Di Forbes recounts a personal tale of memories of an ‘old lady’ once again roaming the streets and now a star of the small screen
KW 1961 is a beautifully preserved 1927 PLSC3 Leyland Lion, wearing the colours of her original fleet Blythe and Berwick, where she began her working life, running up and down the hills around Bradford, Keighley, Baildon, Otley, Ilkley and Leeds. She will have worked hard, in a time when owning a car was considered a rich man’s pastime, and with few cars on the roads the buses were more often than not fully loaded, delivering people to places of work and out for cinema, theatre and pub excursions on evenings.
In 1928, still pre-WWII she became fleet number 321 at the West Yorkshire Road Car Company where she served the same community until a trip across the sea, in 1932 when she was sold on to Jersey Motor Transport and became its number 51. She remained on Jersey, surviving German occupation during WWII, working hard until 1959 when she finally made it to a kind of retirement, moving into preservation with East Anglia Transport Museum in Lowestoft.
Going forwards to the late 1950s, preservation was really only in its infancy, and museums and preservation groups often sat hand in hand within the same building or yard as the daily bus service provider, one assisting the other. Health and safety wasn’t the all encompassing thing it is today, and it would be common to find the night shift assisting the preservationists to repair or preserve whatever was on the pit. Likewise fuel was cheaper and often the preserved motors would travel further afield simply because they had the fuel to do so. In fact a conversion I recently shared with Richard Hall, the Chairman at Dewsbury Bus Museum, revealed that his local childhood museum had allowed young members of 14 or less years old to join in and help with mechanical and body repairs, wearing open toe shoes and flat caps, whilst Wakefield bus station allowed ‘free fuelling’ for the museum motors!
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