We will be filming tomorrow in Essex, Colchester, Chelmsford, Southend area.
Today I did more coverage of Chester, last weekday operations, last school journeys etc.
Sunday is North Weald, the weather isn't set to be as bad as early forecasts, celebrate its return, our first photo sales for many years and bargain London DVDs.
Last night the Three Greyhounds was still out of action for food following a change of brewery, ended up at the Swettenham Arms which was supposed to be very good, had the worst meal we've had for quite a while, disgusting place.
I'm working on London archives for next DVD and hopefully an Eastern archive for Carlton Colville release.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Thursday, June 28, 2007
YOU CAN'T WIN EM ALL
Chester City transport, the countdown has begun, plenty of people out with cameras today, taken around lunch time.About 15,000 photos now ready in our sales unit for launch at North Weald.
Not a lot of feedback lately, then you get two together, thanks Mrs Ward of Strtton who so much enjoyed PMP sponsored POPS rally and the DVD of the event, and then Mr Clarke of Crawley who has taken a dislike to my filming techniques, wonder what his films look like eh!
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
33 YEARS NOT OUT
Well bashed by wind and rain maybe but the garden is coming along nicely, tomorrow we celebrate our 33rd wedding anniversary, don't expect anything from me tomorrow night we're off down the Three Greyhounds!PHOTO SALES NOW READY
A hectic evening locked away in the attic, there are those who say I should have stayed there perhaps. Anyway I've got a full box ready of
Southdown
M& D
E Kent
Kent Sussex Minor ops & Coaches
Hastings & Dist
Bright & BH&D
Maidstone Boroline etc
the range covers from charas to Nationals both black & white and colour. Be amongst the first to graze at North Weald. I will extend the range soon.
Southdown
M& D
E Kent
Kent Sussex Minor ops & Coaches
Hastings & Dist
Bright & BH&D
Maidstone Boroline etc
the range covers from charas to Nationals both black & white and colour. Be amongst the first to graze at North Weald. I will extend the range soon.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
CHESTER MUNICIPAL BUSES THE END THIS WEEKEND
Chester City Transport ceases this coming Sunday with First picking up the services from Monday morning, meanwhile in Preston a bus war is starting up between Preston and Stagecoach, plenty of new buses and new Preston liveries about also newbies with Fishwicks so perhaps worth a visit soon!
The boxes for the photo sales have arrived, next I'll have to delve into the attic. Just posting Nancy guided trolleys on Youtube.
The boxes for the photo sales have arrived, next I'll have to delve into the attic. Just posting Nancy guided trolleys on Youtube.
Monday, June 25, 2007
NOW POSTING YOU TUBE TRAILERS FROM OUR EUROPEAN TOUR
Everything has been blown and rained on to the extreme today. Tonight working editing yesterdays Totally Transport at Blackpool, then starting to re edit LT 1970s archive feature or two for next Sundays North Weald ( hopefully). Its our wedding anniversary Thursday so not much editing that night on pain of death methinks!PHOTOS SALES TIMETABLES ETC
I hope to have a rummage up in the loft this week and pull out items for sale. I've ordered up suitable plastic boxes to hold around 2 -3 thousand photos per box.
Initially I will be disposing of East Kent and Maidstone Corporation bus photos together with Kentish independents and coach operators.
I will also be selling off all timetables from NBC era and after relating to Southdown M&D EKent. There will be no mail order or we ebay listing , all will be via rally stand.
Next venue and launch North Weald.
The next progression will be modern era sales covering world wide bus tram and trolleybuses including British Isles. Misc items I hope to unearth will include posters, calenders, booklets, models etc.
Initially I will be disposing of East Kent and Maidstone Corporation bus photos together with Kentish independents and coach operators.
I will also be selling off all timetables from NBC era and after relating to Southdown M&D EKent. There will be no mail order or we ebay listing , all will be via rally stand.
Next venue and launch North Weald.
The next progression will be modern era sales covering world wide bus tram and trolleybuses including British Isles. Misc items I hope to unearth will include posters, calenders, booklets, models etc.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
FLEETWOOD TRAM SUNDAY STILL ON
Blackpool rally today, a sunny afternoon but the dire weather forecast put most people off, very light trading, just a couple of brief showers but trams went very quiet in the afternoon just when the sun appeared, a couple of tornado's seen in distance. Forecast very bad hence some garden shots from week to cheer us up, at least I don't have to water at night at present. Many of the buses were to do with Majorettes, Ginger haired spotty kids doing a sort of line dance to boom boom music, horrid, whats that got to do with transport I ask.
Fleetwood has nearly been abandoned but reprieved at last moment, perhaps this years will be the last, too much on site drinking not enough transport, all chestnuts from past few years.Saturday, June 23, 2007
NEARLY CAUGHT UP BUT HAD A BOTTLE OF WINE ETC
Lille , not changed much, rained a lot but very friendly place, enjoyed it a lot
FIRST VIEWING OF HOUSE BLACKPOOL TOMORROW
We had an amazing time in Luxembourg, the buses are so varied and new, surpised though by the drugs, sex shops, etc around the centre, the old town though was fine and of course an Irish pub very welcome for a pint of the black stuff.Tomorrow totally transport at Blackpool, this afternoon our first viewer for 17 Birchwood!
Friday, June 22, 2007
WHAT A ROTTEN SUMMER
We have ploughed through Freiburg and Heidelberg to reach Mannheim and thence on to Nancy for the guided trolleys, who remembers what happened when I first visited them ( yes they had been withdrawn due to coming off the 'track', now much of the system is either off guide, off poles or being modified. Very friendly and nice weather though.
Sometimes I get all artistic, silly beggar!
Huddled by the fire with pullovers on, isn't this global warming something! When will it ever stop raining.LINES ABOUT MY ADOPTED FATHER
a few more lines from my book, this time picking up on George Spencver my father. I'd very much welcome any observations from other family members.
................To the casual outsider George must have had a slight limp as he was still recovering from a bullet wound gained in India. He had grown up in Waterloo north of Liverpool where his father Frank (Prof – professor) Spencer was an inspector on the corporation trams, bandmaster of the tramway brass band and in his spare moments leader of the Stylists dance band. His wife Daisy was a relatively small lady but of fiery temper and after having a bible thrown at him one day George decided that generally speaking life at home and as bell boy in Lewis’s Department store was not for him so he enlisted as a boy soldier at the tender age of 14. With his father’s pedigree a bandsman life was inevitable and it wouldn’t be long before he would be shipped off to India with the Kings Regiment, Liverpool. One of the duties the band undertook before leaving was playing at the opening of the Mersey Tunnel with the King in attendance.
As a bandsman George was a non combatant, they acted as stretcher bearers in times of conflict. Unarmed and attacked by tribesman in the Khyber Pass region, now part of Pakistan, he shinned up a tree for cover but was shot in the leg. I suppose had it been peace time he may have been dismissed from the service but as war in Europe had broken out he found a role teaching maths and ending up in Fort William, his last posting. Along the way whilst at home in Liverpool recuperating he no doubt played with his father Prof’s Stylist dance band and one evening at a dance spotted my mother Marion who had been evacuated from Eastbourne to Liverpool. A strange decision you may think but at the start of the war Liverpool was far from the range of German bombers and Eastbourne was much more on the front line and with invasion expected much of the civilian population was removed.
Marion went to Liverpool with her sister Sylvia and was allocated a job in a ball bearing factory, much as men were drafted into the army or mines. After she met my father she also met the formidable Daisy from whom George had previously fled, Daisy obviously hadn’t mellowed and even at the risk of imprisonment for leaving a job of national importance she returned to Eastbourne in 1944 only to find that the coast was now being pounded by the dreaded doodle bugs (German unmanned rockets), many falling short of London which was the intended target, 60 miles to the north.
Marion had been to school with the girl who married comedian and conjuror Tommy Cooper, supposedly they were mixed up in racketeering in the war. We inherited a small tea set, this was given to Marion by some young soldier friends of Thelma, they had ‘liberated’ it from a house in Rye where they had been billeted, the home having been evacuated in view of the expected invasion.
The early days of the war must have been exciting and happy times for the girls of mum’s age but just 5 years later as widows, with doodle bugs and V2s behind them it must all have been wearing a bit thin.
We know that granddad and granny Spencer had been out in America, Daisy told how they had hid in flour barrels from the Red Indians, there obviously was some truth in the story, confirmed when I did the family history and found siblings born in Colorado. Likewise granddad supposedly had Spanish blood, again confirmed when I found the name Sabeno as a second Christian name for both granddad and great granddad alike, although nothing more is known. Granddad known as Prof used to play bowls; crown green unlike the lawn type in Eastbourne, there was a green near their house in Thorndale Rd, Waterloo, a smart upper working class neighbourhood of Liverpool. The house still stands and looks in good order, when we visited in the 50s my cousin Charles, a Teddy boy, played billiards with his cronies in the front room. I remember the old Liverpool market being burnt down to the ground to clear it. The old overhead railway no longer ran but the structure remained in place, Prof would dearly liked to have shown me their trams but a trip to Fleetwood had to suffice. He once bought me a tiny ‘Matchbox’ model tram from Wilson’s sweet shop. The ships on the Mersey stretched out into the far distance; we watched them from the shore line near Waterloo where the sand stretched out forever until it merged with the grey sea and still greyer sky. The vessels were a link in the chain of commerce which had had it’s heyday in the time of the slave trade. For Merseyside bad times were coming only to be lightened by a new primeval beat of pop music and diversions from hardship from a line of comedians.
I think George liked to gamble, we never had much money that’s for sure but after he died Marion never spoke ill of him but then again never erected a memorial headstone at his grave, and she bought two plots side by side. Certainly we were out on a limb down at Langney and relatives seldom visited us, it was all one way traffic. I think Thelma worked in the Saxone shoe shop on Terminus Rd, perhaps Marion had also done so pre war. Olive in the 1960-70s worked at Oswald Fields Ladies gown shop just past the station near Bradford’s coal office. The buses stopped either side of the road outside the station until traffic got so bad they moved them a few yards down into Terminus Road. Post war with the surface pitted and roughly applied tarmac, Terminus Road had little by way of road markings or street furniture, it seemed an immense spacious highway occupied by the occasional cyclist. It was a sort of landing trip into town for the gorgeous green and cream Southdown buses which still served all the surrounding country villages several times a day and Eastbourne Corporation whose vehicles painted Blue, Custard and topped off with white roofs were the epitome of municipal style and charm. Even the adverts were painted in yellow by hand and designed to use the blue body colour as background.
Sylvia also found her husband Claude Pessell in Liverpool. The impact of these V1 flying bombs, one of Hitler’s secret weapons which he had long threatened to unleash, was quite severe as they gave little warning. Marion went to the doctors for her ‘ nerves’, Dr MacLeanan recommended taking up smoking, a justification she clung to for many years until a bad cold finally put her off the habit and she stopped without further ado. Dr Mac as he was known went on to treat our little family for many years although they fell out over some childhood ailment I’d had and we had the less satisfactory Dr Saville. She met Dr Mac in retirement and they sat in Gildrege Park quietly reminiscing and regretting the incident. In those days a bottle of bright pink medicine sorted out most ailments real or imagined, it’s taste was pretty dire so you wouldn’t want to feign illness. My health has thankfully been good and I had the worst whilst still very young, this consisted of a bout of whooping cough (App VII), then a killer, I also had tonsillitis.
................To the casual outsider George must have had a slight limp as he was still recovering from a bullet wound gained in India. He had grown up in Waterloo north of Liverpool where his father Frank (Prof – professor) Spencer was an inspector on the corporation trams, bandmaster of the tramway brass band and in his spare moments leader of the Stylists dance band. His wife Daisy was a relatively small lady but of fiery temper and after having a bible thrown at him one day George decided that generally speaking life at home and as bell boy in Lewis’s Department store was not for him so he enlisted as a boy soldier at the tender age of 14. With his father’s pedigree a bandsman life was inevitable and it wouldn’t be long before he would be shipped off to India with the Kings Regiment, Liverpool. One of the duties the band undertook before leaving was playing at the opening of the Mersey Tunnel with the King in attendance.
As a bandsman George was a non combatant, they acted as stretcher bearers in times of conflict. Unarmed and attacked by tribesman in the Khyber Pass region, now part of Pakistan, he shinned up a tree for cover but was shot in the leg. I suppose had it been peace time he may have been dismissed from the service but as war in Europe had broken out he found a role teaching maths and ending up in Fort William, his last posting. Along the way whilst at home in Liverpool recuperating he no doubt played with his father Prof’s Stylist dance band and one evening at a dance spotted my mother Marion who had been evacuated from Eastbourne to Liverpool. A strange decision you may think but at the start of the war Liverpool was far from the range of German bombers and Eastbourne was much more on the front line and with invasion expected much of the civilian population was removed.
Marion went to Liverpool with her sister Sylvia and was allocated a job in a ball bearing factory, much as men were drafted into the army or mines. After she met my father she also met the formidable Daisy from whom George had previously fled, Daisy obviously hadn’t mellowed and even at the risk of imprisonment for leaving a job of national importance she returned to Eastbourne in 1944 only to find that the coast was now being pounded by the dreaded doodle bugs (German unmanned rockets), many falling short of London which was the intended target, 60 miles to the north.
Marion had been to school with the girl who married comedian and conjuror Tommy Cooper, supposedly they were mixed up in racketeering in the war. We inherited a small tea set, this was given to Marion by some young soldier friends of Thelma, they had ‘liberated’ it from a house in Rye where they had been billeted, the home having been evacuated in view of the expected invasion.
The early days of the war must have been exciting and happy times for the girls of mum’s age but just 5 years later as widows, with doodle bugs and V2s behind them it must all have been wearing a bit thin.
We know that granddad and granny Spencer had been out in America, Daisy told how they had hid in flour barrels from the Red Indians, there obviously was some truth in the story, confirmed when I did the family history and found siblings born in Colorado. Likewise granddad supposedly had Spanish blood, again confirmed when I found the name Sabeno as a second Christian name for both granddad and great granddad alike, although nothing more is known. Granddad known as Prof used to play bowls; crown green unlike the lawn type in Eastbourne, there was a green near their house in Thorndale Rd, Waterloo, a smart upper working class neighbourhood of Liverpool. The house still stands and looks in good order, when we visited in the 50s my cousin Charles, a Teddy boy, played billiards with his cronies in the front room. I remember the old Liverpool market being burnt down to the ground to clear it. The old overhead railway no longer ran but the structure remained in place, Prof would dearly liked to have shown me their trams but a trip to Fleetwood had to suffice. He once bought me a tiny ‘Matchbox’ model tram from Wilson’s sweet shop. The ships on the Mersey stretched out into the far distance; we watched them from the shore line near Waterloo where the sand stretched out forever until it merged with the grey sea and still greyer sky. The vessels were a link in the chain of commerce which had had it’s heyday in the time of the slave trade. For Merseyside bad times were coming only to be lightened by a new primeval beat of pop music and diversions from hardship from a line of comedians.
I think George liked to gamble, we never had much money that’s for sure but after he died Marion never spoke ill of him but then again never erected a memorial headstone at his grave, and she bought two plots side by side. Certainly we were out on a limb down at Langney and relatives seldom visited us, it was all one way traffic. I think Thelma worked in the Saxone shoe shop on Terminus Rd, perhaps Marion had also done so pre war. Olive in the 1960-70s worked at Oswald Fields Ladies gown shop just past the station near Bradford’s coal office. The buses stopped either side of the road outside the station until traffic got so bad they moved them a few yards down into Terminus Road. Post war with the surface pitted and roughly applied tarmac, Terminus Road had little by way of road markings or street furniture, it seemed an immense spacious highway occupied by the occasional cyclist. It was a sort of landing trip into town for the gorgeous green and cream Southdown buses which still served all the surrounding country villages several times a day and Eastbourne Corporation whose vehicles painted Blue, Custard and topped off with white roofs were the epitome of municipal style and charm. Even the adverts were painted in yellow by hand and designed to use the blue body colour as background.
Sylvia also found her husband Claude Pessell in Liverpool. The impact of these V1 flying bombs, one of Hitler’s secret weapons which he had long threatened to unleash, was quite severe as they gave little warning. Marion went to the doctors for her ‘ nerves’, Dr MacLeanan recommended taking up smoking, a justification she clung to for many years until a bad cold finally put her off the habit and she stopped without further ado. Dr Mac as he was known went on to treat our little family for many years although they fell out over some childhood ailment I’d had and we had the less satisfactory Dr Saville. She met Dr Mac in retirement and they sat in Gildrege Park quietly reminiscing and regretting the incident. In those days a bottle of bright pink medicine sorted out most ailments real or imagined, it’s taste was pretty dire so you wouldn’t want to feign illness. My health has thankfully been good and I had the worst whilst still very young, this consisted of a bout of whooping cough (App VII), then a killer, I also had tonsillitis.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
GETTING THROUGH EUROPE SLOWLY
The rain really caught up with us on Tuesday afternoon at Biel / Bienne.
Sunshine again, now in Germany in the morning rush at Freiburg, very nice tooA DONK WTH AN ETHNIC TAXI TODAY
Had a bit of a car smash with acouple of Asian taxi drivers racing each other, no one hurt though.
Meanwhile back in Switzerland we were lucky with the weather in the fascinating but remote system at La Chaux De Fonds but it looked pretty gloomy by the time we reached Neuchatel where the last photo was taken.
TOTALLY TRANSPORT BLACKPOOL
Sunday 24th June, we shall be at Totally Transport at Blackpool, we look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible.
For those in the South we shall be at the relaunch of North Weald bus rally on Sunday 1st July the week afterwards.
Work continues each evening in the garden which has been blown about a bit by wind and rain but is coming together well.
I'm working my way through the European tour films, 3 are now completed, another 5 to go, they are all on our main list see
www.pmpvideo.com
For those in the South we shall be at the relaunch of North Weald bus rally on Sunday 1st July the week afterwards.
Work continues each evening in the garden which has been blown about a bit by wind and rain but is coming together well.
I'm working my way through the European tour films, 3 are now completed, another 5 to go, they are all on our main list see
www.pmpvideo.com
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
MAKING DO IN LAUSANNE
Construction work continues n the centre of Lausanne, the Neoplan trolleys which caught fire so easily have been replaced now by Neoplan buses, a few foreigners still exist such as these from Geneva.Tuesday, June 19, 2007
LYON IN THE RAIN FUTURISTIC TROLLEYS EH
The third tram line has opened since my last visit. The oroginal two lines meet under the main station, an area which now looks and smells like a public urinal at a football match
Lyon is a bit of a dump other than the superb food , I suppose with the sun on a good day it looks better but can't say it did a lot for me other than the superb trolleys, but what about a livery, looks as if money ran short for paint!
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