Beaky's Blather

After University in 1976, my first post as a teacher was in a small public school in Whittingame, East Lothian, twelve miles from Edinburgh. Approaching the summer holidays, in 1977 I pinned up on a notice board one morning an offer to the boys of a three-week summer camping trip – itinerary – Paris, the French Riviera, Florence, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Munich and Amsterdam. Surprised, I soon discovered that twenty-seven kids had put their names on the list indicating that they wanted to go. The school minibus however could carry only eight plus kit. Clearly, I was going to disappoint the majority. 

My first instinct was to find a way to avoid disappointing so many. Perhaps I wondered, could I hire a larger vehicle? I thought of a bus. As an ex, bus driver, I had the required PSV driving license, so emboldened, I approached some coach companies, seeking what is known as a ‘dry hire – a contract’ for a coach based on a daily rate without fuel or driver. 

Worldwide Travel, a large Yorkshire-based company attracted me as one likely to be able to meet my needs. I called and spoke with the MD who listened to my plan and then explained apologetically that despite the company name, they didn’t actually go abroad. Every Firm that I subsequently approached also turned down the opportunity for my business.

I don’t give up easily. I began to investigate the purchase of a suitable bus. My logic, I could buy the vehicle, use it for the trip and resell it to recoup the initial outlay. I look back at myself today and even I am surprised by my… what was it, tenacity, courage, naivety, foolishness… I don’t know. 

Why not, I thought. What could go wrong? 

As an unexpected co-incidence, quite incredibly, at this exact moment, the Pleasance Trust Charity, an Edinburgh organisation that had catered for the underprivileged children of the Pleasance Housing Estate, a huge area of the city called the Pleasance for decades was to close down because the location, close to the town centre, was to be re-developed. The buildings were to be demolished, and the residents moved, redistributed between various new developments far to the west of City. The excellent Pleasance Trust Charity’s assets, so the newspaper article notified us, were to be subject of an Auction in a week or two.

I mentioned at the top of this article that before going to university, I had been a bus driver. I had been employed for a couple of years by Eastern Scottish, a Scotland-wide, publicly owned bus company. I left the firm in when I entered Loughborough University in late 1972. Our bus depot in Edinburgh, from where I sallied forth early each morning, and where our vehicles were based and engineering works located was in News Street, adjacent to the Pleasance Estate.

I recall, only vaguely – from when I was employed there – that occasionally, a crudely painted old bus appeared in the engineering workshop and was worked on by our mechanics. It didn’t strike me as significant at the time at all.  It was explained to me by a mechanic. I recall that the old bus belonged to a local charity that the firm had supported for years. As a large organisation it seemed to me laudable that we support such a deserving local cause.  The firm I learned, had provided this support-in-kind to the Pleasance Trust for decades going back almost to the 1930s or 40s.  

I do recall speaking casually with a mechanic one afternoon as I mooched around the depot, idling time between the active hours of my split shift. He told me that he was replacing the engine of this old coach, a 20-years old ex-Eastern Scottish vehicle. It had been, he had explained, sold off or more likely donated to the Charity at the end of its economic life with the firm many years earlier. A good thing I thought, and I gave no more thought. I should have because this old bus presaged an approach that would significantly reshape my whole career for decades.

The old bus had served the Charity’s need for a vehicle to ply back and forth between the Pleasance Trust’s base in the Pleasance District of Edinburgh and its fixed holiday camp in East Lothian, where around thirty local kids from the Estate enjoyed a summer break each week throughout the summer.

Goodness knows why, years later, one evening I read the item about the Trust in the evening paper however, I did. It was now five years after I had left Eastern Scottish having moved south and spent four wonderful years as a student in Loughborough University before returning to become a schoolteacher as I said, employed in a small public school in East Lothian, outside Edinburgh. I spotted the Trust’s bus listed in the defunct charity’s auction catalogue. 

– “27-seater bus, runs well, regularly serviced and maintained by professionals.” –

It was providence, I concluded. 

I investigated further, found and spoke with the guy who worked for the Charity and managed the deployment and maintenance of their old vehicle. He shared with me the old coach’s back story. Years back, he explained, the chief engineer at the bus depot – himself once a Pleasance Trust boy – had decided to help out and so he had sourced, repaired and renovated comprehensively a redundant vehicle that he  spirited out of the scrap vehicle compound and donated it to the Pleasance Charity – from which, probably in the 1930s, he had personally derived so much help. Indeed, he credited the Charity with diverting him away from the path of mischief and setting him on the right road to his present high office as the Chief Engineer. He had been enormously grateful and determined to give something back. 

Eastern Scottish engineers had for many years thereafter it transpired fixed and replaced anything on the old coach that risked becoming troublesome. No doubt setting the cost of so doing against the routine maintenance schedules of other vehicles still in the fleet. The old bus, I learned was, beneath its rather disfigured surface, a gem; rough looking because the kids had painted it, but mechanically, very sound. 

I decided to attend the auction and bid. If successful, I would extend the old buse’s expected range from Edinburgh to East Lothian return, a distance of 27 miles to Rome and back via Paris, Nice, Florence, Venice, Vienna, Munich and Amsterdam a distance of around 4000 miles. What could go wrong?

After a rather worryingly troublesome first few sorties locally where faults showed up alarmingly, I climbed underneath and fixed whatever I could diagnose was wrong and, as spring term concluded, supported by two young teachers, I with 27 boys on board, drove southwards to begin a four-week camping trip to Italy, passing through France and back to Holland via Austria and Germany. 

As we departed the school and headed south along the A1 towards Newcastle, the old coach ran superbly. Top speed was 65 mph; it rose to the occasion, and after an overnight drive to London, we were delighted.  In fact, we were in Rome before the bus even suggested that there would be any mechanical issues to deal with. We were in fact driving in traffic past the Coliseum in Rome when I stalled the engine and discovered that we had lost generating power to the batteries.  It proved a minor difficulty. The boys rapidly become adept at pushing and bump starting the bus as required for the final 2 weeks The bus’s radiator inevitably boiled up on the long alpine mountain roads but nonetheless, it also was a small problem. The old bas carried us nearly 4000 miles without missing a beat. 

It was agreed by everyone involved as we returned to the school and the waiting parents, most of whom saw the old bus for the first time and expressed surprise that it had achieved the journey. As we all separated it was universally agreed to have been a spectacularly successful trip. Once we returned for the autumn term, half the kids in the school approached me asking to join any future trip. Why not I thought, why not, I could get a bigger bus if necessary? What could go wrong?

In the event it wasn’t to be as, finding it terribly hard to live on what was at that time a truly meagre teacher’s salary and support a wife and young child. I joined the Physical Education Branch of the RAF and in so doing, doubled my income. I was done with buses I thought. The RAF I was sure would provide for my anticipated expedition transport needs.  I parked the old bus on a local farm belonging to a friend, doubted that I would ever need it again. What could go wrong?