 |
|
|
|
HUMBERSTONE
GATE
the end days - 1968 17 paragraphs or
= to 10 pages of A5
Chapter 4, being
part of a much longer memoire of how I
came to be a busman in the first
place, my training and eventual
departure from the Leicester scene.
I started on LCT in October of 1968, and so only had that winter, the Christmas season, and into the new year up to March, to experience what would turn out to be the final days of Humberstone Gate, or Central Depot as we also knew it. It's days were almost numbered, the new premises in Rutland St which I would get to know much better over the following four years were almost completed. But I didn't know that then. Had I known how much history and later interest I was turning my back on, I may have taken a great deal more notice, and copious notes. Perhaps not photographs, for that was a hobby that was beyond my limited income then. I didn't even possess a decent camera. Humberstone Gate was a real blast from the past. There was much evidence still around of the days of the trams, their untimely passing having occurred only some twenty years before, in the year before I was born. The tram lines were still down, in what I supposed was 'the tunnel', that narrow entrance, the square hole in the façade at the side of the Bell Hotel, through which trams would leave Humberstone Gate to be swallowed up in the bowels of the building, which ran much deeper than it looked. In fact, the tram shed had been right at the back, in Bread Street, and the long, railed tunnel for a single tram was simply the passage that led down to it. It was through that arch that the last tram in Leicester, car No36, passed out of service and into history. It would be years before I saw an actual old photo of a tram being swallowed up in that hole. It was a tight fit. When photos do crop up online, they are mostly just post-war, and the façade of the front offices appear very tired and uncared for. They did get much more spruced up in the 50s, but naturally, by the time we come to the late 60s and the move to new premises only months away, they were very tired and peeling again. And that is how I found them, in mid-October of 1968, and there are several street scenes showing the old offices at that time, again looking rather forlorn. But we must remember that, up to 1939, these were the city centre offices and public face of one of the proudest and most innovative tram operations in the country. Noted for it's very smart and classy livery, lined with gold leaf and impeccably, smartly turned out staff, Leicester City Tramways was the bees knees. It's public enquiry and lost property office had been just as smart and well turned out. The public office, the enquiry office itself, was merely a one door, one step, basic shop front, painted in the corporation maroon, with a large window. It could easily have been a barbers, or a small shoe shop, or a travel agents. The window was by now quite dusty, as were the contents within, which were examples of the latest timetable that could be purchased for 3d, and varying posters on a large back boarding that prevented view through into the office itself. All along with notices on little easels displaying half-hearted advertising of corporation bus hire for parties, weddings, sporting events, etc. We operated no coaches then, so a single deck bus for hire was exactly that, a bus. This was the window in which I had espied, on passing during my unwanted journey to the dole office, the equally dusty maroon card notice on its own easel pronouncing, in capital letters, the legend "CONDUCTORS WANTED". The other offices, the Inspector’s Front Office and all the admin, seemed to be at the front behind the enquiry office and on the upper floors. The cash office, spare room and canteen, and heaven knows what else, were down and leading off the veritable warren at the back. The canteen also showed signs of the days of the trams, and to an industrial archaeologist, would have spoke volumes about horse trams. For in the back of the canteen wall, in the kitchen, were the original, recessed stalls for the tram horses, the arched brickwork now whitewashed but still betraying signs of the metalwork hooks and bars of the hayracks that had been fixed to the walls. Our canteen had once been the tram horse stables! Right at the rear of the premises was the bus parking area, part open and part under cover of what remained of the old tramshed, leading out onto the ancient Bread Street and by which the depot at the back was known. Next door, leading back towards Charles St, was the garage entrance to the back of The Bell Hotel. Now mostly concreted over, Bread St was in the daily charge of a senior driver, Arthur Nurse, senior enough to put the fear of God in young upstarts like me. Being new, I received the rough edge of his tongue for my hesitant and sloppy parking. It was rather a confined space, in which Arthur had to get an unbelievable number of buses, parked mirror to mirror and often with 'mirrors in', then so close you couldn't insert a flattened fag packet between them. When half a dozen buses returned from the morning peak almost all together, he had not a lot of time to do it in. His problems were constantly ‘growing’, buses getting ever longer and wider, but his space didn't get any bigger. Rookies like me, shunting back and forth under Arthur’s exasperated directions, and still not getting it right, would try the patience of a saint. I first became aquainted with Arthur Nurse whilst I was still a conductor and he would direct whoever was my driver into the required parking space. Later, I got to know him a little better while still under driver training myself. He was not a bad sort, just didn't suffer fools gladly, a bit like most older busmen. I know now how he felt. When the morning’s training session was over, we would break for an hour for lunch and so the whole class, many of the driving school too - including their instructors - would all pile into the old double-decker (usually a PD2) and repair down to Humberstone Gate canteen. The trainees and instructors would make a bee line for the canteen as the nominated trainee driver for that day would then park the bus on Bread Street under Arthur’s watchful and critical eye. So we rookies had our introduction to the city centre offices and staff therein, wherein lay the lairs of the Traffic Superintendant Peter Goodridge, The Chief Inspector George Hickman, and his notorious assistant, the ACI - Alfred Moore. I would recognise Alfie Moore as soon as I next saw him, for it was he who had given me the forms to fill in and supervised my adding up skills on the fateful day I walked into his office looking for a job. He had, effectively, interviewed me, and passed me as suitable fodder. There were other rather senior inspectors, close to retirement, who now had inside jobs manning the “front office”. George Bull was one such I recall, in what was effectively the main control desk where all crews signed on and off at Central, in which was also the big brass key rack and notice board previously mentioned, and the Duty Booking Office, where daily duties and rest day work were allocated. And of course, the front office was almost at the very front, on the street, almost an extension of and behind the passenger enquiry lost property desks. When I say 'desk', these were chest height, desks for standing at, not sitting, all wood and very Dickensian. Close by the front office was the conductors’ paying-in room, with its wooden floors partly covered in cigarette ash, large wooden desks of 6 or 8 partitions with high dividers like voting booths, and the wooden counter where issues of fresh supplies of tickets were obtained, as well as all the metal racks containing dozens of numbered ticket machine boxes. I realise now, recalling the worn and battered sides to the dividers that I cashed my takings up on, were the very wooden desks used by generations of tramway conductors, easily going back to the start of operations before the First World War. The cashing up surface on the desks were individually lined with aluminium sheets, another by-product of the job, being scrap bus or tram panels cut down and adapted for an after life. I would find scrap aluminium also formed other parts of the job, not least our 'home-made' ticket boxes, and our running boards on which our route instructions and journey times were listed. Also close by the front office, almost a part of it for it was just the other side of a large area, was the ‘spare room’, with a couple of rows of wooden benches and a couple of tables, where men could relax, read their paper and sup tea when on a ‘spare duty’, or part thereof. They were within visual and calling distance of the duty inspector, literally less than 20 feet away. There were always two or three conductors and drivers, sometimes more, who could be called out at a second’s notice to cover a missed shift, sickness or provide a crew for an extra bus for some breakdown or emergency. Spare men were not allowed to wait their 'spare time' in the canteen, or anwyhere else out of sight and out of hearing of the front office. Men even had to inform the desk if they went to the loo, to avoid them being called for and time wasted when they were not to be found. You were not forbidden to go to the loo, not at all, but you had to inform them you were going, and let them know when you were back. I do recall that part of the spare room, or even outside in the tunnel, were the glass fronted display cases containing all the duty sheets, showing every turn (or shift to non-busmen) for the whole job, as well as the sheets of weekly lines of duty worked by each crew, who dropped down one line every week. Each day shown on the line would have a turn number in it, the turn's full details of which route and at which times, being found in the other display cases. We would stand there, sometimes half an hour at a time, trying to balance duty book or diary in one hand whilst writing duties in for the weeks ahead, sometimes a month or more. It was our responsibility to accurately note down our duties in our own time, usually a portion of our break time, though the duty inspector was often lenient enough to allow men to write duties down during 'spare' time, so long as he was within calling distance. There was also a tannoy, which sounded throughout the premises, and on which drivers and conductors were called by name and their number. "Conductor Haywood, number 12, to the Front Office please," would be a regular occurance for me over the next four years. Somewhere in there too, was the cash office, doubling also as our pay office for the weekly drawing of wages, but I can’t recall where. There must also have been a 'shorts & overs' window, for conductors to settle their owings and shortages from the bag. Shorts are where a conductor has totted his takings up incorrectly, and may be a shilling or two, or only a few pence, out. His takings should match his ticket sales, so £10 worth of ticket sold should equal £10 in his paying in bag. If he inadvertantly got it wrong the other way, and paid in too much, he got that back, as well as any foreign coins he paid in. A shilling in foreign coins had to be made good out of his own pocket. All the cash office were interested in was that the contents of the cash bag matched the ticket sales, not a penny less and not a penny more, foreign or otherwise. Last but not least, we got to know our way around the most important part of the whole operation to us, the staff canteen, right at the back. Bus drivers and conductors just about lived on tea, gallons of it. Bacon and sausage sandwiches were almost as important too, and it was a proper canteen in the full sense in that it served full breakfasts and hot dinners, as well as cakes, biscuits and snacks. But tea was the mainstay of a busman's day. How important the management regarded the continuous replenishment of our bladders with fresh, hot tea is shown by what some would regard nowadays as extreme measures to ensure we got it; being the 'Tea Mashing Duties' ... but more of that another time. But for anyone reading this who ever wondered what the high multiple hooks were adorning certain city centre lamp posts, like the one outside the Manchester Club just up from Lewis', that's what they were for - our tea! These halcyon days were not destined to last. Even before I joined the firm, plans had been well advanced for a brand-new “operating centre”, across the town in Rutland Street. All these old premises were coming down, and I was literally seeing the end days, the last few months as it turned out to be. Some adjacent buildings nearby, old shops, pubs, etc, had already been demolished on the Clock Tower and round into The Haymarket, to enable development of the ‘marvellous’ new shopping precinct and spanking new theatre planned to take Leicester into the latter half of the century. The old Bell Hotel, literally the other side of the 'hole in the wall', and right down to Leah’s Corner at Charles Street, would all be coming down too, and very soon after we vacated our offices. We do wonder now what it was all for, particularly as that spanking new state-of-the-art theatre had a life not half as long as our transport offices did. The convenience of emerging from the canteen straight out into the wide Humberstone Gate to take your bus over, would all soon come to an end. Here were the majority of our city centre termini - or barriers as we called them - the term presumably taken from the fixed iron safety railings that passengers queued against at each terminal. Most of the rest were round the corner, in Charles St, with the rest scattered about elsewhere. But I never gave a passing thought for all that would be lost in our rush to have a modern building, with its brightly tiled 2nd floor canteen and a new transport club on the top floor. I was 18 and always in a rush to meet something new. The impression I took away of the old place was one of great antiquity, of faint smells in the air of dust and very old woodwork, mixed with the more strident, pungent scents of strong tea and tobacco smoke. All the floors were bare boards, sprinkled with sawdust but frequently swept, and the yellowish emulsion of the 'spare room', where I spent a lot of my time when not on the road that first few months, was most certainly not all paint. The air in there, as well as the canteen, was always full of laughter and chatter as well as smoke, the scene always of men playing cards, telling jokes and swapping tales, at the long wooden tables when awake, occasionally with a head back on the wall having a brief nod or trying to catch up on some sleep amidst the general din when not. It was, generally, a happy place. However, when we did leave Humberstone Gate, the following spring, whatever sadness the old hands felt, I gave not a single glance back, paid little attention to wiser men's distant memories of good times in peace and war. It only briefly crossed my mind back then that I'd had two grandfathers that had worked there. I feel foolish now not to have taken more notice, but perhaps the fact I knew of my family heritage is what has caused me to remember so much in the first place. But at the time, such wistful nostalgia was mostly clean over my head. It never occurred that I would never again stand outside on the busy Humberstone Gate front, briefly enjoying the sun with my driver, awaiting our own bus to pull in, exchanging last minute gags and banter with other crews coming and going or awaiting their buses. For during the day, for most of the time, we would not be alone as we waited there. It could be a very busy place at the front of that office. As well as passing crowds of shoppers, lunchtime office workers and the usual bustle of a city's come-and-go, there were men like ourselves waiting to take over their bus, men arriving to sign on a middle or late shift, and others leaving having finished and signed off their early shift. Roughly between 11am and 3pm, it could be all hell and no notion out there on the street front, and very rarely quiet. I never noticed myself at the time, but not all of the solitary ladies that were occasionally to be seen waiting by our offices were, shall we say, kosher. One or two were wives, or a girlfriend awaiting the likes of me to finish a shift. But not all. Especially on Thursdays, payday, when it was said that certain local girls of ill repute seemed to gather where there may be money to be had and a certain amount of 'trade'. Some men had a great deal of money, a lot more than their own wages. Card schools, though illegal and against our rules, were rife in the canteen, and it was not a rare occasion for a man to stake the whole of his wages - and sometimes his bag money - on the turn of a card. The winner would exit the hole in the wall often with several hundred pounds in cash in his pockets after a successful run at cards. Sackings for misuse of takings were, naturally, not uncommon. As well as all this activity, we can add the dozens of buses arriving and departing on both sides of the road every minute of the working day, some awaiting a few moments at their barriers for departure time, some would pull in, set down, reload and set straight off again like the devil was after them with passengers often still on the platform and conductor hanging out behind them. Leylands, AECs, Daimlers of various marques, all puthering their own clouds of exhaust fumes in varying degrees of visibility, depending on the weather. My Humberstone Gate memories are of sunny days, wet days, and a fair number of foggy and snowbound days in that first winter of my service, and of course, of Lewis' all lit up like, well, a Christmas tree - several Christmas trees! It's hard to credit those scenes now, viewing it today, all aesthetically landscaped, paved and traffic free and nothing like so busy. Then, as if that were not enough, there was added all the normal traffic of cars, trucks, vans, taxis and motorcyles. Humberstone Gate was a de facto bus station, albeit with a main 'A' road running right through from one end to the other. In fact, from the Clock Tower, all of Humberstone Gate almost to The Palais, and a good length of both sides of Charles St were one great big sprawling bus station of streetside barriers. Buses that left from very nearby the office were the 66 Melbourne - actually right outside - the 32 East Park Rd, 41 Catherine St, and others, from barriers stretching from The Nelson pub to right down past The Bell. Even beyond Charles St crossing, the 61 Nether Hall left from right outside the old City Boys Grammar School. Over the other side, from Lewis' tower right back down to the Manchester Working Mens' Club and Charles St corner, there were - from memory - the 29 Stoneygate, 18 Braunstone, 19 & 20 Imperial Avenue and 21 & 52 to Narborough Road. Eventually, the 33 East Park Rd would join them and move from it's barrier just around the corner in Gallowtree Gate. Walking about amongst all this chaos from bus to bus, sometimes perilously amongst the traffic, would be a couple of regulating inspectors. There was one such at every 'point', a term taken from tramway days and their overseeing the changing of the tramway points, so one was at the Clock Tower, one for Charles St, another for Rutland St, and yet another at the Town Hall for Bowling Green St. With their thick, black, folding leather-bound duty books wherein were all the departure times of every route for their own particular 'point', along with all the relevant running board numbers, they could instantly identify every arrival and departure as to whether it was running late or on time. Some inspectors had worked their 'points' for so long that they knew those books by heart, from first bus and start of service to last bus at 23:00. And of course, they could - and would - chivvy up crews cutting it too finely when emerging late from the canteen, the threat of being put on report and losing one's bonus always hanging like a sword over a careless crew's head. They knew who was reliable and who was not, who knew their job and who didn't. Most inspectors had done both jobs, some had driven trams, particularly the inside office inspectors who where nearing their retirements. Humberstone Gate was not quiet for long, for barely five hours all told. The scene outside the transport office started its daily busy-ness with the arrival, from 05:30 onwards, in summer sunshine or still the dead of night for most folks, of about a dozen staff buses from all over the city bringing early shift crews to work. Five were LCT buses, at that time Tiger Cubs nearing retirement and disposal and the odd Reliance or Bristol, and six were Midland Red. All staff of both firms were free to catch whichever route was convenient to them, and in five years on the job, I used both at times. All staff buses disgorged their staff outside the office, but the one from Eyres Monsell and my first regular staff bus, was the one that ran on through to Abbey Park Road depot. So I didn't have to change, but we picked up a good busload from all the others, which generally turned round and went back out to do another identical staff run from the terminus. Mine had left the Monsell at 04:55, and would go out and do another at 05.55, so I had two choices of staff bus to get to work. The whole staff bus system went into a sort of reverse at end of service. The last service buses from the city centre left at 23:00, and most were back in depot and conductors cashed up by midnight when our own staff buses left the depot to meet up with all the Midland Red staff buses in Humberstone Gate. Staff would quickly change to their required buses, and at 00:15, with everyone sorted, someone blew a whistle and the whole caboosh left together in clouds of exhaust smoke for all points of the city's compass. (I think it was 00:15). If a staff bus driver didn't have his own transport, a fitter or garage hand drove him home. Typically, he'd not be home much before 01:30. I knew the old offices for barely four months, but it all made such an impression that the memories are stronger and last better now than what I did last year. It was indeed a sad day when they all came down, but of course it wasn't just our offices, but the whole length of the street with all it's varying architecture and history that was sacrificed to make way for what is there now, the new, the modern, and for which there is precious little appreciation now. I'm as guilty as the rest, at that age, less than 20, old red brick and fancy architecture was old hat and like most folks at the time, I didn't appreciate what was lost until - it had been lost. It is more than a shame, had the whole block survived to the new milennium, those offices, that tunnel and the old depot at the back would have made a city centre transport museum to die for. But, I imagine there would be plenty of folks who would even today object to preserving the city's heritage in such a way, and at the expense of shops. Compiling this enabled even more memories to come to light, such as the card schools and early mornings and late nights, and the overall hustle and bustle of the office and environs. It is surprising to me that there are not more images of the 'hole in the wall' online, considering the important role it played in the city's history. If anyone has one they would allow me to use as a header to this piece, I would gladly use it here at the top of this long article and give due credit to the owner. |