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Sutton ~ some personal memories by David Thrower

If there is one place that, in my admittedly biased mind, epitomises the comfortable outer London suburbia of the 1950s, and the London Transport bus network that served it so well, it is Sutton, Surrey. This was the era of by then well-established pre-war suburban houses and gardens, long sunny summers and genuine snowy winters, the BBC Home Service, sweets and ice lollipops that you could buy for one penny, and the novelty, still only for a minority, of television (but at that time only two channels). Of Harold Macmillan’s “You’ve never had it so good”, of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock and Nat King Cole’s melodies, and of course of the superb London Transport RT and RF bus fleet.

The town of Sutton is older than you might think. It was recorded as a small hamlet as far back as the Domesday Book (1086), but really began its growth as a place to exchange horses for the stage-coaches running between London and Brighton. The arrival of the railways in 1847 greatly-boosted the development of the town. Growth positively exploded during the early 20th century, and in 1934, during a period of particularly great expansion, the Borough of Sutton and Cheam was created.

At this time, Sutton was still administratively in the county of Surrey, and indeed even in the 1950s we still wrote “Sutton, Surrey” on letters, but the creation of almost-continuous housing development, particularly to the west, north and east, and the ever-growing importance of rail commuting into Central London, resulted into its inevitable absorption into the Capital, becoming the London Borough of Sutton in 1965.

A Personal Link

Like the former Prime Minister John Major, so I recently discovered, I was born at St Helier Hospital, just north of Sutton, in 1950, spending my first four or five years in Morden, within walking distance of the Underground station. This was at a time when London Transport was still recovering from the Second World War that had ended just five short years previously. For its bus services on the very busy Morden-Sutton corridor, in the late 1940s, LT had famously brought in a fleet of 100 wartime “Utility” Daimler double-deckers, with pre-select gears, based at Sutton Garage, and I can just about remember these at Morden.

Why was I interested in buses? My maternal grandfather (my mother’s Dad) worked, as he had since the mid-1930s, at the well-known Weymann bus factory at Addlestone, Surrey, commuting from Lower Morden by 118 bus to Raynes Park and then Southern Electric train. He used to bring home old trade magazines, and to keep me amused I was given back-number copies and permitted to cut-out the pictures with those well-remembered children’s rounded-tip scissors and paste them with Lion gum into a scrapbook, sitting by the (coal-fired) hearth.

Thus it was that, even at three, I was closely interested in buses. Whenever we travelled from Morden to St Helier Hospital (my late Mum, who remarkably lived until 2025, by then almost 102, would have been expecting my younger sister), we would use the 164/164A route, and as a pre-school infant she would lift me up high to check the bus-builders’ body-plate on the staircase bulkhead of each bus, to see if it was “one of Grandad’s (Weymann) buses”. I recall this as clearly as if it were last week, but we are talking 1953 here, and the buses were almost-brand-new RTL Leylands, most of which would in fact have had Park Royal bodywork.

And so the London Transport network, particularly the 164/164A bus from Morden station to Epsom/Tattenham Corner and the 118 from Morden station to Raynes Park, together with the Northern Line, with its strange station-names such as Colliers Wood (coal mines in South London?), Oval and Tooting Bec, formed my infant transport upbringing.

And even as a very small boy, I appreciated the excellent interchange arrangements at Morden, with those fascinating semi-streamlined1938 Underground trains downstairs at the platforms and an array of smart red double-deckers waiting up the stairs right outside the station doorway. And the stylish yet subtle beauty of the RT-family buses and Tube stock. The RT-types and RF single-deckers in particular impressed me, and I certainly never dreamed that, seven decades later, I would end up restoring and maintaining four of them.

Sutton The Town

Trapped between Kingston to the west and Croydon to the east, Sutton the town was like a pin between two magnets, caught betwixt the competing pulling-powers of these two very large outer-London shopping centres. In 1963, Sutton was listed as having a population of 79,000, about the same as Sutton Coldfield in the Midlands.

But it was always very difficult to grasp just how large or small Sutton was, because it simply merged into the neighbouring centres. In clockwise order, these were Morden to the north, then Mitcham, then Wallington and Croydon to the east. To the south-east and south there wasn’t much in terms of centres, only leafy-suburb Carshalton Beeches and Belmont. Then to the west was Cheam, of comedians Tony Hancock, Sid James and Bill Kerr fame, and beyond lay Worcester Park and Kingston.

The shopping centre was always bustling, except on Sundays when virtually all shops were closed. My main memories of the shops in Sutton were of a medium-sized department store, Shinners, on the west side of the High Street, and a stationers called Pyles or Piles on the east side - I think it was called Pyles/Piles Corner, where you could buy BIC biros (a very new invention, most pens at that time used liquid ink) for a shilling (5p). Shinners was in later years taken over by United Drapery Stores and later still was to become Allders in 1979. There was also a shop at the Sutton Green (north) end of the town that sold model railways, and I recall admiring a very expensive Hornby-Dublo train set in its window, featuring the Duchess of Montrose Pacific locomotive, that would have set an office or shop worker back well over a week’s wages.

Sutton was not, most regrettably, on the London Underground, and you had to travel to Morden for that, but it stood at the convergence of several busy Southern Electric rail routes to Victoria and London Bridge, West Croydon, Horsham and, via a relative upstart of the interwar years, a branch to Wimbledon via St. Helier that had only opened as recently as 1930. There was also a short branch to Epsom Downs, which became extremely busy on Derby Day.

None of these lines excited much interest for rail enthusiasts, their services being operated by vast numbers of 4-SUB suburban electric units as they wandered round and round South London in endless circles, although you might occasionally spot a steam locomotive on a local pick-up goods train if you were very lucky, a memorable day!

Sutton’s Bus Network

To a bus enthusiast, Sutton’s appeal was very considerable indeed. The road pattern of the area was defined by a north-south-east-west cross, with the north-south of the old Brighton Road forming the High Street, and intersecting there with the west-east of Cheam Road and Carshalton Road.

The intersection was at the south end of the High Street, almost at the top of a low hill, and was marked by the Cock Hotel inn sign that had been relocated by a few metres to there in 1914-15 when the inn itself had been demolished. The magnificent Grade 2-listed inn sign happily still survives today. At this key point, the north-south bus routes from Morden crossed paths with the west-east routes from Epsom and Cheam to Croydon, giving the young bus enthusiast being dragged round the shops a great place to watch buses.

By this time, having moved to Sutton as a (just) five-year-old, we lived near the extreme north end of Sutton High Street, near Angel Hill. Sadly we were not on a bus route, indeed we seemed to live in a vast swathe of suburban roads completely unserved by buses, which were a good ten minutes’ walk away from the nearest stops at the south and north end of Angel Hill, where there was (and is) a footbridge that afforded the exciting opportunity of watching the shiny red roofs of RTs pass beneath your feet. On one occasion at Angel Hill, I spotted RT 9, the lowest-numbered working RT I ever saw, by then demoted to driver-training duties. I recall the moment as though it was an hour ago.

After another change of school at age seven, my new prep school was right at the extreme southern end of the town, on the Brighton Road a couple of stops south from the Southern Electric station. This gave me my very first experience of commuting, on the 80, 80A, 164 and 164A routes (all RT-operated), with each single journey costing the grand sum of 1.5 old pennies (just over half a penny in today’s money). It seems amazing now to think that fares started so low.

But my early travels were soon to come to an abrupt halt when the infamous 1958 bus strike broke out. It lasted for no less than seven weeks, from 5th May until 20th June 1958, resulting in the axing London-wide of numerous routes, several garage closures and the withdrawal of no fewer than 646 buses and trolleybuses. This in turn resulted in the selling-off of hundreds of excellent RT and RTL buses, some only a four of five years old. Provincial bus operators, especially in Scotland, were not slow to purchase many bargains.

In the meantime, back in Sutton and still age seven, a very long (2km)) walk to school became the norm for me. But for thousands of others it marked a permanent transfer to bicycles and trains or the purchase of mopeds, motorcycles and cars. It was a lasting setback to the London Transport bus network that had been so successfully modernised since 1947 when the first of all those thousands of new RTs had arrived.

No attempt is made here to detail the history of Sutton’s bus network, which had become well-established in the 1920s at the time when motorbuses themselves first became mechanically reliable. By the mid-1950s, the RT/RF era I recall so vividly, Sutton’s major routes were (on the north-south axis) the 80/80A, 164/164A, and Green Line route 711. On the west-east axis, the main routes were the 213, 408 and 470, these last two of course being operated by green London Transport Country Area RTs that always looked a little out of place in London red-bus suburbia.

The 80/80A routes had a history stretching back to 1916, and later had been operated with Sutton’s Utility Daimlers immediately after World War II, before briefly using brand-new Leyland RTLs until these were displaced by AEC RTs in 1954. The RTs were to monopolise both routes for 15 years, until the conversion to one-man (later more accurately renamed one-person) operation by RFs in 1969, when the Mitcham-Sutton leg was renumbered 280. The RFs held sway until 1976, when they were to be replaced by Bristols, the RFs thus completing a quarter of a century of service at Sutton, a fine record.

The one route I have absolutely no memory of was the 88, which was Acton Green to Mitcham with some extensions (weekday peaks and Saturdays) to St Helier, presumably to serve visitors to the hospital, and then further extended to Sutton and Belmont on Sundays. The reason is doubtless that I wasn’t wandering around Sutton High Street on a Sunday, being either indoors or away visiting grandparents near Raynes Park, and so probably rarely if ever set eyes on it. Its presence and relevance in the 1950s came as a complete surprise in the 1980s when organising sets of destination blinds for my preserved RT 2794, which I had purchased in 1983.

The Sutton red-RT routes I remember best were the 164/164A. These linked Morden station with Sutton and Epsom (164) or Tattenham Corner (164A), and were designed as bus-feeders to the Underground at Morden. The two routes combined to offer a roughly ten-minute frequency along their joint section, with extra buses at peak times. When added to the 80/80A in the 1950s, this frequency was five minutes or even less. So there was a bus to or from school at least every five minutes, a wonderful service, like a conveyor belt, you never had to wait long.

As noted, the RTs took over the 164/164A from Sutton’s Utility Daimlers in 1953. And there they stayed! The routes were only finally converted to Routemaster at the start of 1977, but one lone RT (RT 1892) gamely hung on at Sutton until November of that year, plus three more loaned from elsewhere during Derby Week, giving the type a 24-year innings, another remarkable record.

There is an odd postscript to the 164/164A, and that is the 164B. Again, like the 88, I had never heard of it. It was reportedly to have been a variation on the 164/164A, to be introduced in 1961, a couple of years after I had moved away to Derry, but it apparently never actually happened due to local protests. The first I head of it was once again when I found it had been printed out by London Transport’s Aldenham Works blinds shop on one of my preserved RT destination blinds.

The really big event in Sutton’s bus year, of course, was the Derby Day racegoers meeting. This involved allocating a very large fleet of extra buses into Sutton to operate the Morden Station-Epsom Downs shuttle service on what was normally the 164 corridor. I do not have a precise figure, but my memory is of lines of smart RTs parked outside Sutton Garage, the local roads all but blocked with them. I recall that they carried special blue destination blinds, to distinguish them as express services, rather than the normal black and white blinds showing route numbers. All this was very exciting for a young enthusiast to observe.

The 213 route was single-deck out of necessity, until the roads beneath the Southern Electric railway-lines at New Malden and at Worcester Park were lowered, enabling double-deck operation of this busy service from May 1963. Also in 1963, half the service was designated 213A and routed via Clarence Avenue instead of Traps Lane. In 1964, a 213B was briefly introduced, running for less than a year, but I never saw this in action, having by then long since moved away.

There were several other Sutton Garage-operated bus routes during the 1950s and early 1960s, including the 115, 151, 154 and 156. The only one of these that I used was the 154. This had previously been the 654 electric (overhead-wire) trolleybus. As a schoolchild awaiting my 80/80A/164/164A at Sutton Green, at the northern end of Sutton High Street, I used to watch, fascinated, as the short-length B1 and B2-type trolleybuses on the 654 from Crystal Palace used to turn themselves slowly around at the Green, powered from above by a fascinating spiders-web of wires supported by thick green poles, accompanied by mysteriously-fascinating overhead pick-ups mounted on the ends of the poles on the roof of each vehicle.

After waiting on their dedicated stop at the Green, the trolleybuses would pull out onto Sutton High Street then glide almost silently back towards Crystal Palace, first southwards and then a very carefully-executed sharp turn eastwards along Benhill Street and then Benhill Avenue to Carshalton, West Croydon, Norwood Junction (where we regularly travelled to) and up the steep hill from Anerley to Crystal Palace Parade, where the Crystal Palace High Level station had been until closure in 1954. The frequency of the route was impressive, every four or five minutes. Today’s 154 is only quarter-hourly.

The base for the 654 was Sutton’s “other” garage, Carshalton Depot. This had been opened as Sutton tram depot in 1906, and was located on Westmead Road, a few minutes’ travel eastwards from the High Street, and was coded “CN” and renamed Carshalton Depot in 1950 to avoid its being confused with the Sutton Garage built for motorbuses. Carshalton became “Carshalton Garage” once again in March 1959 following the conversion of the 654 to the RT-worked 154. The garage was to close as early as January 1964, barely five years later, when the 154 was re-allocated to Sutton and Thornton Heath garages. It is reputedly still standing, but in commercial use.

The Country Area (green RT) 408 and 470 could be sighted crossing Sutton High Street as they headed west or east along Cheam Road and Carshalton Road. The 408 originated (in the west) at distant Guildford, a “frontier town” for London Transport, and the 470 at Dorking, and both extended east as far as Warlingham, linking with Leatherhead, Epsom, Ewell (a place I erroneously pronounced “ee-well” as a child rather than “yool”), then Sutton, Wallington and the most important place served, Croydon. The green RTs on these routes looked magnificent, and were always smartly turned out.

The bus route that awed me the most as a young child was the one I never got to travel on, the Green Line 711. This, extraordinarily to enthusiast eyes, ran from distant Reigate in the south to even more distant High Wycombe, a place that sounded so remote that it might as well have been located in the Lake District, and serving Sutton, Tooting, Stockwell, Trafalgar Square, Baker Street Shepherds Bush, Ealing Broadway, Southall and Uxbridge along the way. If anyone had ever attempted this marathon journey, it was scheduled to take three whole hours. In later years, of course, due to rising traffic congestion, this was to be its, and many other Green Lines routes’, undoing.

Although the 711 was always an RF in the 1950s, on one red-letter (or should it be green-letter?) day, some time between January and April 1958, it wasn’t. I don’t recall ever seeing an RT on the route, but one morning a double-decker of a hitherto-unseen species pulled up at my stop, a moment of puzzled surprise for the queue and complete astonishment for myself, this being prototype Routemaster CRL 4, “CRL” standing for Country Routemaster Leyland (a reference to just the engine, not the make of the whole bus). In an experimental brighter-green livery, this was a glimpse of the future, but was sadly never to be seen again on the 711 which remained solidly RF for another decade and more.

The Garage

As a very young spotter, I did not have the courage to ever actually enter Sutton Garage. And quite rightly too, children were not allowed to wander around on LT property. So the closest I ever got as a young boy was hanging around near or at the entrance.

Sutton Garage (coded “A”) was opened in January 1924, the garage code being re-allocated after earlier use by another garage, Albany Street, which had closed. During the 1930s it had mostly operated the classic LT designs, the STL double-deckers and the three-axle LT single-deckers, but from 1946 until 1952 the fleet as noted earlier had comprised distinctive Daimler Utility double-deckers. From 1952, however, the RT family made its presence felt, initially (and perhaps in retrospect, surprisingly) as a fleet of RTL Leylands.

At this time, London Transport seemed to be in a state of some uncertainty as to which garages should operate Leylands and which should run AECs, and during 1953-54 the Leylands were transferred elsewhere and the AECs took over. They were set to stay a very long time, the last RTs not leaving until 1977. Incidentally, no RTW (eight-foot-wide) or RLH (low-height) buses every operated out of Sutton, although in their final years it is quite possible that RTW training buses occasionally might have called there, such as for lunch breaks.

As a snapshot of how many buses were needed for Sutton’s routes in the all-RT era, focusing on the Monday to Friday morning peak, I can quote from the official LT Allocation of Scheduled Buses notice for October 1963…

80/80A, 15 RTs
93, 28 RTs
115, 9 RTs
151, 4 RTs
164/164A, 20 RTs
213/213A, 14 RTs
286, 10 RTs

…. making a nice round total of 100 RT buses out on the road at breakfast-time, to get workers to jobs, commuters to stations, children to school and NHS staff and patients to hospitals. An impressive operation, and one that was savoured by those who loved the RT design. There were a few more buses on Sutton’s routes from other garages, for example three more from Merton (AL) Garage on the 164s and six from Kingston (K) on the 213/213A. Other garages elsewhere, of course, managed even more impressive totals, for example Stockwell’s 44 RTLs on route 88 alone.

The other classic design that made its home at Sutton was of course the little RF single-decker. As enthusiasts know well, some 700 of these lovely little buses were delivered to London Transport between 1951-53. At Sutton, a batch replaced the venerable LT-type six-wheelers, of which there had been 22. Over 30 RFs were needed to operate the 213/213A, so the little RF, a bus externally shaped by the designer Douglas Scott (of Routemaster, AGA cooker and toaster design fame), became a longstanding feature of Sutton Garage’s operations.

The influx of Routemasters in the early 1960s into the LT fleet had no impact on Sutton, with the garage on weekdays in 1966 having an allocation of no fewer than 24 RTs on the 80/80A, another 25 on the 93, eight on the 151, 12 on the 154, another 21 on the 164/164A and a further 24 on the 213/213A, a total of no less than 114 although the actual total was a little lower at 100 as the numbers for any particular route varied within each year. As late as November 1976, Sutton had an allocation of nine RTs for weekday operations on route 164 and a further five for the 164A.

The RT in the 1970s was to gradually give way to the Routemaster – Sutton operating several dozen of them on its busiest routes - and the DMS one-person-operated buses. From 1982 onwards, the garage was 100% DMS, until newer designs arrived. The 1987 DMS fleet was apportioned amongst the remaining Sutton routes on weekdays as follows:

Route 80, 13 DMS
Route 93, 11 DMS
Route 151, 6 DMS
Route 154, 9 DMS
Route 164, 6 DMS
Route 213, 5 DMS
Route 280, 14 DMS

The totals per route are strikingly lower than in the RT heyday of the mid/late 1950s, reflecting the fall in passenger demand and huge rise in local car ownership. When I lived in Sutton in the late 1950s, in a reasonably-affluent tree-lined suburban road of detached and semi-detached houses, there were only three car-owning households in the entire road. By the 1980s, every road in South London was lined with parked cars, and bus use had fallen massively.

Bus garages as buildings were something that London Transport and its predecessors mostly seemed to value, and to get right. Sutton, of course, was constructed by the London General Omnibus Company (“the General”), LT’s principal ancestor. It had a then-generous floor area of 37,000 square feet and a largely-unobstructed interior that could accommodate 100 buses.

The bus garage occupied, and still occupies, a corner site on Bushey Road, with three large doorways opening out onto a relatively narrow suburban byway. The building, despite not being in a particularly strategic-target area as was the case with London Docks, was nevertheless bombed in October 1940, a water-filled crater appearing right in the centre of the garage but (remarkably) without apparently causing any loss of life or vehicles. In passing, a startling fact is that during wartime the garage operated a batch of lowbridge Manchester Corporation double-deckers, as well as buses loaned from Hants & Dorset.

Many years (indeed, fully three decades) after I had moved away from Sutton, the garage was to become part of one of the new London Buses business units, which the old London Transport network had been broken-down into. Sutton Garage became part of London General, the operation being symbolised by the outline of a venerable B-type bus from the First World War era, a nice touch. And it’s a source of personal pleasure that the garage has celebrated its centenary and survived the route cutbacks and regrettable garage closures and demolitions of the later decades of the twentieth century.

London General was bought out by its own management in 1994, and then re-sold to the huge Go-Ahead Group in 1996. Go-Ahead was, and remains, one of the most successful of the private-sector bus group. But all this is a far cry from my time living in Sutton as a young schoolboy, and I must leave it to others to cover those intervening decades and then bring the story up to date. I hope these brief notes, very much a personal view through my (then) very young eyes, have been of interest.

 

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