Wonderful footage, thanks. Bammot. Brings back many memories.
I once delved into my childhood memory and tried to record a street scene from three or four years earlier, winter 1942/43. I imagine that the vehicles were much the same - just the traffic was lighter with hardly any private cars. Below are some of the bus/traffic bits. I'm standing in New Street, not far from the Odeon.
.........Eventually - but not for at least another quarter of an hour - our bus, always a double-decker, will arrive, having emerged from High Street to our right in front of a tall, modern building bearing the name "The Times Furnishing Co"; its white façade appears undamaged in contrast to the wrecked buildings beside it. ......The bus will pull up in front of us having reached its terminus and stand there, rattling in time with the throb of its engine and emitting a smell of scorched brake or clutch lining. At this stage of the day few people will alight, perhaps a soldier or airman or sailor stepping confidently off the back of the platform in the direction of travel before the bus comes to a stop and then hoisting kit bag onto shoulder and striding purposefully off in the direction of New Street Station or Snow Hill. When all its homeward bound passengers have boarded, the bus will set off, moving diagonally to the right across New Street before rounding the corner and roaring off up Corporation Street past the shops we have recently visited, then turning left into Bull Street and pulling up outside Grey's department store. Here another group of home-going passengers will step off the pavement and clamber aboard. Then off again, turning right in front of Snow Hill Station into Steelhouse Lane and, once past the General Hospital, left into Loveday Street. We shall now have moved away from the central area of the city but the buildings will still be tall, towering over the bus. Every so often there are gaps...........
.........The traffic between me and the buildings opposite is light. Much of it is buses, the red Midland and the dark-blue and yellow Birmingham Corporation on which I very rarely travel. Almost all are double-deckers, seating over 50 people and carrying many more standing but only on the lower deck. It is mainly the Midland Red that I notice, the ones I am most familiar with. Most originate from pre-war; they are solid, substantial vehicles retaining their padded, cloth upholstery, with registration prefixes of HA or AHA. But increasingly they are being supplemented by the newer "utility" buses, gaunt, angular, spindly vehicles with hard suspension and slatted wooden seats. From time to time a single-decker will pass, of pre-war vintage and occasionally very antique, even to my eyes, dating back to the very early 1930s. There are a few cars, almost all of them black in colour, and often a railway mechanical horse, a strange, articulated vehicle consisting of a flat platform or a boxed-in van structure, hauled by a three-wheeled "horse"........... Occasionally a car will pass with a huge, wallowing rubber bag lashed to its roof, overhanging both bonnet and boot and filled with town gas to fuel its progress in these days of tight petrol rationing. All of these vehicles will have fitted over their headlamps the familiar, round, black, metal masks bearing rows of hooded, horizontal slits through which glimmers of light will emerge to help the vehicle on its way after dark. The edges of mudwings and other extremities on all the public vehicles and many of the private ones are painted white to give pedestrians and other road users a chance of seeing the vehicle looming out of the darkness.
There are still horse-drawn vehicles about, usually brewers' drays bearing the name of their owners, Ansells or Mitchell & Butlers, or carts belonging to the LMS or GWR. One of these vehicles draws up alongside the pavement to my right, as they sometimes do. The driver in muffler and cloth cap gets down off his cart........
..........Buses arrive although still not yet ours. The bus-stops along this part of New Street serve mainly the routes out of Birmingham to the north of the city. The 118 goes to Walsall and there is a series of numbers denoting routes via the middle of Sutton Coldfield. The 101 goes to Streetly, as ours does, but travels via Sutton and terminates in Streetly village; the 102 to Mere Green, the 103 to Canwell. The 104, a more infrequent service, is always operated by a single-decker and pursues a circuitous route from New Street through Sutton and Streetly before disappearing off down the Chester Road towards Brownhills and finally ending up somewhere over the horizon in a distant place called Cannock. Another service which picks up here in New Street is one which is always identified by the conductor bellowing "Beeches" as he is doing today, meaning, as I find out much later, the Frankley Beeches Estate at Great Barr......
..........We shuffle on board and at my insistence climb the stairs to the top deck which is less crowded and where the view is far better. The fug of cigarette smoke starts to grow as more passengers light up but that is just about tolerable, as is the thought which always lurks in the back of the mind: whether the driver of this unwieldy and top-heavy vehicle will exercise due caution when negotiating the tighter bends on the journey. The conductor squeezes down the central aisle in order to collect our fares, holding a clipboard containing a row of different coloured paper tickets, starting with a white one for a fare of one penny. My mother offers the correct fare and two tickets are extracted, punched in a little machine which dangles around the conductor's neck and handed over. Then she - for more often than not these days the conductors are more accurately conductresses - moves on down the aisle to the next passenger.
I sit there and gaze out of the window at a Birmingham whole areas of which will disappear within a couple of decades, a concept quite beyond my wildest dreams or comprehension.............
