10 years of retirement: Part 1

Saturday 25th March 2023

I can hardly believe it’s ten years ago this weekend I walked out of Brighton & Hove’s Conway Street, Hove head office for the very last time and entered the new world of retirement.

Folklore has it as you get older the years pass by more quickly and the pace quickens even more in retirement and I can certainly vouch for that. So before this anniversary quickly becomes lost in a distant memory haze and more years are clocked up (hopefully) I’m marking this ten year personal milestone with two special blogs this weekend.

Today’s features the most memorable memories from my 31 year tenure running buses in Brighton while tomorrow I’ll feature my top highlights from ten years of retirement travels.

These blogposts have generally been a Brighton & Hove free zone but last Saturday’s blog about Bus Names generated a lot of interest as well as rekindling reminiscences of other initiatives we were able to introduce thanks to the company’s owner, the Go-Ahead Group, having a firm culture of taking a hands off corporate oversight particularly during the original Martin Ballinger and Chris Moyes period of leadership in the 1990s which was thankfully years before the advent of the obsessive spreadsheet style dashboard KPI school of centralised micro management.

Some initiatives go right back to the day Brighton & Hove was formed as a separately managed division within the overall Southdown company which I had the privilege of leading from its instigation in 1985 as that’s when the adventure really began. It became a company in its own right the following year (by reactivating the former Brighton, Hove & District) and in 1987 became a successful management buy-out from the National Bus Company before the onward sale to Go-Ahead in 1993.

What became known as management weekly “walkabouts” began way back in those heady days in 1985 when a small group of managers spent half a day (sometimes early mornings and late evenings too) travelling around the network seeing how the services were actually doing, chatting to staff, calling into the garages and other sites in what I always said was the most valuable three to four hours of my week. I ensured there was a rota of colleagues to join me so every manager and head office based staff got out and about as part of their work to live and breath the product.

Staff recognition and communications were always important to me and I was proud of a fortnightly newsletter (hard copy printed in those days of course) which I continued from 1985 right through until retiring in 2013 comprising eight A4 pages packed with news as well as items of interest about staff in the business. We had award schemes, personalities of the month, awards for excellence, award nights, an annual social dinner and dance and recognition of service milestones every five years from five to 45 years employment to be sure staff felt valued and appreciated.

Two other enduring initiatives that go way back – right to deregulation in October 1986 in fact – are Bus Times and 1 Stop Travel. Both had as their objective giving passengers and crucially, prospective passengers, reassurance that deregulation was not going to bring chaos and constant changes to bus timetables and (in an era before the Internet) to ensure it would be easy to obtain information and buy tickets.

Bus Times very quickly (from 1987) became a twice a year publication with fixed validity dates and contained integrated information (maps, times, tickets) of all bus services in the towns and surrounding area thanks to the cooperation (and their payment for appearing) of fellow bus operators including Brighton Buses, Southdown and those running tendered routes operated for the county councils in East and West Sussex.

Some could never understand why we were advertising what could be regarded as competitors’ services but I always took the view it was far better to enhance confidence among the public by laying out comprehensive information easily obtainable (the book was free of charge and distributed on board buses as well as from other outlets) and its two fixed dates each year gave everyone reassurance things were not going to be constantly changing and inspired fellow operators to follow the same ethos.

1 Stop Travel had a similar objective. It was the former Southdown travel shop in Brighton’s Old Steine which Brighton & Hove inherited. Located next door was a former British Rail ticket office (which we also inherited) as well as having an IATA licence to sell air tickets which led us to begin the new era by selling tickets for all modes of public transport (ferries too) as well as being a place where information on any bus route, coaches and rail was available.

We even converted an old Leyland National into a mobile travel shop which was useful for taking into the community as well as attending events.

Long before the advent of smartcards let alone a then unimagined world of contactless and tap & cap ticket systems, we were at the forefront of encouraging passengers to buy tickets in advance of travel along with a simple and understandable fare system. Two highlights would be the scratch off SAVER ticket and the introduction of a £1 flat fare in the early 2000s. Both Brighton & Hove and Brighton Buses had operated a scratch off style ticketing system with its great advantage being able to sell the tickets through agents throughout the area – typically newsagents and corner shops as well as every post office – giving the bus companies cash up front twice over as those agents paid (with a discount) for the tickets to hold in their stock.

We’d always had jointly available tickets as well as our own brands but once Brighton & Hove and Brighton Buses merged in 1997, following the latter selling to Go-Ahead, the SAVER ticket became a hugely popular way of paying for travel with daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual versions.

The £1 flat fare absolutely revolutionised bus travel as suddenly everyone knew what the fare was, encouraging them to travel with reassurance. Thanks to the growth in passenger numbers we held it at a £1 for two and a half years and once it did increase we adjusted the relationship to the day ticket such that, for example, when it became £1.20 the SAVER day ticket for a time was £2.40 encouraging passengers to travel more because other journeys made that day were effectively ‘free’. This led to an embedded culture of buying the day ticket as a way of travel.

Improving frequencies of the core routes in the network bit by bit, year after year, was another key plank of improving services. The greatest example of this was route 25 serving the Universities sited along Lewes Road and at Falmer. I can recall way back in the mid 1980s when this route ran half hourly with Leyland Nationals. As the universities (Sussex and Brighton) expanded and by the time former London bendy buses were introduced to supplement double decks, the frequency was as high as 18 buses an hour at busy times such had been the growth.

Another success was route 7 (Hove George Street to Brighton Marina – and originally Bristol Estate) which was converted to high frequency minibuses back in the pre deregulated mid 1980s and gradually saw bigger buses replace these as higher capacity was needed to cope with growth in passenger numbers attracted by the higher frequency.

After a while the affectionately known as ‘bread vans’ were replaced with larger minibuses (originally bought for Bournemouth’s Yellow Buses but never used) and then with Dennis Darts.

Eventually it ended up with double decks at the same frequency as those original minibuses which had offered about a fifth of the capacity.

The coastal route between Brighton and Eastbourne has also seen spectacular growth with a massive expansion in frequency facilitated by the introduction of a hugely successful bus lane running continuously from Peacehaven through Telscombe and Saltdean to Rottingdean thanks to the partnership approach with both Brighton & Hove City Council and East Sussex County Council.

Both authorities, particularly the former, played a crucial role in facilitating improved bus services particularly with bus priority measures right through the city central area …

… but also helping to make us first in the field with high profile real time information way back in the early 2000s.

The City Council has also been at the forefront of introducing an effective parking regime with high parking charges and rigorous enforcement of regulations as well as bus lane enforcement.

Regular investment in new buses every year ensured the fleet was kept modern with an acceptable average age and initiatives such as low floor and improved emissions could be taken advantage of every year but perhaps the two most prominent developments (aside from last week’s mention of Bus Names) were the company’s passion for excellent customer service and high profile marketing campaigns helped by exploiting the long held tradition of a smart red and cream livery, the name Brighton & Hove being synonymous with the city itself and the fact that fairly early on we dispensed with third party advertising so that every bus carried exclusive promotional messages about bus travel as well as some pointed messages aimed at motorists.

We colour coded the network’s five most frequent and busiest bus routes with a Metro sub brand …

… but the campaign that everyone remembers, and was the most successful, was the much loved I’m On The Bus.

This grew out of a weekly advert we placed on page 3 (with a teaser style clickbait on the front page) of the local Argus newspaper featuring local people with various roles in the city, including chief executives, leading politicians and business people, who kept telling me when I met them at events and meetings they used the bus.

After a while I thought this is something that could usefully be promoted to show that buses aren’t just for the “poor people who can’t afford a car” but are the favoured choice of some of the key people running the city. Their endorsement was very helpful in raising the status of bus travel and after a while, in discussions with Ray Stenning who was bringing his fantastic creative skills to our campaigns we decided to move some of them to the rears of the buses themselves.

To cut a long story short this led to the much higher profile I’m On The Bus campaign featuring passengers who volunteered to be involved. It took a huge amount of organising with a professional photographer, studio conditions, each individual bus side to be designed by Ray and the vinyl printed and cut and affixed but the impact was amazing.

Many thought they were actors but word soon spread as more and more appeared that they were real local people and so the clamour began to become involved in the campaign and it just grew and grew – these days we’d say it ‘went viral’.

We deliberately chose people from all different backgrounds to show that everyone uses the bus, It really is an omnibus – a bus for all….

…. and to be seen on the bus is a smart thing to do.

In the end around 100 double decks in the fleet carried “I’m On The Bus” promotional messages.

After a while we also featured staff from a range of jobs in the company to demonstrate we were an employer of choice for over a thousand people from the local community.

And even the managing director was on the bus.

As with the Bus Names there were some interesting ‘behind the scenes’ stories about the people featured. Three employees from one of the city’s prestigious hotels featured but had to be removed when they lost their jobs in unexplained circumstances while a teenager got involved in a minor crime so had to lose her appearance. Sadly one pariticpant died so was no longer on the bus. A couple lost their heads when the upper deck window got smashed. Fortunately, we had a spare head for one of these, Ron Hayes the legendary Operations Officer for the company, so he was quickly back out on the road.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this brief and unashamedly self indulgent nostalgia feast and would like to read more, copies of the book I published in 2010 (Pride & Joy) telling the story of Brighton & Hove between 1985 and 2010 (and how we doubled the number of people using buses to achieve the highest use of buses per head of the population outside of London) are still available including from Brighton based Dinnages Publishing on this link.

I promise not to blog about Brighton & Hove again for at least another ten years – and it’s great to see the company continues to thrive in very safe and capable hands. I was asked recently for my views on bus franchising. Can you imagine the foregoing initiatives (or their modern day equivalents) being incorporated into Manchester’s upcoming Bee Network or in London? Franchising sees bus operation as a public utility. I see it as a commercial opportunity to really grow the market for bus travel in exciting entrepreneurial ways where passengers can’t wait to get back on board and motorists see the sense in leaving their cars behind.

Part 2 featuring a canter through my first ten years of retirement appears tomorrow.

Roger French

Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS with another Su extra tomorrow as explained above.