BEFORE THE BUSES

From a very young age, I had a fascination with buses. My earliest drawings were of buses, I made buses out of Lego, collected Dinky and Corgi bus models, I photographed them, bought magazines and books about them, and thoroughly enjoyed travelling on them. I even went so far as to make the fronts of buses out of cardboard and made destination blinds that I could roll around to my heart’s content! Ron Francis, my art teacher at the Rose Heyworth Comprehensive School, felt the need to make a comment on one of my school reports! He wrote: “Seems to have a mania for public transport.” Excuse me sir?? My maternal grandmother’s cousin, Jack Gould (1919–2008) who she thought very highly of, started out as a bus conductor, before spending many years driving buses for Collier’s and Henley’s.

Having lived with partial sight from birth, I knew my dream of becoming a bus driver was never going to come true. On completing my schooling, I was able to enjoy washing buses and coaches for Henley's, and also went on certain school runs to assist the driver with “keeping an eye” on the children, even if it was only a partial eye! After losing my remaining sight over a period of about 2 years, my love of buses rapidly dwindled. I couldn’t look at or photograph them, couldn’t read about them, even travelling on them wasn’t as enjoyable as it had once been. But in a strange way, my long-time love of buses has stayed with me to some degree.

Being able to use a computer with the aid of software known as a screen reader has made it possible for me to enjoy not only researching my own family history, but also the life stories of those who had wagonettes and char-a-bancs, and who operated (or applied to operate) local bus services and coach hire companies in my home town of Abertillery and at other locations in the Ebbw Fach Valley. Below you will find links to the families I’ve been researching. Some are well-known, while most will be much less familiar.

CREDITS

The AI generated image of a vintage bus and colliery at sunset was created at ChatGPT