[Vwoolf] More omnibuses

Jeremy Hawthorn jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no
Sat Sep 14 07:45:42 EDT 2013


In my youth smokers had to sit upstairs on buses, and downstairs was non-smoking (which would make good sense if there was no roof). But this must have been different at a time when the middle classes sat upstairs - must it not?

I also have a very early memory of a tram - late 1940s early 1950s, in Croydon I think - which had no turning circle so went backwards and forwards on its route without turning. To cope with this, the backs of seats could be pushed backwards or forwards, so that passengers could always sit facing forwards.

Even in the late 1950s there were 1st and 3rd class compartments in trains, along with smoking and non-smoking compartments, and ladies-only compartments, in both classes. 2nd class had been abolished (when?), but with a wonderful British logic the other two classes remained 1st and 3rd.

Jeremy H
________________________________
From: vwoolf-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu [vwoolf-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] on behalf of Stuart N. Clarke [stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com]
Sent: 14 September 2013 13:06
To: vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu
Subject: [Vwoolf] More omnibuses

A Polish translator of “The Waves” keeps asking us questions.  Some answers are pretty obvious, some require thinking about, but some are mysterious to a greater or lesser extent.  E.g.

“I like to be with people who twist herbs”
Isa does the same sort of thing in ”Between the Acts”: “ I pluck the bitter herb by the ruined wall, the churchyard wall, and press its sour, its sweet, its sour, long grey leaf, so, twixt thumb and finger. . . .”
However, the phrase “twist herbs” is not familiar to me.  But it’s caught someone’s imagination!
http://thegenealogyofstyle.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/those-who-twist-herbs

So, I don’t feel too bad about puzzling over the following for several hours over a number of years.  Clarissa is in Bond St and observes:
“The British middle classes sitting sideways on the tops of omnibuses with parcels and umbrellas, yes, even furs on a day like this ...”

Firstly, why does she only see middle-class people on the tops of omnibuses.  Is she blind to the lower classes?  Did the lower classes tend to travel downstairs and the middle classes upstairs?  I don’t think so.  Perhaps it’s because it’s the middle of a weekday morning in Mayfair: why would the working classes be on such a bus?  Of course, there’s Edgar J. Watkiss, but he’s obviously a workman, walking along the street “with his roll of lead piping round his arm”.  Was price relevant?  Bus and tube fares increased by 40% on 26 Sep 1920 to 1½d. for up to 1 mile, 2d. for 1½ miles, and 1d. per mile thereafter (Baker, p. 57).  Elizabeth’s journey is about 3 miles: “she would like to go a little further. Another penny was it to the Strand? Here was another penny then. She would go up the Strand.”

Secondly, what puzzles me even more is “sitting sideways”.  (a) What does this mean?  (b) Even if we know what it means, what is the significance of “sideways”?  Why even mention it?

Background: In the first half of the 1920s in the centre of London, almost all buses were double-decker with open tops and open staircases.  (There were single-deckers farther out, but they had roofs; otherwise, I suppose they would have been like charabancs.)  The driver was in the open air and had no protection from the elements, not even a windscreen.

While there was quite a variety of vehicles (see earlier email), the majority fell into two types:
The B: downstairs passengers sat lengthways with their backs to the windows.
http://www.doubledecker-bus.com/2009/11/b-type
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGOC_B-type
The K (also the S-type): downstairs passengers sat on “transverse seats, two by two either side of the central gangway ... the layout with which we are familiar today” (Baker, p. 57).
http://www.doubledecker-bus.com/2009/11/k-type
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEC_K-type

Neither type had pneumatic tyres.  In both, the upstairs passengers sat on transverse wooden seats; we could say that they all sat “sideways”.  The days when the upstairs passengers sat back-to-back lengthways on a “knifeboard” arrangement had long gone.  The B-type was the first reliable motorised bus; from about 1911 it “helped spell the end for the horse drawn bus”.  I suggest, very tentatively, that that word “sideways” is one more post-war ref. in “Mrs. Dalloway”.  The knifeboard arrangement upstairs belongs to the horse-drawn past; see, e.g., this photo. from 1900:
http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/london-knifeboard-horse-bus-in-trafalgar-square-london-news-photo/3324619#

[Correction below: “London Transport General Company” ought to have read “London General Omnibus Company”.]

Stuart

From: Stuart N. Clarke<mailto:stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2013 3:08 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Pirate omnibuses

Yes, the different bus companies had different colours.

In Moments of Being Virginia remembered her mother, who

“did all her immense rounds—shopping, calling, visiting hospitals and work houses—in omnibuses.  She was an omnibus expert.  She would nip from the red to the blue, from the blue to the yellow, and make them somehow connect and convey her all over London.  Sometimes she would come home very tired, owning that she had missed her bus or the bus had been full up, or she had got beyond the radius of her favourite buses.”
However, by the 1920s the main co. was the London Transport General Company (the LGOC, or the “General”), and its livery was red, and that’s why London buses are red today.

Stuart


From: Danell Jones<mailto:danelljones at bresnan.net>
Sent: Tuesday, September 03, 2013 3:01 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu<mailto:vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Pirate omnibuses

I LOVE this Stuart!

I knew there were competing bus companies.  Weren't they painted different colors?  But I didn't know there were "pirates"!

Thanks so much for sharing.  It helps us see just how daring Elizabeth is.

Danell



On 9/3/2013 7:54 AM, Stuart N. Clarke wrote:
Elizabeth Dalloway gets on an “irregular” ‘bus in Victoria St, nr the Army and Navy Stores:

“She took a seat on top. The impetuous creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails spread up Whitehall.”

Then into Trafalgar Sq, along the Strand.  She gets off at Chancery Lane, just past the Royal Courts of Justice where the Strand becomes Fleet St.

The most famous bus route in London is the no. 11.  The savvy (and economical) tourist choses that bus rather than a tour bus, as the no. 11 goes past so many famous sights, inc. St Paul’s, on its way to Liverpool St Station.  The new London bus starts on that route on 21 Sept:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/projectsandschemes/15493.aspx

“The very first ‘pirate’ bus to operate in central London began work on route 11 ... on 5 August 1922, and by the end of 1923 there were 70 such operators.”, Michael H. C. Baker, “London Transport in the 1920s” (Hersham, Surrey: Ian Allan Publishing, 2009), p. 8.

The no. 11 goes past the Army & Navy Stores.

The ref. to a pirate bus is yet one more post-war ref. in “Mrs. Dalloway”:

“Some young men, having acquired skills in a war which was described as the first truly mechanical one, bought a war-surplus bus or lorry ... and set up business.  A downpayment of £100 was all that was necessary; the Metropolitan Police had to approve the roadworthiness of the vehicle, but, that done, it could operate wherever its owner chose. ... At the beginning of 1920 the demand for buses far outstripped the number available, and there was plenty of scope for those who were prepared to take up the challenge.   Very few of these enterprises were long lived ...” (“London Transport in the 1920s”, pp. 7-8).

Stuart

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