When the fare was three-ha’pence and a passenger handed you a fiver at peak hour, well… it could get up your nose a bit. Ex-London bus conductor John Cormack recalls being on the buses was all about timing; watching that the last passenger was seated or holding on; giving the signal as soon as you could to your driver and you’d be off. Seconds counted...
Having somebody argue about his fare on a No.15 can make you forget to hit the bell and the half-empty bus behind catches up. And now you’re late, you’ve picked up the passengers he should have been picking up. An obliging crew behind would pass you and pick up passengers waiting ahead; a lazy crew would dawdle behind all the way to the terminus. So team-work was paramount. A driver and conductor who worked together every day on the same shift on the same route, had to be able to read each other’s minds. ‘Later, when I became a driver, it found it was hell working with an unfamiliar conductor. Some could be very slow on the bell.’
Retired now, at 69, with the old Routemasters and their open rear platforms scheduled to be scrapped by the end of the century, John recalls his total collections of fares for the day amounting to 8 pounds, or on a terrific day, 15 pounds. ‘It was a lot of three-h’apence fares. But you know, it was always an easier day if the conductor smiled. When a conductor smiled, everybody smiled.
‘You ran up and down the stairs (56 seated, eight standing) hundreds of times a day - like a blue-arsed fly. You had to be fit; had to see where the new passengers had gone to sit so you collected their fare without asking the same passenger twice, otherwise you could offend.’ Late at night you had the night-club girls, the Fleet Street reporters and the odd drunk. You got your regulars who caught the same bus from the same stop at the same time for years.
And when you were driving the old Guys, with their five cylinders in engines that came from wartime torpedo-boats, or the big RTWs that were eight feet wide, you had to have strong arms. ‘Buses didn’t have power steering in the old days and they were heavy to turn; you had to get the wheel round several times to turn a corner.’
John’s worst moment was one night on the run between Upton Park and Ladbroke Grove. ‘I had a conductor from Barbados who did a terrific job. We got on well. We were going through Paddington into Westbourne Grove when an inspector got on. He said: "Tell your passengers that if anybody wants to get off now, they can’t. They’ve got to go on to The Eagle, the terminus. There are race riots in Westbourne Grove and skinheads are fighting the immigrants. They are burning and looting."
‘My conductor went upstairs and hid under the last seat at the back and I kept my foot down and drove. When we got to The Eagle we rushed my conductor over to the cafe we used; and hid him until we were ready to take off again. It was one of the hairiest trips I’ve ever had on a No.15.’
With London traffic congestion much worse than the late 50s, slowing average speeds down to 10 mph, it is estimated that delays cost bus passengers 55 million hours a year in lost time. In John’s day, a double-parked van or car, narrowing two lanes down to one, not only tested drivers’ tempers - but also their feet. ‘In some of the old buses you had to stamp down hard on the operation pedal of the pre-select mechanism, to get them into gear. If you didn’t stamp hard enough, your knee came back and hit you under the chin.’ Later came the small gear lever on the steering column, with a gate-change and fluid fly-wheels eliminating the clutch. Life was suddenly easier.
‘For some reason,’ John says, ‘the No.15 run wasn’t popular; I didn’t mind going through the East End and the City. I enjoyed going down Fleet Street - was shown over the Daily Express building once. A lot of drivers and conductors tried for the 101, down to the docks.’
When John migrated to Australia in 1972 he worked for a female private bus operator in Brisbane. ‘She went around the route on a Sunday in her Jaguar, pausing at the stops and reckoning the time-table by how long it took her. It was a non-union job and we had to sit about for five hours each day between trips.’
"A bit of a job nomad" John then switched to driving a postal van, became a security guard, a telephone operator and for seven years was Bailiff at the Brisbane Supreme Court. ‘I saw all the top criminals. But I’m not naming names; the biggest one is still inside.’
My Husband started driving the No. 15 bus at Upton Park in 1975 and ended up being the Operations Director for what was to be Stagecoach - now McQuarie (well the London part is now)
OH retired early in August 2006 and we are now applying for our CPV and are almost 9 months into the application so may see John Cormack at some stage as we are hoping to be heading Brisbane way.
