Catching the bus

Our motoring writer David Clayton meets a fellow bus fanatic with a fascinating collection of old photos.

- David Clayton

I called a friend to wish him happy birthday as, at the time, we were all in lockdown and couldn’t get together.

After the customary, “How are you?” came the customary, “What are you doing with yourself?”

“I’m sorting out life’s wardrobe,” he explained. A perfect description of what many of us have been up to, because we’ve all kept too much stuff in attics, lofts, cupboards and drawers.

In doing so he’d reacquainted himself with a unique collection of photographs he’d taken as a teenager. Dick Hunt, from Thorpe, near Norwich, had taken a boyhood liking to buses for no obvious reason he can recall. He just remembers being fascinated by a badge on a bus radiator he saw while on a trip to Great Yarmouth with his family. He was six years old.

“It must have triggered something,” he says.

Dick is part of the generation who grew up in a family who couldn’t initially afford a car, so the only option for getting about was on a bus. While my dad had a car, because he was a sales rep in the north east of England where we lived back then, the car and him were away all day so I took lots of trips on buses with Mother and recall the excitement of the ‘73’ red United bus rounding the corner towards the bus stop.

Dick was no different with his own memories. “Mum and I would catch the ‘92’ on Witard Road to go up the city.”