Hello everyone,
For those of you who were looking forward to reading a post by Roger I'm sorry to disappoint, but this is one of his younger grandchildren, Billy. As a gift for Roger, me and my Father decided to put this website together to provide a proper arena for Granddad to make his publications available to a wider audience.
I have always been immensely proud of the shear number of books Roger has written over his lifetime. I must admit however, that it wasn't until I began working on this website that I truly took the time to immerse myself in his world, the world of public transport and social history. In order to get a real idea of how the website should look and feel, as well as to understand the target audience a little better I settled down one afternoon and began to pour through my own personal collection of Roger's work.
I found the stories of the lives of those first few pioneers of rural transport to be highly moving. The passion and determination with which they decided to approach the provision of public transport was admirable. For me the biggest realisation to come from reading Roger's work was how much these buses had changed the lives of those who lived in the hamlets and villages of the south. Having grown up myself in a time where public transport has been replaced by the personal car I always took for granted how easy it is to travel relatively long distances with little planning. The bus is now such a pillar of our society that their removal would cause outrage. It's easy to forget though, that until relatively recently the creation of a new Omnibus route would have been the talk of the town!
It's not just the freedom and mobility that these vehicles represent either. Scanning through the images and records there is a real beauty in these machines. My personal favourite has to be the 1949 era Leyland Tiger. For me this bus represents a time when form and function seemed to seamlessly integrate with one another and produced machines that wouldn't look out of place in an art gallery. It is however pretty obvious that the addition of lots of chrome was a fairly new practice as nearly all these buses carry more shiny decoration than even the most enthusiastically decorated Christmas tree!
Thank you all for taking the time to visit the site, Normal service will resume with Roger taking over the mantle of main blogger in the next few weeks.
Best wishes,
Billy
For those of you who were looking forward to reading a post by Roger I'm sorry to disappoint, but this is one of his younger grandchildren, Billy. As a gift for Roger, me and my Father decided to put this website together to provide a proper arena for Granddad to make his publications available to a wider audience.
I have always been immensely proud of the shear number of books Roger has written over his lifetime. I must admit however, that it wasn't until I began working on this website that I truly took the time to immerse myself in his world, the world of public transport and social history. In order to get a real idea of how the website should look and feel, as well as to understand the target audience a little better I settled down one afternoon and began to pour through my own personal collection of Roger's work.
I found the stories of the lives of those first few pioneers of rural transport to be highly moving. The passion and determination with which they decided to approach the provision of public transport was admirable. For me the biggest realisation to come from reading Roger's work was how much these buses had changed the lives of those who lived in the hamlets and villages of the south. Having grown up myself in a time where public transport has been replaced by the personal car I always took for granted how easy it is to travel relatively long distances with little planning. The bus is now such a pillar of our society that their removal would cause outrage. It's easy to forget though, that until relatively recently the creation of a new Omnibus route would have been the talk of the town!
It's not just the freedom and mobility that these vehicles represent either. Scanning through the images and records there is a real beauty in these machines. My personal favourite has to be the 1949 era Leyland Tiger. For me this bus represents a time when form and function seemed to seamlessly integrate with one another and produced machines that wouldn't look out of place in an art gallery. It is however pretty obvious that the addition of lots of chrome was a fairly new practice as nearly all these buses carry more shiny decoration than even the most enthusiastically decorated Christmas tree!
Thank you all for taking the time to visit the site, Normal service will resume with Roger taking over the mantle of main blogger in the next few weeks.
Best wishes,
Billy
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