1983 Commercial Vehicle Rally at Blackpool

Well today I got to the end of my albums of colour slides. I've been scanning them for the past couple of weeks.

I kept most of my 35mm slides in plastic sleeves that held 20 slides to a page that could be stored in folders, a bit bigger than an A4 size.

But as I came to the end of the last album there were several pages that held strips of three 6x6cm square slides on 120 size film. These were the large format slides most magazines insisted on for colour photos at the time. I took them on a huge and quite heavy Mamiya C330 camera which had two lenses one above the other - the photographer looked down at a screen on top of the camera which showed the image coming through the top lens and the photograph was taken through the bottom lens. Which did mean that the photograph was going to be ever so slightly different to what you were seeing... Very different in fact because you saw a mirror image. If you were trying to follow action, anything moving from left to right appeared in the viewfinder to be going right to left so you had to practice very hard to swing the camera the right way!

Seen in the album the slides don't look like much. But hold them up to the light and they look like this! Scan them on a film scanner and they look even better!

So let's have a closer look! All of these photographs were taken in a square format, but they were not necessarily taken to be displayed in that format. We are in August 1983. This is the Commercial Vehicles Rally held on the Middle Walk at Blackpool. This is an ex Crosville Leyland Tiger PS1 half-cab single decker. A few drivers have told me in the past how driving half cabs was a bit like sitting in an oven, but this is how I remember buses of my early childhood so I do admit to a certain nostalgic liking for them!

CLT 414 is a 1963 London Routemaster. There are still a few of these in London but many were sold off at the time they decided that extra-long bendy buses were a good idea in London's rows of traffic light junctions. Blackpool has seen them along the Promenade in our own livery come to think of it! They were stuck in the queue to get through the Euston Road/Baker Street junction and were there so long that Blackpool Transport repainted them in "proper colours"!

Now to my mind this is near perfection. All it needs is to be re-sprayed and badged in Yelloways uniform! I was brought up in Rochdale where Yelloways first started and these were the coaches that used to take me to and from school when we had moved out of the borough to nearby Milnrow and I went to Heywood to school. Note the opening windows out of which your school cap would fly if you were silly enough not to whip it off your head as soon as teachers were out of sight when you got on the coach for the trip home at the end of the school day! And us first formers were not allowed on the back seat because the sixth formers were busy snogging...

Coach firms all around the country had coaches in this shape, known as a Burlingham body. There were a few alternative rooflines - this one has an add-on display board. Unlike modern coaches, the passenger door is halfway down the coach with an emergency exit opposite it on the other side of the coach. This wasn't a full-length door though so you had to shuffle across the seat and then jump.

A 1952 Daimler CVG6 in Lancaster livery - this for years ran as a special, might still do in fact as I'm sure I saw it recently somewhere other than at an event. On some web sites it is described as a CVG5, not sure what the difference between that and a CVG6 is ...logic says: 1? I've also seen it described as a prison bus - someone who knows the story is hereby invited to leave a comment. Can't quite see Nicholas Cage looking on in horror on this one as the prisoners cause it to crash somehow...

And there were a couple of ancient fire engines at the event too. This one quite handily has a big sign board to tell me what it was (a Merryweather) and even that it was registered on 20 February 1936 (!!! Yes but at what time???)

JEV 802 is another Merryweather fire engine with a nice bit of brass work here and there. That must have reflected the fires quite nicely - these little touches make a difference!

And if this entry has seemed a bit of a deja vu experience, I must confess that I featured some of the black and white photos from this event on 24 February 2012 (at 22:49pm but that will be Pacific Standard Time or something like that) just four days short of Merryweather AAM 39's 76th birthday...

By the way, if anyone is feeling rather sad that I've got to the end of my colour slides - that's not what I said... I've got to the end of my albums of slides - there's still at least 16 racks of the sort holding 50 slides that I used to feed into the slide projector on winter evenings when there was nothing on the telly! More to come...

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London, December 1995

Hobbies tend to go in circles - I'm scanning old photos again at the moment and in the middle of doing some negatives of a holiday we took in London way back in December 1995. Nineteen and a bit years ago!

This was the first time we had stayed in London and the couple of day trips we had had previously can almost be discounted as we did little apart from faint at the cost of stuff. We were travelling by train (talking of fainting at cost of stuff...) and the holiday started to prove interesting even on the trip down.

We caught the 08:30 train from Preston to London on Monday 4 December. We had booked seats but at Crewe an old nun decided I was in her seat and was very ungracious when I saw on her ticket that she had caught the train an hour earlier than she should have done. She thought that the two of us should have moved for her anyway. She sat across the aisle and spent the journey muttering to herself much to the amusement of two young girls sitting opposite. Mind you, we all found it amusing when she locked herself in the loo and had to be freed by the guard... As she made her way (muttering) back down the train, an anonymous voice (but not unlike my own) murmured "Oh dear... what can the matter be..."

We got into London just before midday and booked in at the Kennedy Hotel nearby Euston Station. I think it became a Thistle hotel a few years later. On coming out of the hotel the first landmark to be seen was the Post Office Tower. London was dull and somewhat chilly. It was to become just downright freezing...

We had bought our tickets for Madame Tussaud's by post and were allowed to dodge the queue to go straight in. What a swiz when we realised the queue wasn't all that long anyway! I'm not going to post photos of anything that they are likely to still have on show but here's just a couple of tasters.

Miss Franny sandwiched between politician Roy Hattersley and miners' leader Arthur Scargill. They were on a balcony overlooking a garden party scene which featured then current top film stars Bob Hoskins and Hugh Grant shortly after his highly publicised and sadly interrupted dalliance with American prostitute Divine Brown.

Not yet 30, Kylie Minogue was at this point still much loved for her appearances in Australian soap, Neighbours, as much for her singing. The iconic hot pants of Spinning Around were still five years in the future. Chris Evans looked as though he had been modelled in the act of stooping to speak to her and there is lots I could say but won't about the suit...!

We enjoyed the rooms with past and present royalty and the tour finished with a short ride through a sort of steam punk London, probably before the term "steam punk" came in to being(?) We came out into winter and decided to walk down to the West End shops.

Our route took us through some uniform and rather unappealing streets though, behind some of these windows in Harley Street, people were making in that one afternoon more money than I would see in a year or three...

And so we reached Oxford Street. Routemaster buses were still to be seen in profusion, though equally in evidence were other more recent double decked buses. At least the horrendous far-too-long bendy buses had yet to infest the capital.

We had a look round a few of the larger shops, bright and seasonal with Christmas goods. This is John Lewis. Easily spotted, he is the one turning away from the camera behind the table on the top floor...

Coming down the escalators in Debenhams where some awesomely large Christmas baubles were hanging down the stairwell!

We walked the length of the street to Marble Arch and then came back down the other side of the street, starting to feel cold and a bit peckish as the sky got darker. The Christmas Lights came on and we decided to have a look at the posh end of the West End shops and find Bond Street. Which we shall, in the next entry, bumping into a rather well known face!

Return to London Weekend 1995 index page

London Bus Ride

Sunday 1 December 2013. We left the Museum of London, happy and with a high wow factor after our morning searching its exhibits.

We made our way back down to St Paul's Cathedral, chatting about the museum and what a find it was and circled round to the front of the cathedral.

The statue in front of St Paul's is of Queen Anne - not Queen Victoria as many think. Queen Anne was on the throne at the time of the completion of St Paul's rebuilding after the Fire of London. The statue was first erected in 1712, but was badly weathered and was replaced by the present statue in 1886. Figures around the base represent England, France, Ireland and North America - all of which she had some claim to.

We caught a bus to the Tower and spent some time uhmming and ahhing, wondering whether to eat or to head back into the centre of London. We decided on the latter and just took time to take a few photos before heading back to the bus stop.

Whilst there we were visited and scrutinised by some of the locals, one of which is pictured here. We were totally devoid of food at this point though and they quickly discarded us for better prospects elsewhere!

We waited at the bus stop opposite the massive memorial to Merchant Navy crew members lost in the World Wars and were rewarded with the appearance of a 1950s Routemaster. London has got rid of most of its Routemasters now so this was a stroke of luck. However the new buses that are replacing the ridiculously inappropriate for London single deck bendy buses are a sort of homage to these, being double deck buses with an open platform at the back that you can jump on at your own peril. There is a conductor on them too - hooray for London Transport willing to employ people!

Anyway we took a seat on the lower deck near the back and admired the heater controls at the front of the bus with 3 settings from off to on to roasted. We also admired (actually this was me only - Miss Franny was slightly amazed that I should even notice it) the design classic of the original seat covering, below.

Then the rather excitable party of women got up en masse and we took the opportunity to move up to the front of the bus where we noticed the driver was wearing leather driving gloves for warmth - I suspect a distinctly 1940s lack of heating provision for bus drivers! It was quite nostalgic watching the driver wrestling with the long arm of the hand brake too!

We rode the bus to Charing Cross and jumped off to have a look in the Waterstones on the corner of Trafalgar Square. Didn't find a single copy of that classic: Blackpool Then and Now, but London readers should feel assured that it is available to order or from numerous outlets online. Click the book image in the column to the left. You still have time to get it before Christmas!