• PUBLICITY AND PAINT.
Page 9
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Fewer Advertisements Possible on the New London 'Buses. By "The Inspector."
ONE EFFECT of the somewhat drastic modifications of design embodied in the new L.G.O.C. K-type motorbus, and one which, so far as I can recall, ha rs not been remarked upon by any of the many " motor-noters " who have dealt with this new vehicle, is the very considerable diminution in available advertising space which the new form of construction has necessitated. Although the actual space available is now less, the very-much-alive pub Lefty authorities of the company have contrived to give much better effect to the space that is left. The most noteworthy change in this direction, however, is the ban that has had to be placed upon enamelled-iron advertisements—entirely on account of their weight. I do not know exaetly what the various iron plates, including those on the back handrail and inside the bodies, as well as the more prominent " outside top boards " weighed, but it must have been consideraVe. However, I am not sorry to hear Of their banishment for another reason altogether, and that is that quite a deal of irritating noise arose from the creaking and working of these plates when the bus was running. And, moreover, if, by any• chance, there was any chassis vibration or temporary " chatter," it was invariably very iiinch niagnifled by the advertisement irons, which acted as sounding boards and drums.
Black and White.
The London bus, more than any other of' its prototypes throughout the world, always added a note— or several notes—to the brightness of the dingiest of Metropolitan streets. In the old horsed hus days and, of course, in the narlier days of the adoption of the motorbus, most of the routes Were served by buses painted all over in distinctive colours, the advertisements only serving to add to the generally riotous colour scheme. At one time, as I recall quite well, when Scotland Yard, as licensing authority, was very busy indeed issuing " stop notices" for " undue noise" and generally giving'the owning companies no end of a time, there was considerable semiofficial talk of prohibiting the display of advertisements on public-service vehicles in any other colour than in black and white!
Putney Whites and Finchley Greens.
But a few years ago some of us would have regarded with something akin to horror any suggestion that a bus of any kind, painted any other body colour than white could be run to Putney, or that one serving the salubrious area of Camden Town could be aught but yellow. All the Finchleys were green, and the Waterloo Railway biases were chocolate. And there were many other unwritten colour laws in those early omnibus days. It was left, however, to the motorbus to knock all those old associations on the head, The Vanguard Co., the first big operating concern to challenge the older leaseholders for the traffic of London streets, faced by the necessity of interchangeability of buses and routes, boldly disregarded the older customs and put its services on to all kinds of routes under distinguishing servicenumbers, with their vehicles all of the same dark blue colour. .
One Route, One Colour.
But not so easily turned from its path was the old-established L.G.O.C. It was frankly disdainful, in those early Finsbury Pavement days, of the uncultured methods of this new and noisy rival. It would still stick to its route colours, not being able, if, indeed, it would have condescended, to borrow the Vanguard's methods of service numbers. So the early motorbus Generals still went green to FinchIey, yellow to Camden and blue to King's Cross, to the very early dismay of the first officials of the Motor Department. If the whole fleet of half-a-dozen yellow' Camden Be Dions happened to be off the road for repairs, the service stopped, for Scotland Yard would allow no other machine, with a blue or a green body, to take up the running.. Or, if perchance the damage were even more serious and the chassis were in for a month or more, so too had to be the 'body; it could not be used for another chassis for another route. M-oreov,er, the question of changing body and chassis was one upon which Scotland Yard frowned very heavily—and its frown in those days was a nasty depressing thing.
The Daring of. Dumbel.•
The first advance, and it was a hesitant one, was . that initiated by Capt. Dumbel, RE., a newly-appointed joint general manager with Duff of the Road Car. The' gallantcaptain, greatly. daring, decided to trythe experiment with a standard coloured bus but, provided with highly ornate boards, coloured to suit the routes and, withal, removable, fixed to the front of the driver's canopy. These were neither picturesque nor useful and they invariably gave the impression that they had been annexed from a passing ice-cream merchant's push-cart or from the side of one of Lord john Banger's circus traction engines. They did not last long.
The Passing of Enamelled Iron Plates.
This experiment was a.brief one, but it broke up the convention of one route one colour and, not long afterwards, the whole of the fleet was standardized in red with gold lettering and then, with the absorption of the Vanguard and the Road Car organizations, the _ very useful Service Number idea was adopted for the whole lot, the original removable number boards being soon replaced by illuminated opal glass plates.
Colour has been the subject of much contention in the past history of the motorbus: An amusing tale might be told in this connection of the reluctance of the old L.G.O.O. to discard their famous yellow wheels, a relic of coaching days, whatever the standardized bus body colour. . The passing of the enamelled iron plate is another milestone in motorbus history, not important in itself, if a little interesting. It, at any rate, symbolizes the very definite attempt to cut weight to the utmost for the maximum passenger-carrying capacity. .