Early years.

I was born in Douglas in 1946 though my parents were both from the North of England. My father ran Derby Road Post Office in Douglas (later moving to Prospect Terrace and Windsor Road) while my mother ran B&B boarding houses, first in Princes Road and later in Osborne Terrace.

In my younger days, Douglas was very different to what it is now and had changed very little in decades. I often think that I probably saw it at its best but having said that, people in the 1930s very likely thought the same!

Among my earliest memories are food rationing (a legacy from World War II) and my father speculating on whether he would be recalled to the RAF, in which he had been a Navigator during the war, due to the outbreak of the Korean War (1950-53).

I have always had a keen interest in public transport, mainly buses, and this started at a very early age. When I was three or four years old I was with my mother in a shop on Market Hill and while her attention was momentarily elsewhere, I slipped out and wandered into the nearby Lord Street bus station. Fortunately, about 20 minutes later, I was returned by a Road Services bus inspector having had an unaccompanied trip round the Onchan route on one of their new red double deckers.

Lord Street Bus Station and Car Park in the 1930s – it looked very similar to this when I took my unscheduled wander round as a child. (Photographer unknown).

This seems to have been the start of an enduring relationship as I am still involved with red buses 70 years later!

A career in the Police.

On leaving school, I joined the Isle of Man Constabulary as a cadet, later becoming a Constable and remaining in the Police until 1993 when I retired. As with many other organisations, the police force was vastly different to today. For example, in the early 60s when I joined, we had no personal radios and relied solely on our own resources as ‘backup’ in any situation was extremely unlikely. Though new recruits did three months training at the Police Training Centre in Warrington, it was only on taking up actual police duties that you really found out what you had let yourself in for. When I joined the force the majority of serving officers were former military, either World War II (like the Hector Duff for example), Korean War or National Service, the latter only having been abolished in 1960. With the experience some of these guys had, fighting their way across Europe as many had done, dealing with a few drunks in Strand Street on a Friday night didn’t pose much of a challenge. There was a very distinct ‘can do’ mentality in the ex-military men and the new recruits were expected to adopt the same way of thinking. Despite the often unpleasant tasks undertaken, officers knew better than to complain because to show any sign of weakness would quickly result in the suggestion of looking for work elsewhere. The idea of stress-counselling hadn’t been invented in those days and would have been a totally alien concept to the people I worked with.

This probably stood me in good stead some years later when I was one of the first officers to attend the disastrous Summerland fire in August 1973. On arrival there were no senior officers visible so I went into the building with members of the Fire Brigade, all of whom were wearing breathing apparatus, to see what I could do. This was the first time I had been in the building so going in as I did probably wasn’t a particularly good idea but it was better to do something rather than stand around outside looking useless…

One of the many things I gained during my time in the police was the number of driving qualifications I obtained, everything from motorcycles to HGVs, and of course buses, with the result that, when I got into the bus preservation movement, I already had the necessary licence to drive the things!

Buses

People occasionally ask how I got started on bus preservation which, it has to be said, is a slightly unusual hobby. It was something I had often thought about but never seriously considered until a chance conversation with Sir Charles Kerruish, then Speaker of the House of Keys, provided me with somewhere to keep a bus if I should acquire one. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that I graduated from one bus to another over the years and finally obtained one of my all-time favourites, an ex-Isle of Man Road Services Leyland Leopard single decker.

Books

Following my retirement from the police, the involvement with buses lead, by a slightly circuitous route, to writing books –

As a local amateur historian and ‘bus nut’ I was approached by a local publisher, Lily Publications, to provide some captions for a book that well-known local author Stan Basnett was to write. The end result was that I not only got to do the captions but also was given the task of writing the book – this was at Stan’s suggestion and became ‘Buses of the Isle of Man 1945 – the Present Day’.
Once I had embarked on writing, it was a small step to start using some of my own collection of photographs (and latterly from other sources) to illustrate books on the island’s history and thus began the ‘Those Were the Days’ series which ran to four volumes. In tandem with this I also wrote two more buses books, one on Douglas Corporation Transport – ‘Douglas Corporation Buses in Pictures – Centenary Edition’ and the other ‘Isle of Man Road Services Buses in Pictures’ – all published by Lily Publications.
This career may well have continued had not health issues intervened but you have to recognize your limitations…
I still get to indulge my interest in buses and the island’s history through occasional attendance at vintage vehicle events with my Leyland Leopard -which I have now owned for considerably longer than the bus company and from contributing to Facebook pages such as Manx Nostalgia and my own creation, Manx Transport History.

My 1967 Leyland Leopard attending a UK vintage event (Photo: Author’s collection).

Buses on the Isle of Man (Youtube - Bob Hodges Transport DVDs)

Interview: Richard Davis