Wheels and War; Converging Passions

(This post is based on one I wrote for my now defunct 'St Cyr On Wheels' blog back in March 2021. I find that for one reason or another over the years I have left a trail of sad-looking, lonely, overgrown and abandoned blogs behind me, and given that I would really like to make a go of this one I have decided to move over to the new format anything from the old ones that seems relevant. Also it's easier than thinking of something new to write, but you never heard me say that.)

I’m pretty sure I am not imagining this – there is a definite correlation between an interest in military history and a fascination for public transport and I have often puzzled over why this is so.

My own interest in buses, trams and trains, I think, preceded my obsession with things military by about a year. Beginning some time in about 1975 my best mate Carl – similarly obsessed – and I used to get up on a Saturday morning and immediately after breakfast we would take the bus into the Pier Head on the Liverpool waterfront for a day of bus spotting.

Buses at the Pier Head in the 1970s; hideous building, but you know I quite miss it

By the mid-1970s the old Liverpool Corporation - the 'Corpy' - which had governed the city as part of the historic county of Lancashire since the nineteenth century, had been replaced by Liverpool City Council as the city became a metropolitan borough and part of the new metropolitan county of Merseyside in 1974. The Corpy had, from the 1950s onwards, been bringing a growing number of buses onto the city's roads to replace its fine fleet of trams, which were, for various reasons, deemed no longer adequate for the transport needs of a large modern city. As a tram enthusiast - be warned, readers, the trams of Liverpool and elsewhere will return to haunt this blog - I can only sigh at this decision. Liverpool's last tram, a beautifully curvaceous 'Baby Grand' painted in a pure white livery that all these years later makes it look all the more like an innocent martyr to modernity, ran from the Pier Head to Bowring Park on September 14th 1957, some nine months after the closure of the Liverpool Overhead Railway - the Dockers' Umbrella - brought to an end another jewel in the crown of the city's historic transport network.

Mercifully my enthusiasm for trams is mirrored by an equally passionate and inexplicable enthusiasm for buses, and especially the ones I grew up with: those old workhorses of British urban 1970s bus fleets, the Leyland Atlantean. The city's transport was, after 1968, administered by the Merseyside Passenger Transport Executive and they had over a thousand Atlanteans plying the city's streets, one of the largest of the country's regional fleets, wearing a fetching livery of racing green or, sometimes, a lighter green with a broad yellow band between the two sets of windows. Tourists in London always go crazy for the old open-platformed Routemasters but really, they had nothing on the Atlantean with that sexy niche above the engine cover at the rear.

There were several angles to the bus passion Carl and I shared. Like most spotters we had a thing for the livery and model of the bus itself. That racing green was a thing handsome enough; but when there was a change in the livery due to promotion or advertisement, well, that was enough to excite us beyond measure. One of these promotions I remember particularly well - the Old Higsonians series which was run alongside adverts in the Liverpool Echo and even (I think) on Granada TV for the watery local brew, Higsons, and featuring legendary Merseysiders like Ann Field, Doc Road, Phil O’Monic, Rock Ferry, Count Erode and of course Pierre Head. You had to be there…

Some of the Old Higsonians; how we laughed.

If changes in livery left us entranced, changes in model left us scarcely coherent. At times of heavy usage the MPTE would blow the dust off some of its older stock and instead of the usual Atlantean we would suddenly get one of those old Routemasters roll into view as we waited at the bus stop. The other kids probably watched us with a mixture of amusement and pity as we jabbered excitedly over this unexpected treat. Thankfully Carl was hard enough to deter most physical manifestations of our peers’ amusement; on my own I would probably have been bounced off said bus repeatedly until a Dave-shaped dent gave it an additional rarity value.

What I think distinguished us from other spotters though was the sense of the exotic with which we regarded those buses on a Saturday morning. Taking up position right at the top of Water Street, where the street opened up onto the broad space in front of the river, we would watch the buses debouch from the narrow street like an invading army (you see what I did there?). Water Street was the only inbound route for buses to the Pier Head and at the time there were well in excess of 100 routes terminating there, which meant that there was a constant flow of buses to be seen coming up in that green and yellow stream, from all over the city. Some of the route numbers I remember even now, some 50 years later – 72 from Hunts Cross, 78 from Halewood, 17C from Fazakerley. Despite the fact that none of these places must have been more than a few miles from where we lived, the lack of any reason – or any easy route – to get there made them seem places far distant; so limited were our horizons that Speke or Garston might as well have been on the moon. And so we would watch the buses come in and sigh excitedly, our thoughts something along the lines of "Wow, a bus from Hunts Cross...what must it be like to live there?"

Bizarrely, we always romanticised one route in particular – the 12C to Cantril Farm. Cantril Farm sounded to us like some untouched bucolic quarter of Liverpool, silent but for the birdsong and the lowing of cattle and the occasional rumble of the 12C bus. It wasn’t until later that I discovered it was a recent overspill development that in the decade or so since its creation in the 1960s had already become a byword for inner city decline – it was interesting and instructive to read Craig Charles (Red Dwarf's Dave Lister)'s memories of growing up there.

The 12C; they must have just finished cleaning the straw off it.

As well as the MPTE services, we would often as kids see buses operated by other providers, notably Ribble and Crosville, and serving places further afield, mostly in North and East Lancashire respectively. If the green buses showing name plates like Aigburth and Bowring Park were exotic, the red Ribble buses speeding past our bus stop on the way to Southport, Maghull or Skelmersdale seemed positively otherworldly. These were places where people very much not like us lived, and we could only guess at what they were like and what went on there.

From hanging around the hideously ugly 1970’s Pier Head bus terminus lusting over the buses we graduated to hunting down books about trams and trains and – for my wealthier mate Carl at least – acquiring gorgeous Hornby train sets that he would set up in his grandad’s old shop. As always the key was in part the visual kick – I defy anyone to set eyes on a 1930’s period Liverpool Corporation Streamliner tram and not lose their heart completely to its luscious curves - and that always faintly exotic sense of the far-flung routes along which these lovely creatures actually ran. There’s something about a bus or train ride for me even now that will always carry some echo of the starry-eyed trips of my boyhood.

A 1930’s period Liverpool Corporation Streamliner tram...Mmmmm...

Being, as we freely acknowledged, pretty weird kids, we went on, in the spring of 1976, to create an outline map of Liverpool's main streets in plasticine lines on a board in Carl's grandmother's spare bedroom. We then fashioned a fleet of tiny green plasticine buses to trundle along between the brown plasticine road lines, their route markers indicated by minute coloured blobs on the front of each bus which, bizarrely but quite typically, I can still mostly remember - a single yellow blob was the 30 from Netherton to the Pier Head, red indicated the 92 to Kirkby and blue the number 20 which served the very long route between Fazakerley and Aigburth (things started to get overly complicated when our expanding route map made it necessary to have two or even three coloured blobs to represent the route. That way madness lay and the end of our plasticine city followed soon afterwards). This plasticine bus game developed a life of its own. We would spend hours recreating a day on the buses by pushing the little models along the roads, and when Carl departed for his summer holiday early that year his grandmother very kindly let me into her house every day so that I could sit in her spare bedroom and push the little buses around for hours on my own. You try telling that to kids today and they'll look at you blankly.

The MPTE period, sadly, ended badly, as our golden ages are wont to do. Showing their now familiar ideological preference for private over public provision whatever the financial or social cost, Margaret Thatcher's government passed the Transport Act of 1985 which, by abolishing Road Service Licensing, removed the public sector's role in fare-setting, routes, and bus frequencies, transferring those powers to private operators. The act took effect in October 1986; known simply as deregulation, its immediate effects in Liverpool were disastrous. All of a sudden nobody knew which bus to get anywhere. After a period of chaos in which numerous vulnerable people must have been effectively immobilised, the vacuum left by the sudden removal of the MPTE buses was filled by small private operators, often owning no more than a handful of buses with various more or less ugly liveries. Popular routes found themselves covered by multiple operators who proceded to run turf wars which on occasion would result in actual violence; less popular routes were lucky to find themselves with a single service. The quiet civic pride represented by those old buses with their stately livery and route numbers that hardly changed over decades was replaced by brash corporate logos, chaos and uncertainty over routes and prices, capitalism red in tooth and claw, inter-provider wars fought over the bodies of people who were just trying to get to where they wanted to go. Such is life. There are I understand indications that things might be slowly returning to the way they were, in some northern cities at least.

But to get back to my original point, this transport/war thing. I always thought as a kid that it was just us, but as I grew older I became used to seeing military and transport on neighbouring shelves not only in budget book shops but in W H Smiths. And there are also bookshops that cater explicitly to that happy mix of interests – for example the Ian Allan Book and Model shop in London’s Waterloo, where basically half of the shop is books about buses, trams and trains and the other is military books and models. The Pen and Sword publisher list also shows a very pointed blend of military and transport, only more recently branching out into other historical themes.

I guess the clue might be in the word ‘model’. Most of us wargamers will at least go through a phase where we are as concerned with modelling as with gaming, whether it’s gently removing the decals for our dogfight doubles in that little bowl of warm water, or producing the gorgeously detailed armies I see so often in the wargame blogs I follow (there but for a shakey hand and dodgy eyesight…) Similarly public transport is a mecca for the modeller, from those big elaborate Hornby train sets to the stunning – and correspondingly expensive – newer tram model kits available from the Spanish company Occre. But still, not all bus- or train- enthusiasts are modellers, and nor are all military history enthusiasts.

Is it just about the obsessive passion for detail? Is it the same impulse for correct detail that makes someone wary of identifying the wrong tank on a Normandy battlefield or the wrong regiment on a Peninsular one, that potentially makes them also keen to understand the differences between an Altona and a Ringbahn single deck Liverpool tram?

What am I missing? Or am I missing anything – maybe this military-transport overlap is something I have made up and similar links can just as easily be found to other interests. Answers on a postcard. In the meantime, I wonder if there is any way I can recreate the smell of those old Atlantean buses when we boarded them on a hot summer day...that combination of gently warming upholstery, diesel fumes and something else unidentifiable but very bussy. A scent as much a part of my youth as the smell of old books. Sigh.