I always preferred a breakfast. Back in those days the GM Buses canteens served a breakfast special which was egg, sausage, bacon, a slice of toast and a choice of either beans or tomatoes, all for a pound. My own breakfast favourite though was two eggs on two toast with beans and a sausage which is still a favourite today.
When my fellow trainee had taken the wheel we would motor down to Stockport or somewhere and I’d fill in my crossword as I listened to Bill calling out ‘drop down into third!’ or ‘watch your back end!’ and various other instructions.
I remember friends telling me when I started on the buses that my social life was finished because I would be working shifts. In fact, the reverse was true. My social life just boomed. After our early shifts my colleagues and I would go down to the busman’s club and play snooker and pool in the afternoons. After late shifts we would go to a late night drinking venue that was a bit of a dive but they used to let us in wearing our uniforms. Sometimes we would even take a change of clothes and after work go to a smart night club.
Another one of my colleagues was a guy called Neil. Now Neil was a nice fella but he was also a very rum turkey indeed. Way back then there were conductors like me who were honest, well reasonably honest. There was always the passenger who paid right at the last minute as he was getting off the bus and there wouldn’t be time to snap off a ticket. Those few pence went into the drivers’ and conductors’ brew fund and when we stopped at the next canteen (back in the late seventies and early eighties there was always another canteen on the horizon) I’d get the brews in with those few pence.
Of course, there were conductors who made a habit of approaching customers who were just getting off the bus and they made a regular brew fund out of those last minute bus fares. Others, those more dishonest ones, and I am sad to say Neil fell into that category, went out of their way not to give out tickets or even issued blank tickets.
One day Neil got his hands burned. He’d issued a blank ticket to a customer and who should board the bus but the fraud squad. They checked the tickets and pulled Neil up regarding the blank ticket. Neil went to a tribunal where he was accused of fraud and faced the sack but an incredible stroke of luck came his way. The fraud squad lost the evidence. They’d misplaced the offending blank ticket and Neil managed to hang onto his job with a stern warning. The fraud squad Inspector, a not very pleasant chap nicknamed Himmler, came up to Neil and told him in no uncertain terms, he had him in his sights and one day he’d get him.
Well, Neil went on to become a driver and then a one man driver and by then, as far as I know, he had left his nefarious past behind him. Still, you never could tell. Some busmen took fare fiddling to a fine art form and it wasn’t always the ones like Neil who were the perpetrators. One guy, I’ll call him Arthur, spent a pretty uneventful life working for the bus company. He never upset anyone, was always on time and was rarely off sick. He was very good with money and apparently invested his bus driving pay packet well. Then again, he was one of the first one man drivers and on a good wage.
Anyway, he did really well for himself and owned a nice holiday home in Prestatyn. Good on him you might think. Then he dropped dead one day of a heart attack and a few weeks later his widow came into the depot with Arthur’s spare ticket machine. Spare ticket machine? What spare ticket machine? Nobody had a spare ticket machine! Has the penny has dropped yet? Arthur was issuing tickets and taking fares for himself! Somewhere along the way Arthur had ‘acquired’ another ticket machine. Nice scam. No wonder he had a holiday home in Prestatyn! At least the Depot Inspectors didn’t tell the wife.
Vintage GM Bus flyer
Anyway, back to Neil although first I have to tell you this. On the A6 in Levenshulme, we had a small busmen’s canteen and if you were on the Manchester to Stockport service you usually stopped here for your breakfast or lunch. Now if you were going towards Stockport the canteen was actually just by two double yellow lines. Just past the canteen was a turn in to the bus parking bays but if you were due for a meal break and your bus was carrying on to Stockport you had to go through the traffic lights and stop in the lay-by, leave your bus and then walk back to the canteen.
Now, what most people did was stop on the double yellows then shout into the canteen for the new crew. It was wrong but that’s what we did and no one made a fuss. Anyway, one day an Inspector’s job came available. Various people applied but the guy who got the job was Neil and he decided that his first order of business as an Inspector was to stop buses parking on those double yellow lines! He did so and made himself a very unpopular fellow indeed. He’d wait by the canteen door and report any driver stopping on the yellow lines and plenty of times myself and other crews would be coming along, ready to stop and we’d see Neil waving us on so we’d carry on, through the lights and on to the lay-by.
Now here’s where Neil’s past caught up with him. In those days a new appointment was probationary for six months and Neil went along to an Inspectors’ meeting chaired by one of the senior Inspectors who just happened to be; yes, you’ve guessed it, it was Himmler. Himmler took Neil to one side. Asked what he was doing in Inspector’s uniform and by the end of the week Neil was back driving his bus and someone else was in charge at Lloyd Road.
Neil of course, had upset many people in his short term as an Inspector and he had forgotten the golden rule: Be nice to people on the way up because you might meet them on the way down. No one ever spoke to Neil again and he cut a sad figure, shunned by his workmates and always sitting alone in the canteen. Shortly after he packed the job in.
When I was a bus conductor it was pretty easy to spot the fare fiddlers. They would never look directly at you. As I strolled down the bus asking for ‘any more fares please’ I knew who had paid and who hadn’t, after all, I had usually just watched them get on the bus. One scruffy guy got on one day and went straight down the bus, sat down and set a fixed gaze out of the window. Ok, I was chatting to other passengers at the time but I still knew he was new to the bus and I wanted his money.
“Fares please.” I called. Nothing. So then I turned directly to him and asked “I don’t think I’ve had your fare mate?” He finally turned away from the window.
“Where are you going to?”
“Levenshulme” he said.
“Thirty five pence please.” The guy thought for a minute, reached into his pocket and pulled out a can of soup.
“Can I pay with this?” He asked. The answer was no. He was asked to leave. After all it was pea and ham soup, tomato might have been another matter.
In my book ‘Floating In Space’ I wrote about another odd ball passenger.
A harassed looking girl boarded in Stockport. There was something about her that I couldn’t put my finger on. She asked for a single to Manchester and did I require identification?
“Identification?” I asked.
“Only I don’t have my credentials on me at the moment. I’ve got to be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Well my boyfriend’s a nuclear arms salesman. I’m being watched by the CIA and God knows who else. MI5 have probably got the scent by now.”
“Right, we’ll keep a low profile then.”
“Probably best if you know what I mean.”
She was a Nutter.
Conductor 2265: Licensed to issue tickets
The rest of the trip was pretty unremarkable. When we finally reached Albert Square in the city centre the nutter came storming towards me down the centre aisle and yelled at the top of her voice “If my boyfriend’s not a nuclear arms salesman then how did I get CIA Clearance?”
She charged through the open door and on into Manchester. An old chap behind her departing at a much slower and more sensible pace said, “Answer that one then!”
There used to be a guy who never boarded our bus but spent his time hurtling through the traffic on his bike cutting up cars and buses alike. How he was never run over I do not know. My colleagues had dubbed him simply ‘The Levenshulme Nutter.’
One day, some years later when I made been promoted from bus conducting to the lofty heights of bus driver, I was driving through Levenshulme on the 192 service when the Levenshulme Nutter cut across me and I nearly ran him over. I stopped next to him at the traffic lights, opened my window to give him some abuse then, noticing his outsize spectacles with their purple lenses said, instead “I like your glasses!”
He popped the glasses up on his head and said “Yes, but it’s the man behind that counts!” And cycled away. I never saw him again.
Career wise, working on the buses was a major mistake. I had a lot of fun back then but even so, I always regret not going round to the Manchester Evening News and trying to a get a job doing something I really loved doing; writing.
What was your big career mistake?
Letters from an Unknown Author! 