#ThrowBackThursday. So just before Christmas I mentioned my time at Davies Bros, my first driving job. They ran buses and also had their own European tour department, and this was what I was aiming for. I passed my PSV at 19, back then you could get it at 18 but only drive local service bus routes till you are 21.
When I turned 21 they started easing me in to coach work with London Express trips. Basically they ran a coach daily from West Wales to London, you’d park up 10 hours then drive back. Needed to be two drivers and the most I think I ever remember taking down was about 6 people, so the writing was on the wall. My first trip was with a retired driver who did a bit now and again. He’d always driven coaches, this was the closest he’d ever come to service bus work. He nearly shit himself on the drive into central London because being a service bus driver I do have very good spatial awareness and was going through gaps he thought impossible! He got over it for the return trip and was telling everyone who’d listen how we had managed to overtake 6 National Express coaches leaving London! Still makes me smile now.
Not long later Davies Bros. went bust, can still remember everyone being shell shocked in the yard as it was something of an institution in West Wales and easily the biggest. When First Bus took over a company called Phil Anslow tried to take on Davies Bros. coach work but this wasn’t to be. One day someone in Carmarthen mentioned The Londoners were looking for drivers, so rang them up, and went down to Peckham for an interview, quite pricy when you drive a V8 Range Rover. I got the job and a week later said my goodbyes and was off to London! The yard in Peckham was something to behold, size of a postage stamp behind some houses in a residential area! Most of the drivers came from different parts of the country and we all stayed in the house on corner of yard! I wasn’t there long but I have so many good memories when I look back and met some great characters, some sadly no longer with us. 
Believe it or not, my first trip when I was training with John my roommate was a gay group from the US doing a tour with lots of gay history. When we got back to house John the other driver was telling the others about me ‘you should have seen his face, he was terrified and kept standing with his back to wall when he found out they were all gays!’…..they obviously didn’t know then. Wasn’t long before they did, 3 or 4 days, I’ve never actually ever done the big coming out thing, even to family, everyone just works it out in the end! When they found out John, thinking back to his joke simply piped up ‘we’ll, that makes me look a twat now doesn’t it’ and laughed. And that was that, nothing more was made of it, which is really good when you also consider we were roommates. We did fall out in the end tho……
A rare occurrence for Londoners was overnight tour work. 4 of us were put on a 6 days round Britain tour, I’d just been given my brand new coach, pictured on tour in Lake District, not entirely sure how I came to be allocated a brand new coach after 3 months but I made most of it! A Volvo B7R, so a 7 litre engine rear mounted, I find rear mounted engines give the best ride, and best of all automatic. It was also slightly quicker so I overtook the others, at next stop John said we should stay together, I disagreed, and overtook them again, he told me off, 3rd time he just stopped talking to me and never said a word again! With hindsight I can see how I was a bit of a twat was wrong but I was 21 and you couldn’t tell me anything I knew best, so a typical 21 year old then!
Reading this back it’s striking how confident I was back then. I was actually quite a shy child believe it or not, it’s only through being a coach driver that I changed that consciously, I actually remember the moment when I decided to change my shyness. From that day no one can ever shut me up!
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