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By Doug Fairhurst
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Just over 10% of the UK population inhabits the West Country, but a much larger number will have visited the area, at some time in their life, as a holiday destination. My parents took me to Paignton in 1960 where the Devon General fleet of smart red and cream AECs, with musical sound effects, immediately entranced me. Seven years later a college friendship lead me to pay several visits to Exeter and South Devon, enabling me to capture the local scene when Exeter still had municipal buses and Devon General had yet to be absorbed into the National Bus Company. My employment as a full-time PSV-driver ensured that working visits to the area would follow and soon I was despatched on a holiday tour to Teignmouth and, later in the year, to Newquay in Cornwall. On a trip to Torquay I parked my Midland Red coach in Torwood Street garage where the inspector told me that I must report to him on my rest day and operate a local excursion using my coach. This I was more than happy to do and with a hastily assembled set of notes I managed to locate my passengers at various hotels, find the destinations of Cockington and Totnes and complete the tour to everyone's satisfaction. I can now say that 'I worked for Devon General' even if only for a day - and it nearly got me the sack from Midland Red. I did not realise that I needed permission from my Heath Hayes traffic manager and effectively I had been using the vehicle without the owner's consent!
By Bob Jackson
Having spent his youth photographing steam locomotives Garry Yates switched, in1968, to taking black and white bus photographs on a 'box' Brownie 127 camera of the exposed radiator Birmingham City Transport buses which, at the time, were disappearing fast as new Fleetline buses took over. In 1973 he could finally afford a better camera and from that time onwards took colour slides and over the last 35 years has covered every bus fleet in the British Isles and Ireland including the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Many of the fleets and buildings have disappeared over the years, and today's four large bus companies have certainly made the hobby less interesting with a standardisation of vehicle types and liveries. In this book Garry has tried to give a flavour of London's buses in the 1970s showing the variation of vehicle types in an era when many famous LT buses like the RT and RF came to an end in favour of one man operated buses like the Fleetline (DMS), Leyland Titan (T), and Metrobus (M).Author: Gary Yates First published: March 2010
Midlands Bus Memories in Colour
AVAILABLE SEPTEMBER 2008
The author’s first evocation of the Trams of his boyhood, LEICESTER’S TRAMS, was published by Irwell Press in 2000 and sold out long ago. This new account is compiled from all new material - an unrivalled further sequence of photographs and Leicester streetscapes, from the long-distant days before the Great War to the petrol-rationed times of austerity after the Second. Beautifully painted and kept in excellent order the Leicester Trams fought a long rearguard until 1949 – they were the Great Survivors of the tram world. By the 1930s, tramways had been abandoned in every East Midlands municipality, with one notable exception – the City of Leicester.
