Recollections of public transport in 1940s wartime Britain: the underground and buses

My mother's brothers and my father's siblings were all in Edmonton, north London, and we visited often. The journey involved a train from Edgware to Golders Green and then a bus.

The tube / underground

I don't remember what I did on the journeys but it certainly wasn't looking out of the train windows. All the windows had mesh stuck over them to stop glass splinters flying from a bomb blast. This mesh must have been fairly easy to get hold of, unlike non-essential items, as we had it up loosely at the windows at home in place of net curtains. New net curtains, being non-essential items, were no-where to be bought.

The journey from Edmonton to Golders Green was overground and I can't imagine how it was that my parents ever had cause to take me further on into London on the London Underground - the Tube as it was called. Yet I clearly remember underground tube journeys with both my parents, late in the evenings. (My father must have been home on leave, or maybe it was before he was called up and the experiences just stayed in my mind.) What struck me was all the people sitting and lying down on the station platforms, set up with their mattresses and blankets, ready for going to sleep for the night in what they saw as the safest of all the underground shelters. I asked my parents if we could sleep there too, but they always said no. I think they felt that if they were going to die, they would rather do it in their own home. My cousin Anne Davey (born Anne Cole) tells me that I wouldn't have liked it anyway. Her mother travelled up to the City of London and back every day and often remarked on the dreadful stench of all those people bedded down together for the night. The station lavatories would not have been designed to cope with anything other than the needs of the occasional passenger. So there must have been a good number of open chamber pots - or worse.

My parents didn't have a car in those days. Very few people did. My father had one before he was married but sold it to set up home with my mother in Edgware.

Buses

Edgware was well-served for buses because it was a terminus. As the buses had no doors, there was nothing to stop us waiting inside until it was time to leave.

Having no doors and being unheated, the buses could be very draughty - although they were an improvement in this respect from the buses with no roofs in my mother's childhood. In the very cold winter of 1947, the condensation iced up the roofs and grew into icicles. Some were 6-8 inches long. I don't know whether any ever broke off, but if so it would have been perilous for anyone sitting underneath.

As Edgware was in Greater London, all the buses were red double deckers.

Every bus had a conductor who sold the tickets and a driver who was set apart in his own front cubicle.

 

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