A working life: Route master
August 28, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Today it’s just a folk memory: the red London bus with a dedicated driver and a conductor. The ticket clippie – that helpmeet of old ladies with shopping baskets on wheels and the scourge of fare-dodging schoolkids – has long joined the scullery maid and the bootblack in the Valhalla of extinct jobs, although a few remain on routes popular with tourists.
Now a multi-tasker in a service streamlined for profit more than passenger convenience, the London bus driver struggles to be loved. Insulated behind toughened security screens and forbidden from exchanging a word while the bus moves, how can today’s drivers forge a bond with passengers?
Many don’t bother. And many passengers know, all too well, what it’s like when a full bus draws up and lets off a crowd by the middle door while the front remains firmly closed to the heavily-laden pensioner who’s been waiting in the rain for half an hour. Worse, the driver faces forward, stonily indifferent to knocking and entreaties, before roaring off again.
Jonathan Best sounds genuinely shocked to hear of such a thing. “I open both doors at the same time unless I’m really full, when I’ll let people off the middle first before opening the front,” he protests.
“But,” he adds, trying to exonerate his less accommodating colleagues, “you don’t want people to be crushed.”
As it is, my day with Best has not got off to the best start. We’re due to meet in Camden, at the northern end of the 88 route which plies its course south to Clapham Common through some of the capital’s most famous tourist sites. Alas, our driver, whose working journey starts at the southernmost terminus not far from his Clapham flat, is a no-show. Roadworks in Oxford Circus mean he has had to turn the 88 around three miles away and head back south.
We finally meet over a lunchtime cuppa in the grade II-listed Stockwell bus garage, a postwar fantasy of reinforced concrete, in a break that lasts 90 minutes thanks to the complexity of synchronising the drivers’ shifts with a disrupted schedule.
Best – “Jonathan, Jon or J” – confesses to being “very much a people person”. At well over 6ft, and radiating guileless good humour despite a forbiddingly shaven head, he’s a Doncaster-born Russ Abbot lookalike who escaped the madhouse to wind up on the buses.
Now 42, his talent for mechanics jump-started a career in local bodyshops until a craving for more human contact drew him to Lincolnshire, where a local bus company was recruiting drivers. He felt he had a talent for it and his passengers seemed to agree.
“In the Lincolnshire countryside passengers are very friendly and polite,” he recalls. “Because their buses only have single doors at the front, I’d see passengers getting on and getting off, and your regulars would know you by name, and old dears would give me an apple or the paper.”
But Best’s stint negotiating the streets around Lincoln Minster ended after a back operation when, despite passing a full medical, he was not re-employed. With his marriage breaking up, he needed a fresh start and, within a week, he found it in London with the bus firm …
Read the original article at Guardian