40 years ago today…..

Saturday 1st March 2025

It’s not just Eastenders and Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day celebrating a 40th anniversary this year.

I am too, and more pertinently, today.

1st March 1985 saw the mighty Southdown bus company, whose buses and coaches had reigned supreme across Sussex and East Hampshire since formation in 1915, reorganised into six semi-autonomous operating divisions. This significant structural change led to a more formal split at the end of that year, readying what became three completely independent companies, for privatisation.

Long time readers may recall I‘d been appointed to the role of Assistant Traffic Manager at Southdown’s Head Office in Brighton in November 1982 but from 1st March 1985, two and a bit years later, my career took a new, and what turned out to be, very positive and rewarding period that continued until retirement beckoned 28 years later.

I began leading what at that time was the Brighton & Hove Division within Southdown but soon thereafter became a company in its own right as the Brighton & Hove Bus and Coach Company Ltd, firstly as a National Bus Company (NBC) subsidiary, then a management buy-out (in 1987), and then owned by the fledgling Go-Ahead Group (from 1993). It was in fact the reactivation of the Brighton, Hove & District Omnibus Company (BH&D), a Tilling subsidiary since 1935 (and therefore 90 years old this year), which had merged with Southdown when NBC was formed in 1968 and lain dormant for 18 years.

Michael Sedgley, the General Manager of Southdown, oversaw the March 1985 reorganisation and, as you can see below, appointed me Manager of the new Brighton & Hove Division on the grand salary of £15,556 (£47,228 at today’s prices). Managers in NBC days were certainly not generously remunerated.

The five other Divisions created in March 1985 were Hampshire; West Sussex; East & Mid Sussex; Southdown Coaches and Southdown Engineering Services. Each was led by a newly appointed Manager and the idea was to bring decision making management teams much closer to ‘action on the ground’ as deregulation approached.

The same approach had been followed throughout NBC’s Southern Region in the early 1980s with large companies such as Midland Red, Bristol, Western National, Hants & Dorset and United Counties all split into smaller separate companies which in many cases reversed amalgamations that had taken place in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the newly formed NBC had aimed to reduce overheads by bringing companies together.

In leading the new Brighton & Hove, I was lucky to be joined by Alan Eatwell as Fleet Engineer and a great team including Paul WIlliams and Martin Harris.

As mentioned above, within weeks of the new arrangements being introduced in Southdown in 1985, it became evident the changes hadn’t gone far enough to satisfy Nicholas Ridley, the Secretary of State for Transport, and plans were put in place to formally split Southdown into three independent companies – Brighton & Hove; Southdown Engineering Services and Southdown (which took the other three geographic divisions with the coach fleet split to either Southdown or Brighton & Hove, depending where it was allocated). About this time, similar company splits were insisted upon by Ridley for London Country and United as privatisation approached.

I see from my 1985 diary I attended a meeting with Michael Sedgley on 14th March in Oxford, just two weeks after we’d got going, making a presentation to Robert Brook, the Chief Executive of the National Bus Company, presumably about that impending more formal split.

Back in 1985 the bus network in the Brighton area was not only regulated but coordinated with municipal owned Brighton Borough Transport as part of the long standing BATS Agreement (Brighton Area Transport Services) which saw all revenue pooled and shared out in proportion to the operations in a 79.5/20.5 split with the majority of services run by Brighton & Hove/Southdown. With deregulation approaching in 1986 that Agreement was set to end after December 1985 so there was much discussion about the future including at the BATS Committee quarterly meetings of which I see from the diary there was one on 11th March.

The newly formed March 1985 Brighton & Hove Division’s fleet was a typical NBC mix of Bristol VR double deckers and Leyland National single deckers with a smattering of Leyland Atlantean double deckers and some Plaxton or Duple bodied Leyland coaches many of which wore route branded liveries including Sealine 773 between Brighton, Crawley and Gatwick Airport…

… which was operated jointly with London Country/Green Line and Stage Coach 799 between Brighton and Rye, which at one time started further west in Worthing and was jointly operated with Hastings & District, and for a time, Brighton Borough Transport.

There was also an attempt at running a limited stop ‘semi-express’ type service between Brighton and Portsmouth which had begun prior to 1985 and was branded as South Coast Express but was not a success.

Brighton & Hove took over the bus garages in the area including the two former BH&D depots in Conway Street, Hove and Whitehawk in Brighton as well as the Southdown garage in Moulsecoomb, an outstation in Steyning and offices in Pool Valley bus station and, once the formal split happened from January 1986, Freshfield Road in Brighton. We also took over responsibility for the long standing Southdown outstation at Victoria Coach Station which had four vehicles allocated for the Gatwick Flightline 777 route – another route jointly operated with London Country/Green Line.

As you can see from the photos we added Brighton & Hove fleetnames in place of Southdown on the dull NBC green bus livery and the coaches but soon turned our attention to what livery the buses should wear once the formal split occurred at the end of the year to create a fresh looking positive impression.

Coincidentally, 1985 was the 50th Anniversary of BH&D’s formation as a subsidiary of Tilling. The company had formed much earlier as the Brighton, Hove & Preston United company in 1884, selling out to Tilling in 1916, which ran it as part of its London operations for the next 19 years, and also the 90th Anniversary of Southdown, so we thought it would be very appropriate to mark this by painting a few buses in the original BH&D red and cream livery.

These included two of three second hand Leyland Nationals acquired from Yorkshire Traction in May 1985…

… and a Bristol VR was also given the retro BH&D treatment.

Seeing a photograph of those second hand Leyland Nationals from Yorkshire Traction reminds me just how frustrating it was in those days of nationalised ownership to get new replacement vehicles into the fleet which were often desperately needed. NBC had to fall in with Government spending restrictions and some companies went years without seeing any investment in new buses as sparse resources were shared around the Group. We were lucky to secure a cancelled order (by Blackpool Transport) for eight Leyland Nationals (the last to be built at the Workington plant before it shut) which arrived in August 1985 and initially ran in an all white livery while we continued to finalise designs for the new livery to launch later that year, ready for the 1986 formal split.

We’d done some trials on an old Bristol VR in the fleet using a predominantly cream livery with either a red or a green band…

… but the practicality of using cream (winter roads are notorious for dirtying liveries) and the positive public reaction to those traditional red and cream liveries convinced us a modern updated livery featuring red, cream and black was the way to go.

A red and cream livery had last dominated the local scene 17 years previously in 1968 (until NBC days) and with an accelerated paint programme it wasn’t long before buses were once again showing off their smart colours to an appreciative population.

However for a short while there were still some old faithfuls used on special services and special occasions like the Bristol Lodekka shown below in Madeira Drive, Brighton.

Towards the end of 1985 a new fleet of minibuses arrived heralding an era of frequency enhancements that became the foundations for taking advantage of deregulaton the following year and by the beginning of the next decade a period of sustained growth in passenger numbers which, aside from Covid, has continued right through to the present day.

And it all started exactly 40 years ago today, 1st March 1985.

Roger French

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