The First Seventy Years: 12 - Dreaming the Dream
Eric Biddulph recalls the days when he rode the Nottingham buses driven by his father.
For earlier chapters of Eric's autobiography please click on The First Seventy Years in the menu on this page.
It was into this environment that I joined my father. I would travel on a petrol bus driven by him with the full knowledge of his long-standing conductor. No fare was ever paid except on the rare occasions when an inspector boarded. When one did board, the conductor would quickly and discreetly issue me with a ticket, and my father would pay the fare at the terminus.
I would travel around on a number of different routes in this manner until an appropriate time, usually after 6 pm, at which point I would get off the bus and walk home to arrive at about the same time as my mother. These excursions lasted between two and three hours.
I became quite an expert on the different models of buses which made up the fleet. I was even permitted, on a limited number of occasions, to climb into the driver's cab and dream the dream. The nearest I ever got to a real life experience of being a crew member was being permitted at the end of each journey to wind the handles of the number and destination boards on the front and back of his bus. This was something to brag about to my schoolmates.
There were many occasions when I enjoyed a meal with my father in the staff canteen. When he was on a split shift during school holidays, I would sometimes get the opportunity to play snooker with him on a full-sized table.
Until the 1960s many workers went home for lunch. As most of them relied on buses for commuting, it was not unusual to catch one for the ten or fifteen minutes journey home, spend half an hour eating a cooked meal and then return to work. The schedules of bus crews had to accommodate this pattern of living.
As a consequence, my father would work what amounted to a three shift system whenever on a split shift. His first journey would be around 7 am. This would predominantly take workers to one of the numerous industrial factories. His second trip would have a bus full of office workers.
By 9 am there would be very few passengers on the buses. My father would arrive home by 10 am. He would spend the next couple of hours reading, firstly the Daily Express and then the western which he had borrowed from the library. He would return to the bus depot to take a bus out on service for the benefit of home lunchers.
Between 2.30 and 4.30 pm there would be a huge number of crews passing the time in the canteen or games rooms. It was during this time that most snooker games were played. Towards 5 pm there would be a massive movement out of the depot. The crews were required to transport the mass of humanity from their workplaces to their homes.
My father would finish the day's shift between 6.30 and 7.30 pm. The early morning shifts started around 5 - 5.30 am and finished between 1 and 2 pm. The late shifts started between 4 and 5 pm and finished between 11 pm and midnight. They both allowed a semblance of a social life to be pursued but the split shift totally disrupted any attempt at any ongoing programme of activity.
