The double-decker was designed for a peaceful job: shift a lot of people through a crowded city at a steady price. War asked something else of it. Within weeks of September 1939, buses that had carried shoppers and clerks were hauling troops, stretchers and canteen urns, running to darkened timetables, and doing it with a thinner crew and no certainty that the garage at the far end of the route would still be standing when they got there. What follows is how requisition, blackout and disruption changed double-deck operations — and what stayed behind when the shooting stopped.
Requisition: When the Fleet Went to War
Emergency powers handed the state sweeping authority over road vehicles. Operators were expected to keep ordinary services running, but they also had to surrender vehicles and often crews. London Transport, then one of the largest bus undertakings in the world, gave up hundreds of vehicles in the opening months, and provincial municipal fleets over the country had to hand over machines too.
The buses did not go to one tidy job. Double-deckers were shipped to France with the British Expeditionary Force, where they shuttled troops and supplies until the collapse of 1940. Others were stripped inside, fitted with tiers of stretcher racks and pressed into ambulance work, where the tall body and rear platform made loading easier than anything the ambulance services had. Some became mobile canteens for the canteen organisations serving bombed-out districts. Others vanished overseas to the Middle East and North Africa, and plenty never came home.
For the crews left behind, requisitioning meant fewer vehicles for the same timetable. Buses came out of reserve, older types were pushed back into service, and anything parked in a corner became a donor for spare parts.
Blackout and the Business of Being Seen
From the first night of the war, Britain went dark. Headlamps were masked down to a slot, interior lights were swapped for dim blue bulbs, and a bus at night became a moving guess. Conductors worked by torchlight; passengers climbed staircases they could barely see. Road casualties rose sharply in the darkened months, particularly among pedestrians, and a fair share of the drivers' skill lay in judging where the kerb was by memory and sound.
Operators fought back with paint and discipline. Typical adaptations included:
- Masked headlamps and rear lamps, with the mask checked and adjusted constantly — a badly fitted mask was as dangerous as no light at all.
- White or light-coloured paint on platform edges, staircase nosings, mudguards, bumpers and the corners of the body, so a bus could be seen and its edges judged.
- Blackout shutters, blinds or removable window masks, fitted by the crew at the start of a shift and stowed at the end.
- Dimmed destination blinds, lit from inside by masked lamps, or replaced with plain boards carrying the route number only.
- Slow, deliberate running through junctions, plus a conductor or driver on the kerbside at blind corners.
In winter, blackout and fog arrived together. Some routes were allowed a little extra running time simply because nobody could be expected to keep to schedule in the dark.
Routes Redrawn Overnight
A bomb crater was a route change, sometimes for a day, sometimes for months. Unexploded bombs closed whole streets. Requisitioned garages and damaged bridges broke services in half. Controllers put out emergency notices at stops and crews simply learned the new way round. Some services were suspended "for the duration" and never came back at all.
Wartime also fiddled with the clock. Britain ran on altered time, including double summer time in the middle war years, so printed timetables had to be redrawn and shift patterns reworked around factory hours. Long-distance and Green Line-style coach routes lost their leisure traffic and turned into workmen's services or disappeared. Every garage worth its salt had a firewatch roster, a dispersal plan for its vehicles, and a storeman who could keep a 1930s engine alive on parts from three write-offs.
The Utility Bus: Austerity on Wheels
New bus construction was cut hard at the start of the war and then brought back under a standardised "utility" specification from 1942. The idea was to build functional double-deckers with as little material and labour as possible, and it showed. Out went moquette and chromium. In came wooden slatted seats, plain painted finishes, simplified bodywork and — on some deliveries — a single headlamp.
These buses were not elegant. They were also tough, easy to repair and cheap to keep running, which is why they stayed in service long after 1945, some lasting into the 1960s in municipal fleets. The war also taught operators thrift the hard way: rubber was short, so tyres were retreaded and reused; petrol and diesel were rationed; engines were rebuilt rather than replaced. A 1939 bus that survived the war usually owed its life to a fitter with a lathe.
The People on the Platform
With men called up, operators recruited women — first as conductors, then, as the shortage deepened, as drivers. The clippie with her ticket machine and torch became one of the defining figures of the wartime street. The work was long, often at night, often followed by firewatching, and the early women drivers met plenty of scepticism before they met acceptance. By the last years of the war, many garages could not have run their timetables without them.
Passengers changed too. Evacuees with labels and suitcases. Night-shift workers going out as other people came home. Families travelling with everything they owned. The bus became less a convenience and more a piece of public infrastructure that people simply expected to keep going, crater or no crater.
After the War: The Long Climb Back
In 1945 the fleets were exhausted. Decades-old buses had been run harder than anyone intended, garages had been patched, and staff were still coming home. Operators rebuilt what could be rebuilt and bought new vehicles when the factories could supply them. In London, the new RT-type — ready just as war broke out, and largely stored or used sparingly through the conflict — finally entered service in numbers from 1946 and went on to define the city's streets for a generation. Some wartime lessons stuck: better lighting, clearer markings, more robust seating and a general assumption that passengers deserved to see where they were putting their feet.
Researching a Wartime Bus Yourself
If you want to go further than the overview, the records are there — you just have to know where to dig.
- Start with national archives for transport ministry papers and company files, then work down to county and city record offices for municipal fleets.
- Bus company and transport museum collections hold staff magazines, timetables, vehicle records and photographs; these are often the richest single source.
- Local newspapers on microfilm carry emergency timetables, route diversions and garage damage reports as they happened.
- Oral history collections preserve what paperwork never recorded — how a crew found a diversion at two in the morning.
- Dating a photograph is easier than it looks: masked lamps and white platform edging point to the blackout years, while slatted wooden seats and plain paint suggest a utility bus from 1942 onwards.
For modellers and diorama builders, the same clues apply. A pre-war double-decker with white-edged steps suits 1939 to 1941; a grey, slab-sided utility bus with bench seats belongs to the middle and later war years. Get those details right and the scene reads as authentic without a single caption.
Photo: Ralphs_Fotos / Pixabay
