A RUNAWAY CHIPPENHAM BUS
It was pitch-black, one imagines, in wartime Chippenham market place, when at 9.55 pm on 22 December 1940 a double-decker bus bound for Hullavington, its headlamps masked in accordance with blackout regulations, attempted to depart. The self-starter failed, so the driver freewheeled it down the hill and round the corner to try to start it in gear – a slightly hazardous manoeuvre fondly remembered by those of us of a certain age as ‘bump-starting’. At the second attempt, after inadvertently mounting the pavement, his stratagem was successful, and the motor sprung into life. He stopped, presumably to rev up the engine (and by now almost twenty minutes late), and then continued down the High Street, erratically, since he swerved to the offside outside the Co-op store (now Wilkos) and crashed into the parapet of the bridge, causing damage calculated at £240 19s. 10d. An upstairs passenger was thrown into the top front seat, and the driver suffered mild concussion and cuts and bruises; he could recall later that he had swerved but not for what reason. The bus, according to the Wiltshire Times, ‘remained precariously among the debris at the edge of the river’.
The driver was Harold Upjohn, son of a Welsh miner, 28 years old, and he had been a coach driver living in Dursley before the war. He was married to a girl from the same area of South Wales, although in 1939 they were apart - she was a waitress in Minehead. He was living in Chippenham at the time of the crash, though it may have cost him his job, as nine months later his address was Tetbury. The insurance claim dragged on for almost three years, and it is in its correspondence file that most of the information about the accident is recorded. It involved a protracted spat between Wiltshire County Council, HM Ministry of War Transport, HM Treasury, Western National Omnibus Company, Cornhill Insurance Company and various witnesses and solicitors.
The bus company claimed that the driver was not negligent – he had suffered a heart attack or fainting fit, and therefore the accident was inevitable. The Ministry of War Transport who, because it occurred on a recently designated trunk road (the A4), was responsible for Chippenham bridge, cited the damage to the parapet itself as evidence of negligence – the bridge could not be to blame. The police had attended and taken statements but decided not to charge the driver with dangerous driving. Witnesses were called, including driver Upjohn, who (perhaps unwisely) admitted that he had had a ‘gin and pep’ in the Bear earlier that evening, but no-one would swear to this being the cause of the accident. One passenger thought that the way the bus was being driven suggested that the driver must have been drunk. As the world war raged on, locally the correspondence continued and it was not until November 1943 that a hearing in Bristol resolved the matter and ordered the bus company’s insurers to pay the ministry the full amount of compensation.
I came across this story while researching who was responsible for maintaining Chippenham’s roads in the early 20th century. It didn’t help that enquiry very much, but it does raise some interesting questions, and I will pose them – for others who may know the answers. How difficult would it have been with blacked-out headlights to drive a bus successfully across Chippenham bridge at night? One witness, waiting at the bridge for a different bus, apparently saw it coming (so much for blackout), stop and then crash. So how easy was it to identify the correct bus, or any bus at all, if you were waiting at a stop, and would the driver see you anyway? What about the conductor? Bus design before the 1960s required a second operator to take fares and issue tickets, but we do not hear what happened to him or her when the bus crashed, nor were they called as a witness. And was it normal for bus drivers to hang around in local pubs drinking gin before setting off? Did anyone worry if they did? And strangest of all, was it worthwhile, at a time of national emergency, to spend three years going to law over a £240 insurance claim?
Those are questions, but there are also observations. Bus drivers were at a premium during the war – it was the bus companies’ finest hour, as private motoring was difficult and discouraged, and everyone used buses for war work and troop movements, so Upjohn’s war effort probably continued at the wheel of his bus, rather than flying a Spitfire or crewing a battleship. But his employer may not have been too happy with his accident. Keeping buses roadworthy in wartime was a perpetual struggle, and only 11 days earlier Cheltenham coach station and the vehicles there at the time had been destroyed by bombing. Three months later a raid on Plymouth knocked out 50 of his company’s vehicles. One assumes that Western National would have taken a dim view of a driver who crashed a bus into a bridge after an evening in the pub. Ironic too that his passengers, airmen from RAF Hullavington who daily faced instant death from enemy action, should have to face the additional hazard of being pitched headlong into the Avon from a runaway bus after a night out in the local town.
What Harold began with his bus in 1940 was completed in 1966 by the ministry and the council, when the old bridge with its parapet was demolished and replaced by the present characterless structure. A few fragments of the parapet remain nearby, largely unnoticed.
Principal source: WSA, F2/256/3/1. Other details from Ancestry and British Newspaper Archive. For background see also R J Crawley and F D Simpson, The Years Between, 1909-1969, vol. 3: the story of Western National and Southern National from 1929 (1990); and J Davis, From Blackout to Bungalow: WWII Home Front Wiltshire and the austerity years, 1939-55 (2016).
~ John Chandler - 02 Mar 2023