The upstairs downstairs life of a bus conductor

“Clippies” were essential to the operation of a double decker bus, since the entrance was nearly always at the opposite end to the driver. And as these pictures from the archive bear witness, the presence of a conductor on every service was a given until well into the 1970s.

Their familiar banter – “plenty of room on top” and “hold very tight, please” – was part of the language, and the comedian Arthur Askey made their standard acknowledgement, “Ay thang yow”, his catchphrase,

It was a job that had its ups and downs, and not just on the staircase. Keeping upright while traversing a moving vehicle was a skill in itself, as was avoiding travel sickness.

It was originally an exclusively male preserve, and although women had been taken on during the two world wars, many thousands were then summarily dismissed to make room for their returning menfolk. Some 1,500 conductresses were sacked in Manchester alone.

Yet a decade later, there were more vacancies than people to fill them, and in London and other large cities, managers looked to the Caribbean for recruits. An exception was Bristol, where an unofficial ban on minority workers led to a widespread bus boycott.

It was the move away from litigation-prone back door buses and towards driver operation that did away with the clippies. Even so, the habit of hopping on and off at will was a hard one to break, and it was not until as recently as 15 years ago that the last regular conductor-operated service, from Marble Arch to Streatham in London, was finally withdrawn.

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