21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (10 page)

The last route to be served by a Routemaster was the 159 from Marble Arch to Streatham, and the final journey took place on 9 December 2005. Such was the public interest that crowds flocked the route and sometimes even blocked the road. Hundreds of people turned up to bid a much-loved bus a fond farewell.

The Routemaster has not completely vanished. In London they are used for two special heritage routes, the 9 from Olympia to Aldwych and the 15 from Trafalgar Square to Tower Hill. There are also examples of the vehicle elsewhere in the country, with many local firms buying up stock as it was decommissioned. So there is still a chance to see a few of them for a while yet.

And in 2012, the new London mayor, Boris Johnson, will be introducing an updated version of the Routemaster. The sleek new design is very modern, but keeps the classic open platform – something old, something new.

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Bus Conductors

‘Fares, please!’

When is the last time you heard that cry? I suspect you’ll be hard pushed to remember. I am willing to bet it was some considerable time ago.

Next time you find yourself singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ to a child, and at some point in your life that is pretty much bound to happen, stop when you get to this line:

‘The conductor on the bus says, “move along please”.’

And ask the child what a bus conductor is. They won’t know!

We are all aware why there are no longer any bus conductors; since the privatisation of public transport, companies have tried to save money and operating a bus with one person costs less than employing two, but the slow extinction of the role has sort of gone unnoticed.

The bus conductor’s main job was, obviously, to sell and check tickets, but the role was much bigger than that. Think about that name, conductor, like in an orchestra. He or she would organise their passengers into some kind of order. They would make sure everyone who needed a seat could get one, that nursery rhyme cry of ‘move along please’ would ensure new passengers could get on, they would make certain that smoking only took place on the top deck, that unruly schoolkids got a clip round the ear to keep them in check, that fare dodgers were kicked off, that everyone knew what stop was coming up, and, something people tend to forget, they would keep the driver in check, quite happy to have words if he was going too fast or turning corners too sharply.

The bus conductors did their best to instil order and safety. They were, much of the time, a reassuring presence. Now you think about it, you probably realise that you miss them.

But worry not, they might be back. The new Routemaster buses due for London are supposedly going to have conductors on board. I, for one, would welcome them back.

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Playing in the Streets

In his excellent book,
How to Live Dangerously
, author and social commentator Warwick Cairns points out that our modern-day fears for child safety are largely nonsense. He calculated that if you actually wanted your child to be abducted, then you’d have to lock them out of the house for close to 200,000 years before they would (statistically) be taken.

And even then, the chances are they’d be returned within 24 hours.

Now, I don’t want to belittle the many horrible things that happen to children, but the facts are that the vast majority of them happen inside the home, and are caused by members of the family. Playing outside, I would argue, is no less safe than it ever was. And yet children growing up today have less freedom to do so than ever before.

I grew up in the 1970s. I was allowed to play outside my house, a quiet but not secluded suburban street, from an early age. I was walking to school on my own by the time I was about seven or eight. And this was not in any way remarkable at the time. At ten I would spend most of the weekend out of the house, visiting friends, down the park, or climbing trees. As long as I was home for lunch and dinner, no one seemed to mind. Blimey, when I was eleven, I had a two-hour journey to school that involved a bus and a train – and that train was one of the old ones where you could open the doors at any time, and with carriages full of schoolkids, they were pretty much open for most of the journey.

Nowadays, allowing your seven-year-old to walk to school alone can result in disapproving comments from other parents, a local newspaper headline, and a radio phone-in.

I remember some years ago allowing my young son to go unaccompanied to the toilet in a restaurant. The people we were with
were astounded that I could be so reckless: they were assuming that some nutter was lying in wait to abduct him in a branch of Pizza Express.

What has become of us?

The world is no more dangerous now than it was when I was young; if anything, it is safer. Cars are safer, roads are safer, neighbourhoods are safer – and yet kids under the age of eight are rarely allowed outside unaccompanied. Forgive the rant, but I fear for the sort of mollycoddled children we are raising today. Danger and risk are a part of life. Exposure to them helps us to judge and react to them. It builds our common sense. They are, I would argue, essential to growing up.

We should allow our children to play in the streets, climb trees, walk to school, play down the park, cycle round the neighbourhood, go to the corner shop, etc. They will become better adults as a result.

I was chatting about this very subject with an elderly lady a while ago. She told me how, in the late 1940s, she and her sister, both under 14 at the time, had travelled to Norway alone to visit family friends. Their parents waved them off at the garden gate and didn’t see them again for nearly a month. They negotiated a train and ferry to Norway and then the journey through a foreign country to their destination and no one batted an eyelid. If that happened today, the parents would be arrested.

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Election Vans with Loudspeakers

Before the days of 24-hour news channels, Twitter, and all things internet-related, politicians had to really put in some graft if they wanted to be elected. There was the door-to-door canvassing, the kissing of babies, and driving around in a van that had a loudspeaker on the roof.

It sounds daft now, if you have never seen such a thing, but it was standard procedure at the time. Seriously.

A big speaker or loudhailer would be strapped to the roof of an available vehicle, and the prospective MP would be driven around town while trying to convince people to vote for him or her. Usually this involved inspired and unforgettable rhetoric, such as, ‘Vote for Peter Jones, I’m the man for you’ or some such nonsense.

It was like the ice cream van of your nightmares.

Usually the arrival of said van would be greeted by jeers from builders hanging off scaffolding (if it was a Tory candidate) or a disapproving look from posh women in headscarves (if Labour). I presume it must have had some effect, though, as politicians did it for years.

Now they just poke you on Facebook or something.

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Nuns

There simply aren’t as many nuns as there used to be, and their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. During the time John Paul II was Pope, the total of Catholic nuns dropped by a quarter. Between 2005 and 2006 (the most recent statistics available) the number of men and women belonging to religious orders declined by 10% – that was in one single year!

The reasons for this are obvious and twofold. First, and this isn’t meant to sound flippant, lots of them are dying as they are an ageing population. Second, fewer women are choosing to dedicate their life to their God in this way. This combination means that nuns really are an endangered species.

Prior to the 21st century, most towns of a reasonable size would have some nuns knocking around. They were a bit of a novelty, I grant you, but not an uncommon sight. The arrival of a group of nuns in a public place would have an amusing effect on those around. Schoolboys and girls would often have a fit of giggles, women would look on curiously, and even the roughest bloke would turn into a true gentleman, ‘Let me get the door for you sister’ and that sort of thing. They would, usually, brighten up the immediate vicinity and leave politeness in their wake.

Now you are more likely to spot one on a
Nuns Having Fun
calendar than in the butcher’s buying a pound of sausages.

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Telephone Boxes

When you think about it, it is a bit odd to get all misty-eyed about objects that were more often than not vandalised, frequently littered with prostitute calling cards, and usually smelt of piss. But there is no accounting for nostalgia, it is a powerful beast.