Leeds Buses

All Aboard -Leeds Buses by DavidMcKie & recollections by John Swash
Extract from Great British Bus Journeys, by David McKie, published by Atlantic Books 2006. When David McKie and his family moved to Leeds as wartime refugees, it was the city's old green buses that came to mean home to him. Here, in an extract from his book, he explains why the humble bus is such a cornerstone of British culture.
Bradford's were blue. Sheffield's were cream and blue. Halifax's were green and orange, as if they had somehow escaped from Glasgow. In Leeds, ours were green; a slightly dour, urban green. Southdown's, on the south coast, were a more meadow-like shade of green; Bournemouth's, or so it was declared by those who had holidayed there, were an exotic buttercup yellow. And London's, as everyone knows, were red. Some people shun service buses: they don't like having strangers jammed up against them. The normally gregarious Conservative politician Steven Norris once declared his distaste for using the bus because of the kind of people he found himself sitting next to. For others, the common service bus is a kind of ambulance of failures. That champion of the great car economy, Margaret Thatcher, is often quoted as saying that any man over 26 travelling by bus must have lost out in life. One can't help feeling, though, that it might have done Margaret Thatcher good to travel just now and then, in heavy disguise of course, on a humble service bus alongside the people over whom she presided. Had she so demeaned herself at the height of her power, to catch the bus from Grantham to Sleaford, for instance, she might have heard conversations cautioning her against the fatal poll tax or her apparent assumption that people work best when they feel insecure.			Leyland half-cab bus in green 1960's LCT livery
In Leeds, where I grew up, the corporation buses were green by order of the municipality after the war. In wartime - not in order to confuse the Germans, as people sometimes supposed, but because the old paints were no longer available - both buses and trams had turned a dodgy khaki. With peace, the trams re-emerged as red and the buses as green. The Conservatives, turned out by Labour in the council elections of 1945, protested that this was political manipulation. If the trams were to be dressed in socialist red, then the buses, they insisted, must be painted Conservative blue. But the chairman of the transport committee of Leeds council, Alderman Rafferty, said this was stuff and nonsense. The choice of red for the trams was pragmatic. Leeds was buying London trams as London dispensed with them, and London's trams were red. "Dozens of people have written in praise of the colour of the red tram in Leeds," the alderman robustly claimed.
On the eastern edge of the city centre, beyond Kirkgate market, in the shadow of Quarry Hill flats, stood the city bus station. Sometimes claimed in Leeds to have been the biggest such complex in Europe, erected by a pioneering housing department in days of huge municipal pride and endeavour, the flats were demolished in 1978. We had almost lived there. As refugees from Hitler's V-bombs in London, one of which killed my father in June 1944, we had lived with an aunt in Whitkirk, a suburb of Leeds, until my uncle returned from the war and wanted us out. My mother, brother and I were rescued by the Leeds housing department.		Leeds Central bus station located near Kirgate market and Quarry Hill flats in 1954
They offered us a flat in the Quarry Hill complex but, desperate though our predicament was, my mother rejected its lowly ceilings as too dark and claustrophobic. Instead they found us a house that belonged to a man who had been imprisoned in Singapore. It was on the hill up from Chapel Allerton into Moortown, quite an expensive territory. You got off the number 2 Circular tram at the Kingsway cinema, which later became a synagogue, known to us lads as the cinemagogue. Even now I cannot look at it without recalling the matchless exhilaration of the night when the wartime ban on neon lights was at last rescinded and the name of the Kingsway glowed in the evening sky, and throughout the city the streets were full of people gazing in rapture at a lightscape now taken for granted.
It took a long while for the old Leeds to die and for the new super-Leeds - that transformation of the heart of the city from grim and intensely Yorkshire to glittering celebration of big European money - to replace it. One part of this new enrichment, occupying one end of the old Quarry Hill site, is the hugely successful West Yorkshire Playhouse. At the great plate-glass windows of its cafe-restaurant you can sit with your cappuccino or americano (products quite unknown in my childhood) and watch today's buses wheeling in and out of the bus station, carrying passengers to destinations not dreamed of in Alderman Rafferty's time.There is one that serves both Odsal Top and Stanningley Bottom. In summer, you can even catch a bus that runs directly to Blubberhouses. In territory once dedicated almost exclusively to serving the city suburbs, there are buses to places all over the county and well beyond. There's a Pink line and an Indigo line (though sadly their buses are not painted pink or indigo), and Coastliners to Whitby and Scarborough and Flamingoland. Here are multicoloured Black Prince buses, each one, it seems, a different concoction of shades from the Black Prince before it, a blue and white Keighley and District with a big red K making it look like an advert for breakfast cereal, and a red and cream Harrogate and District still decorated with the legend "Bus Operator of the Year 2002".
At the bus station I overhear one bus driver relating to a colleague an incident with another bus which tried to steal a space he was heading into. He lost. "But he," he says, as if in mitigation, "It were an Olympian." An Olympian? Zeus, in a bus station? But an Olympian, I've discovered, having bought a magazine called Buses from the station bookstall, is a kind of large and superior bus. To your true bus devotee, and as anyone who has been to their rallies will know, they are many. The buses that swirl around Leeds bus station are not just Arrivas or Firsts but Leylands, AECs, Guys and Dennises, Titans and Olympians, Atlanteans and Lodekkas. Some of these buses carry ads on their sides, offering, for no more than it costs to get you to London or Edinburgh, trips to destinations that many in Leeds would never have heard of in Alderman Rafferty's heyday: Venice, £21; Malaga, £23. Meanwhile, the suburban buses mostly run from the city centre, sparing shoppers the trail though Kirkgate market (now only half the size it used to be, since a disastrous fire). The services have been "rationalised" since the first wild days of deregulation in 1986, which means in effect that the big operators - Arriva and First - have eliminated or gobbled up smaller ones. Even plucky Black Prince, the last Leeds independent operator of commercial services, was breathing its last in the spring of 2005 as the mighty maw of First opened a little further to swallow it.
Recollections of Leeds City Transport Buses by John Swash
One of the advantages of growing up in a city like Leeds was the availability of a reliable and frequent public transport system. By the time I attended WLBHS, trams had been phased out, and public transport was provided by the numerous Leeds City Transport (LCT) buses in their distinctive dark green livery.
The school had a broad catchment area, so that many pupils depended on the bus to get to school. I never saw pupils being dropped off outside the school by car in those days. The majority walked or cycled to school or caught the bus. A few from Bramley caught the train to Armley Canal Road Station. I used to catch the bus from Bramley Town End, but in good weather would often walk to save the fare.
Apart from everyday travel, we could explore the city for pleasure and entertainment for the cost of a 3d bus fare. On hot summer days, my friends in Bramley and I would think nothing of catching a bus across the city to visit Roundhay Park, which had the only open-air pool, or Lido, in Leeds. We were not restricted to cinemas within walking distance of home; we could see the latest films at city centre cinemas. LCT used to operate special buses to take us to events such as air displays at Church Fenton or sporting events at Roundhay Park and Headingley. There was also an "intercity" service to Bradford. The main hub for the green LCT buses was the central bus station at New York Street, near Quarry Hill Flats. Besides the multitude of green LCT buses, a few "exotic" bus services ran from there in the dark blue and cream livery of East Yorks, or the cream and blue livery of South Yorks.
An East Yorkshire bus with the peculiar "zeppelin" roof shape designed to pass through Beverly Bar.	The West Yorkshire "red" bus station on Vicar Lane provided out of town services to the Yorkshire Dales , West and North Yorkshire.
Most of the "long-haul" services from Leeds were operated by the West Yorkshire Road Car Company , recognisable by their distinctive post office red livery. These services ran from their own West Yorkshire bus station in Vicar Lane to various destinations, including Wetherby, Otley, Ilkley, York, Knaresborough, Ingleton, in the Yorkshire Dales. My first visit to the Lake District was on one of these buses. Many of these out-of-town buses were single deck or low-deck double-deckers (Lodekkas), allowing them to pass under low bridges. As a result, upper-deck passengers had to sit on four-seater benches with an aisle on the right-hand side of the bus.
I always enjoyed travelling on the upper deck, preferably in the front seat for the view, blissfully unaware of the dangers of passive smoking at the time (smoking was allowed on the top deck). 1950's Leeds buses displayed a sign on the front windows of the top deck, stating that "expectoration was forbidden". It's a word I have never seen or used since, and it amused me to think that LCT expected their passengers to possess a broad vocabulary back then, or perhaps they did! Getting on and off the bus was too mundane; passengers were asked to "alight" the bus, presumably without setting it on fire!
Back in my late teens, I occasionally caught the night bus from the city centre to Bramley-it ran hourly through the night. One evening, I was waiting at the stand outside the Queen's Hotel, thinking I had City Square to myself. Then a "Black Mariah" ( police van) rolled up, and police began rounding up denizens of the night who unknown to me were drunk or sleeping rough among the statues in the square. I was just standing there, minding my own business, until the van stopped near me and two young officers approached and asked why I was out so late. They didn't seem convinced by my story about waiting for the night bus until I pointed to the printed timetable at the stop. That saved me from a ride in the van!
I caught the same night bus again after the pubs closed and chose the bench seat over the rear wheels on the lower deck. At the next stop a heavily intoxicated man boarded and sat opposite me; it was my first close encounter with someone really drunk—just the two of us downstairs while the conductor stayed upstairs. He launched into a rambling, theatrical tirade about how the world had treated him, standing and flailing his arms like a street preacher as he jabbed a finger at me for emphasis. I kept my head down and avoided eye contact. Then the driver took a sharp right turn under a railway bridge, immediately followed by a quick left; with few passengers aboard he sped through the corners and the bus tilted wildly. When it finally steadied, I looked up and the drunk was gone. He could not possibly have climbed the stairs in that state, so the only conclusion was that the violent turns had flung him out through the open rear door—certainly a dramatic way of exiting, or "alighting" the bus.