A preserved Routemaster is a repository of social and personal history on wheels. It may have been built at a fixed point in time and worked on certain verifiable routes long, long ago but then it tends to loom out of the past – a big red friend – and move people in less expected ways.
The Red Bus has operated RM737 in Edinburgh since 2013. For 30 years before that, the former Harrow Weald garage show bus belonged to the late John Nicholls and four friends in the area. They took it to rallies all over the country, as far north as Dunbar in East Lothian.
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting his son Steve, who had come north from his home in Hampshire with his brother to scatter John’s ashes at Gretna Green, where he and their mother had married in 1960.
Steve had asked if he could pop in and check up on the old bus. A few days later he was behind the wheel again, driving along West Harbour Road in Granton (and, as it happens, helping diagnose a fuel pump leak – he is an RAC mechanic of 30 plus years).
Concorde flies over RM737 at Hatton Cross Station, near Heathrow, in 1984. Photograph: John Nicholls
“Seeing and especially driving 737 was a highlight of the year,” Steve says. “It was incredible just to hear that AEC engine again, never mind sitting at the wheel and taking it down the road.”
The bus, which was the first standard Routemaster taken out of service by London Transport, in 1983, played a big part in the family’s lives on countless trips in the next three decades.
“My Dad loved Routemasters and passed that on to me,” says Steve, who was only 16 or 17 when the group first took RM737 out in 1981 – they bought it two years later.
“We used to head to these rallies, seven or eight of us, have a good few drinks, sleep on the floor and drive home the next day!”
Last respects
How much did John love Routemasters? Put it this way, the family hired one for his funeral two years ago and wrapped the coffin in tartan moquette vinyl to match the famous seating design.
Steve Nicholls reunited with RM737 in Edinburgh, October 2020. Photograph: Sam Phipps
“It was a fantastic send-off, the most fitting tribute we could have paid him, and everybody loved it. We did have a few nerve-wracking moments when we realised the coffin wasn’t going to get past the pole on the entrance platform. Luckily, it was an RML [the longer, 72-seat Routemaster] and they have an emergency exit a few rows behind the cab, so we were able to open the window and slide the coffin through.”
Who knows what the next 30 years will hold for RM737? Or the next three, for that matter. But if all the love and money that have poured into the bus since 1961 count for anything, this fine old specimen should be around for a good while longer yet.
— Sam Phipps