A Useful Bit of Nostalgia

A couple of weeks ago I bought this on eBay. It was just a whimsical rush of blood to the nostalgia gland, I guess, but I used to have one of these when I was a lad.

I hasten to add that the item was already pretty old when I had it. A great many of my boyhood outings to football matches and motor races, cycling trips and journeys to Preston with Cousin Dave to spot Ribble buses involved one of these - ideal for carrying a plastic mac, a package of pilchard sandwiches (in red, gingham greaseproof paper, borrowed from a sliced loaf), and a map in the front pocket.

It is, of course, a Mark VII gas-mask bag, dating from 1942, as issued to civilians (and the Home Guard, I think). The ones for sale on eBay are original, but new (if that makes sense), stored since the war, just in case. Oh no - it didn't come with a gas-mask - that would be silly.

If it's a fake, please don't bother to tell me - I'm quite happy with it. Apart from a pleasing nostalgia value and a kind of lowbrow utilitarian appeal, it will be a useful conversation piece if we now get endless re-runs of Dad's Army on British TV.

Anyway - there you go - it doesn't take a lot to make me happy. I'll have to see if I can get pilchards online.


Completely Separate Topic

I was intrigued by this picture from the 1920s of a social day out for a local branch of the Klu Klux Klan. It may be a fake - I have no idea, but it is an image which will stay with me for a while...

Hooptedoodle #219 - The Away Game (plastic mac & pilchard sandwiches)

This is really just a note to myself – I have seen some of the reaction to the recent Hillsborough verdict – I do not wish to make any me-too comment, nor falsely claim any personal involvement, but Liverpool was my home town, and I am well aware of the depth of feeling that has prevailed there for the 27 years since the tragedy.

Cold shadows that come down the years from 1989 are the extent of the government paranoia about civil unrest, urban terrorism and potential class war, and the growth in crowd trouble and neo-fascist hooliganism which marred soccer in those days. The cages behind the goals at Hillsborough where the fatal crush took place were designed as animal pens, quite simply because football crowds were viewed as exactly that – animals. Especially, I need hardly add, northern football crowds, where the proportion of Tory voters might safely be assumed to be very low indeed.

Maximum-wage heroes - Liverpool FC, season 1961-62 - Big Tam Leishman,
in the middle of the front row, still looks like something from Frankenstein's lab 

I am even less qualified to comment on this than I usually am – which may be saying something. The last time I went to watch an away league game of my beloved Liverpool FC predates Hillsborough by many years – it was on Saturday, 18^th November 1961 (I checked), when I was a schoolboy – my mate Ken Bartlett got us tickets for the Huddersfield Town vs Liverpool match, in the old English League Division Two (in which Liverpool were staging, I think, a remarkable five-year run of 3^rd place finishes, in the days when only the top two clubs were promoted at the season’s end!). Football crowds were not the high-profile violent menace which they had become by Thatcher’s time, but my 1961 memories of our day out involve very little of the match we went to see – all I can remember is the misery of the journey, the squalor and the sense of worthlessness which the police and the logistical arrangements instilled in the travelling fan.

Leeds Road, Huddersfield - pre-war photo

Ken and I were experienced visitors to Anfield, Liverpool’s home ground, though my parents insisted that I never went in the Kop end, which was famous for its passion and the surges on the terracing – as a small chap, I used to go to the Anfield Road end, which at times was scary enough.

Our trip to Huddersfield started quite early, queuing to board one of the old Football Special trains from Lime Street station. We were late getting on the train – we waited for our friend Tony Potter, but he didn’t show up, though we had a ticket for him, and we eventually gave up on him and squeezed on board. I was shaken by the police presence – I don’t know what the size of the travelling support was in those days; records show that the crowd at that game was 23,000-odd, which is not bad considering Huddersfield were having a poor season, and I guess the visitors might have brought 5,000 or so with them. In 1961 a good proportion of these would have been on the trains. There was a hefty contingent of Liverpool Police and Transport Police at Lime Street – including a good number of senior officers – the police were aggressive and profane throughout, even though there was no trouble at that time of the morning. I was upset that the police were so abusive, when it did not seem to be necessary.

It was a tradition that British Rail would use old or obsolete rolling stock for these trains – the fans, after all, were barely human, so it was probably deemed adequate. There was no heating, the toilets did not work, in some carriages there was no lighting, and only some of the carriage doors were unlocked – for security. We were also crammed in – 4-a-side in a filthy compartment designed to hold six. People standing or squatting in the corridors. Much shoving and swearing to get us all in.

The journey was cold and it took ages – the Football Specials, of course, had to work around the normal timetables of sensible trains for decent people, so the routing may have been odd, and we spent lots of time waiting at signals. We arrived in Huddersfield on a cold, soaking wet afternoon – it was already very dark at 2pm, when we got off the train. That was the first shock. We were not in a station – we were unloaded – had to jump down – in a siding somewhere, and were herded along what appeared to be a disused railway line, past derelict factories and rubbish dumps, accompanied by a lot of policemen – some of these had come on the train, some were local and met us there.

Industrial heartland - Huddersfield in the Old Days

The idea was to keep this horde off the streets of the town as completely as possible – it was a long, wet, muddy walk to the old Leeds Road ground, and only the later part of the walk was along paved streets. We got into the ground without incident, always with the watching constables, and the game itself was almost an unreal interlude (we won 2-1, Melia and Hunt scored the goals, though I don’t remember a great deal about it), and then it was time to get us all out of the town again.

The return march seems to have been more direct – we actually walked through central Huddersfield – I recall being surprised that they had trolley-buses – but you could not stop – certainly no chance of going into a pub or buying food. Prodded and abused, we were at least taken to a station this time. The train, however, was the same as before, and we reached Liverpool many hours late, frozen stiff, and I was seriously traumatised by the experience. I was never allowed to go to an away game again – in fact the home games were off limits for a few weeks as well.

The point of this insignificant tale, if there is one, is that there was no trouble – maybe that is a vindication of the methods, I really don’t know. It was a competely routine transport exercise, to move PAYING CUSTOMERS (I capitalise that to remind myself that we were not, in fact, convicts or prisoners of war) to a public sporting event in a town that really was not so far away. It must have happened, just like that, many, many times, every weekend, all over the country. The police, famously, did not relish football duty on the weekend, and it was very obvious that the fans were uniformly regarded as vermin. Again, maybe we were – I certainly felt degraded and distressed by the experience – Ken and I were just naïve young boys from a decent school, and being shouted and sworn at on a routine basis was upsetting.

Of course, it was all right really – just a growing experience, something to toughen us up, but if you wanted to radicalize the working classes that was one way of going about it. My grandmother use to say that if you expect the worst of people, that’s just what you will get. It doesn’t seem particularly sensible that league football matches should become a long-running war between the police and the public, especially if they didn’t have to, but that was certainly the tradition.

Hooptedoodle #185 - The ABC Man

Last month Ian Allan passed away, one day short of his 93^rd birthday. Who? Well, in his way, Allan was one of the most famous and influential men of his generation.

Ian Allan (left), in his early 20s - checking facts

You see, he more or less invented trainspotting in the UK. Well, he didn’t really invent it, but the books and enthusiasts’ guides he published (and which the company he founded continues to publish) organised it and codified it, and have been the backbone of the Nerd World since 1942.

Allan was born in 1922 in Horsham, Surrey, and educated at St Paul’s School. An accident at an Officers’ Training Corps camp when he was 15 resulted in the amputation of one of his legs, and he was not greatly gifted scholastically, so by 1942 he was employed in a clerical department at the Southern Railway, a humble role which, as it happened, suited him perfectly. He was fanatically enthusiastic about all things to do with trains and locomotives, and, since his employers refused to have anything to do with the project, he published at his own expense a booklet describing all the rolling stock of SR, and was rather shaken when all the copies sold out very quickly, necessitating a further printing. He went on to produce successful booklets for the other British railway companies, and the first edition of his volume on London Transport systems sold out all 20,000 copies within 4 days of going on sale. After that, things really took off.

In post-war, rationed, miserable, penniless Britain, Allan had provided the basic tools for an inexpensive hobby which became a near-religion, claiming the attention of vast numbers of boys (of all ages). In 1949 he and his wife founded the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Club, which eventually had some 230,000 members. His little booklets covered a remarkable number of titles, originally on railway topics, but later on trams, buses, aviation, all forms of road transport, shipping, military subjects, model-making – you name it. About half the kids in my class at grammar school were trainspotters – at weekends, on railway station platforms all over the country, there would be little groups of enthusiasts, each with a knapsack containing a flask of tea and a number of Allan's precious ABC books, so that “spotted” locomotives could be marked off in the lists.

Trainspotters at Newcastle, 1950

Just as well his mother never knew...

My cousin Dave had an astonishing number of the bus books – and I do mean astonishing. He was an easy kid to buy presents for. Not only was it necessary to have the booklet for every known vehicle fleet, but constant change in those fleets would require new editions every couple of years, and, naturally, they would be snapped up as soon as available. Though the individual books were only a couple of shillings each (in my day), they would form a major investment for the true disciple. Dave and I spent many hours at the Ribble bus sheds, in Liverpool and Preston, scribbling numbers into notebooks. I guess my unsophisticated tastes were honed at an early age…

Allan was always an enthusiast

Ian Allan Publications are still going strong – their output is glossier and more ambitious now, but they still seem to hold the same important place in the hearts and minds of transport fans, and their reputation for accuracy and quality still holds. Allan also produced market-leading monthly magazines on railways, buses and model railways, which I believe are still going strong, and at various times he bought the Hastings Miniature Railway and the Great Cockrow Railway (near Chertsea). He was honoured with an OBE in 1996.

If you wish to see how influential ABC books were, just have a look on eBay – any day, any week, almost any subject.

My old school chum Andy “Cocky” Roche once announced that he had seen a girl trainspotter at Carlisle station, but this was greeted with total (and somehow reassuring) disbelief. Anyway, if he had seen one, she would most certainly have had one or more of the ABC books with her; thanks very much, Mr Allan.

Jamie the Postie Is Doing a Good Job

Our friendly postie has been doing stout service in wet conditions once again. Yesterday he turned up with an excellent parcel of S-Range Minifigs Spaniards very kindly sent to me by Matt - all the way from New Zealand (no wonder Jamie looks tired). I knew these were coming, but was delighted to see their condition, and they are painted, and there are enough of the fabled SN1s figures here to produce an 1812 Spanish light infantry battalion with very little work. There are also some 1809-period grenadiers who may well be the start of the first battalion of Granaderos Provinciales, if I can raise some matching friends for them. Thanks again, Matt!

I've been doing well on the donations front of late - I also was recently sent a very nice stash of unpainted SN1s chaps by my mysterious painting friend, Goya, so the 1812 Spaniards are kept bubbling along. I have only very rarely met a free parcel of soldiers which I didn't like.

Jamie also brought me a slightly off-the-wall addition to my non-collection of buses. This is a Commer (Rootes Group, Chrysler...) minibus in the colours of Crosville - the destination is Ynys Station, which was on a now-defunct railway line running south from Menai, in North Wales, through Caernarfon to Afon Wen. The bus companies used to run minibuses like this in country areas which were too sparsely populated for a full coach service; the minibuses also took a role in handling post and parcels. I must say the model (by Oxford Diecast) looks absolutely tiny, but it is 1/76 - the normal HO model railway scale - the same scale as the double deckers I have already in the non-collection, so I guess minibuses must have been a lot smaller than buses. That's probably where they got the name from. [Duh.]

The number plate ending in a B dates this vehicle from around 1964 - any North Welsh readers remember these little chaps? The railway closed in 1964 (thank you, once again, Dr Beeching!), and Crosville provided a bus service to replace it, so the full-size original of this van must have been provided new for the start of that service. I imagine these little buses would operate as feeders for the main bus service - so this would be a local shuttle running passengers into Ynys to connect with the (bigger) Caernarfon/Menai run. Note that the vehicle has a raised roof to allow passengers to stand up. The sheep would not be allowed on the seats, I guess.

Original rail route-map of Menai to Afon Wen service

Hooptedoodle #177 - TB Maund - A Prince Among Nerds

I have occasionally mentioned here my interest in buses - I have also emphasised that it stops short of being a hobby, as my little box of model buses stops short of being a true collection. This is a matter of policy. My focus, if there is one, is on the nostalgia associated with vintage buses from my home town and the surrounding area during my childhood, which is a bit contrived, I guess, as are a lot of old men's follies, but there is something profoundly special about buses for a man of my age, in a way which may be less obvious to, even less easily understood by, someone from a later generation.

For a start, public transport was an ever-present in the 1950s and 1960s - just about everything I ever did, everywhere I went, involved buses - half the childhood conversations I can remember seem to have taken place on the bus. Life was arranged around bus routes and bus timetables - and the limits of everything acceptable and decent were defined by the times of the last bus home. I knew people whose families owned cars, of course, but my family never had one until after I had gone away to university (you don't suppose that was deliberate, do you?). Buses were, and remain, important to me.

The other thing about old buses is the photographs in the hobby books - wow! - time-capsule stuff. Some bus enthusiast taking a routine photograph of the number 82 driving along Park Road in 1953 is just another old picture of a bus, but if it wasn't for the bus enthusiast no-one in his right mind would ever have taken a casual picture of Park Road otherwise, so these old snaps are a goldmine of social history - absolute nostalgia bomb. I bought a couple of old books, to fill in some of the huge gaps in my understanding of the subject, and I was hooked. I am still concentrating on what used to be termed the North West (a term which must have mystified anyone from Fort William), but I have branched out (ha!) into trams, local railways and the Mersey Ferries, and my time horizons have widened a lot.

One common thread that I picked up on straight away is that a large proportion of these books is the work of one Thomas Bruce Maund - TB Maund - the high priest of Northern transport. I have learned to associate his name on the cover with a guarantee of a well-written, balanced, thorough presentation, and (OCD bonus point) I believe that I have not been aware of any transposed pictures, misprints, spelling errors or even incorrect punctuation. Mr Maund is the business. Bus-spotting may be another classic example of a minority interest (no-one ever got rich publishing books about Birkenhead buses), but it is blessed - TBM is a perfect example of the sort of quiet superhero without whom hobbies would be impossible - a man whose love of his subject becomes a treasure trove for those who come after.

Mr Maund is, of course, very famous in his field (though he would have hated the very idea), but I had never heard of him until last year. I have more of his works on order - this time a 2-volume history of the Mersey Ferries - and I know they will be excellent. He died just a couple of years ago - after a lifetime of painstaking research and careful, flawless documentation; he died before I had even heard of him, but I hope you will forgive me if I extend this off-topic post to offer a small tribute to him - this was his obituary in the journal of the proceedings of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport, of which TBM was, of course, a Fellow.

Obituary: Thomas Bruce Maund FCILT

Renowned transport historian and author Thomas Bruce Maund, former bus company manager and author of some of the most authoritative transport history books, died on 1st October 2013 at the age of 89. 
He was born in Wallasey on 10th August 1924 and had remarkable personal memories of trams and buses in the Merseyside area, which he was able to date back as far as the age of four. He was almost certainly the last person alive with clear memories of the operation of Wallasey trams, the system having closed on 30th November 1933.

He attended the Oldershaw School in his home town and his first job was as a junior railway clerk in a local goods office. After army service in Africa towards the end of the Second World War and for a period thereafter, he began work in the bus industry in 1948. Initially he worked for Basil Williams’s Hants and Sussex operation, involved in what he described as: ‘the seamy side of what appeared to be a glossy operation’. The following year he obtained a position with Ribble Motor Services, where he was known as Tom. He served the company for 18 years, with the parent company and with Standerwick, latterly as District Traffic Superintendent in Blackpool and finally Preston. For a time in 1966/67, he was seconded to the Traffic Research Corporation to work on the Merseyside Area Land Use/Transport Study (MALTS) project. 

In early 1970, he took the opportunity to move abroad when he took up a position with United Transport in Kenya, working for Kenya Bus Service in Nairobi. Staying with United Transport, he moved on to South Africa in 1973, where he worked for African Bus Service in Pretoria, Greyhound Bus Lines in Krugersdorp and Rustenburg Bus Services in Rustenburg, before finishing his working days at United Transport’s head office in Johannesburg. 
He took a great interest in training and further education, lecturing at colleges at Blackpool and Preston and at Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg. He was a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Transport, having studied for his Institute exams in his early Ribble days. He retired in 1987 and he and his wife Kathleen (Kay, who died in 2002) returned to the UK in 1992 and made their home in Prenton, Wirral. 
Alongside his professional career, Bruce was developing a reputation as a thorough researcher of transport history and a prolific author of his findings.

He could trace his interest in transport back to the late 1920s, having vivid memories of the introduction of double-deck buses in his home town on 4th April 1928. His family accepted his interest but, in his own words: ‘All attempts to wean me off my “mania” failed.’ His adventurous nature took him on a solo trip to Liverpool via the ferry at the age of six (which he never told his family about!), and he remembered seeing Ribble buses in Lime Street, shortly after the company had changed its terminal arrangements. The Ribble terminus gave him a ready source of used tickets, and by the age of 10 he was already what he described as a serious ticket collector, identifying different types of ticket and forming them into sets. After school, he was often to be found watching traffic movements at the busy Seacombe ferry terminus and committed the full contents of the Wallasey Corporation destination blind to memory. Over 70 years later, he could still recite this verbatim. 

The reward of a Royal Enfield bicycle (cost £3 19s 9d) for passing the grammar school scholarship widened his horizons and he undertook ambitious cycle trips to places as far afield as Greater Manchester and the Potteries. He also got as far as Birmingham to visit his aunt unannounced, but she was out at the time and he and his bicycle caught the train home. Until this time, Bruce was unaware of the existence of any other bus enthusiasts, although he had a small set of contacts with whom he corresponded in connection with his ticket collection. One of these was the tramway expert W H Bett who lived in Birmingham and who persuaded him to take up membership of the Light Railway Transport League. Through the LRTL Merseyside area representative he met Peter Hardy, who, before being called up for war service, had been researching the history of Liverpool bus routes. This initial contact awakened Bruce’s serious interest in road passenger transport history, as well as starting a long friendship that lasted until Peter Hardy’s death in 1986. 
Through Peter Hardy, Bruce met a wide range of other enthusiasts, including Omnibus Society North Western Branch founder member Jack Baker. He joined the OS in 1943 and was one of its longest-standing members at the time of his death. He acted as the Branch’s visits secretary for a short time, helping to organise a fine array of summer visits that reached, in that pre-motorway era, as far as Darlington and Northampton. In the winter he was involved in arranging a programme of meetings with guest speakers. He subscribed to Buses Illustrated from its first edition in 1949 and it was fitting that the month he died coincided with the current buses calendar displaying a picture of Wallasey PD2 No 54. 

His first piece of published work was an article about Bere Regis and District which he wrote for Modern Transport while based at Salisbury during the latter years of the war, for which he was paid £5. He followed this up with a piece on Kenya Buses when posted to that country by the army in 1945–47. With respect to the bus industry, in his own words he had become: ‘interested in everything but as a consequence became expert on nothing’. He therefore made the decision to concentrate on the Merseyside area because that was what he knew best and began work in the early 1950s on what was much later to emerge as the five volume Liverpool Transport series, jointly authored with John Horne. He revelled in making new discoveries from minute books or other records, and in debunking some oft-repeated untrue statement. His first publication was a booklet in 1958 for the Omnibus Society on Transport in 
Rochdale and District, much of this being based on material left to the OS through the estate of a deceased member who had been researching the subject. This was followed soon afterwards by one on Local Transport in Birkenhead and District based on Bruce’s own research. He went on to author or co-author a total of 28 books during his lifetime. 
Through well-known Liverpool photographer and enthusiast Norman Forbes, Bruce was introduced to John Horne, who Forbes was aware was ploughing a similar furrow with respect to research on Liverpool. The Horne/Maund partnership produced the first volume of Liverpool Transport in 1975 (published by the LRTL) and the lavish set of books – including a significantly rewritten version of the first volume in 1995 – stands as probably the most thorough piece of published transport research on any UK city. It was all the more remarkable for the fact that for the majority of the period Bruce was living in South Africa and much of his contribution to the research was conducted on trips back to the UK, where he and Kay would work as a team at the Public Record Office and local archives to record as much information as they could in their limited time available.


Following his return to the UK in retirement, Bruce’s output averaged almost a book a year, with detailed books on Crosville, Ribble and St Helens (the latter jointly with Mervyn Ashton) and a series of illustrated soft-backed books for a Wirral-based publisher of local interest titles. Although predominantly targeted towards buses, his researches widened to cover titles on tramways (a Birkenhead and Wallasey title with Martin Jenkins in 1987), two volumes on Mersey Ferries (the second one again jointly with Martin Jenkins), and three railway books. He was persuaded to write up some of his previously unpublished material on Birkenhead and early bus services in South Lancashire and these were published by the Omnibus Society, the latter being his final title in 2011. He also undertook editing work for publishers such as Venture Publications and NBC Books, and was often asked to provide text verification for other transport titles. 
This prodigious volume of published work is a fitting legacy to a man who devoted a large part of his life to his research and, importantly, ensured it reached a wide public. Although at times appearing stern – and with what could be viewed as unreconstructed opinions forged in different times – Bruce was loyal to his friends and colleagues and a devoted family man. He is survived by his two sons Derek and Philip, granddaughter Vanessa and great-grandsons Liam and Ethan.

Charles Roberts and Ken Swallow