With its Grade II** listed Sudbury Town Underground Station, and other stations close-by, excellent transport links have been crucial to the area and its expansion, even providing a reason for new comers to move here. Walking and cycling long distances was fairly common in the in the 1950s, but this changed as cars became more affordable. In addition, steam trains became diesel and trolleybuses disappeared during the same time.
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Public transports
I remember my father said that, when he moved here in 1955, which was before I was born, he said that the steam trains used to shake the whole house because obviously, they have more mechanical movement than diesel, but now we’ve gone full circle and they’re shaking the house again, occasionally.
David
You see, that’s another thing that was attractive about living in Sudbury, a really big attractive thing, because if you get… at one stage you could get an 18, an 18 bus, and it would take you through to Euston. Now I think it’s become Warren Street, I think, it can take you through to Warren Street, but the beauty of the 18 was that there was always this problem with strikes etc. in the underground and goodness knows what in the world, always strikes, I mean I know strikes a little bit more obviously than they were… but at that time, I mean, oh dear me! Strikes were part of life, and one thing about being in Sudbury was that you could just… It was the beginning of the eighties when the 18 begun, you see, opposite Harrow and Sudbury station where near, where the present Tesco is, and you could just get a bus there an 18 and wrooom, right to the middle of London and, you know, that made a difference when you rely on working yourself, you know, ops, and how… I was never without work, and everything, I’m very thankful for having the 18 bus service for that.
Janet
We would have to go to the end of our road for a start, and then we would have to carefully cross the road to get to the bus stop and the bus stop was opposite where there is a pub called… there was a pub called ‘The Mitre’ and the bus stop was a request stop, so you would have to put your hand out if you wanted the bus to stop. There were 2 bus stops actually, there was one a few yards further up which I just about remember,which was a Green Line bus which ran between Kent and Buckinghamshire until about the 1960s. But anyway, going back to the red bus, we people waited for people to get off the open back of the Route master bus and then you’d get on and go upstairs ordownstairs and very often you’d have a jovial bus conductor who would have his own or her own style of doing things. One thing I do remember was one oldcharacter going around upstairs on the bus collecting the fares and saying, ‘Money for the poor, money for the poor’! Then when he wanted to attract the driver’s attention to carry on from the stop, there was nothing to, no bell, so he would just get a coin and rap it on the front of the front deck of the bus, so the driver could hear this coin. And so never a dull moment really!
Francis
In one occasion when we got to the Swan – of course the Trolleybus used to turn around there – a kindly conductor, obviously must have loved children, let me wind my ticket out on what used to be called the ‘Gibson ticket machine’ which… you had a little roll inside it, and you wound the handle with your right hand, put your left hand down on a little bar to release the machine and (he) let me do this, and I thought (at the) age (of) four ‘I can do this’, so this was my very first career ambition, to be a Trolleybus conductor!
Robert
They (Trolley buses) used to run along the High Street and used to go down to Sudbury, and then turn around and come back again, and more often than xxx the trolley which were on the xxx would come off and they were swinging around the road and the driver would have to come out and put them back, back on the power lines. I can remember seeing that, watching one of these things floating about, they’d come off for some reason or another. (…) No cars, very few cars in those days of course, very few cars, you could walk along the street with any difficulty and not much traffic, but… it’s changed, changed beyond recognition .
Patricia M
I was very lucky because I think for the last five years of steam trains on the mainline from Euston I crossed the line four times a day and I always loved steam engines, I still do. I could hear them from… when I was in bed at night and I could, more or less from the sound, tell the type of engine and what it was a coal train coming into the side, just South of Wembley Central, all the wagon bouncing up, there was always a loose couple in those days, no automatic breaks, the whole thing was just controlled by the driver who had a break on the engine and the man who got a hand brake in the guard fan at the back, so it was a very different working condition but I can hear this just interpreted automatically. I fully enjoyed that.
Robert
Second of January 1962 in… on the route from Stonebridge. I was very, very upset. Of course they replaced them with brand new master buses, which in fact turned out to be one of the old time, I think, classic buses that have been used in Britain, a really good long-lasting well designed vehicle but, these were aliens, and I think the think that I remember that particularly upset me was that the radiators of the buses seemed to keep them warm, they cut out the destination blind of the trolley buses just been taken out of service, and put them inside the radiator to stop the radiator freezing up because, as I said, it was the first week in January, and, you know, I thought how sad it was that something that, you know, I’d grown up with had been sort of desecrated almost, that’s the word I would use.
Robert
I remember in the ticket office, this is quite, quite big, the old Borough of Wembley put a map in all stations and Sudbury and Harrow Road was the last one to keep it while the ticket office was closed. A map of the area, you know, sort of… putting… a hand-drawn I think it was, and it put the station in the middle and showing all the local streets and how to, you know, how to get to places within reasonable reach from the station. I think other stations in the old Borough of Wembley had this, but certainly Sudbury and Harrow Road had longest.
Robert
One of the staff there, I think it was only ever staffed in the morning, and I couldn’t… One of the staff there turned up living a bit of double life. This was after we started to get an Asian community in the area, and I seem to remember that in Asian circles there was something of a musician repute. Now, being the booking clerk at Sudbury and Harrow Road as it was, was his day job, and of course after the morning rush hour the shift ended so presumably pursue his musical career and…
Robert
I did actually know and still know the former signal man at Sudbury and Harrow Road, who run the signal box. Well, he was the man who saw the… operated the signal, he had a box on the on the down platform, with the whole frame of leaves in it, and he would accept the train from the previous box which is Blind Lane, which is just between Park Lane Wembley and St John’s Road, signal there were often in the train and he would accept it, would allow to go safely up to Sudbury and Harrow Road and then in due course he would offer it to Sudbury Hill parrow box and in that way in days of manual signalling the thing was all operated safely and very labour intensive of course, but it went very well and of course it’s now all been replaced by computerised system.
Robert
My Uncle used to live at Mile End, so we went there one Christmas time…or January someday and we had to stuck there up to three days because I remember the bus… there was no central heating in those days. It was a paraffin lamp. So, the bus at Stratford… they would have to use a lamp, you know, leading the bus because it was so foggy, ice, and snow… really piled up. And to see the bus going, and the bus conductor was leading the bus with a lamp.
Florence
Well, where I live, I back on to the what is now the Chiltern Line and I certainly can remember walking up the garden. When I was born there were still steam trains running a regular service. I don’t remember seeing the engines too much because we had French windows. They have quite small panes with a curtain so you’d be looking through and the railway embankment was behind us and quite often you’d hear one and by the time we went to look, it was gone. Not that they went that fast. Aah, and there was, it’s sort of always been a constant…the railways being very upgraded now.
David
I remember Sudbury used to have the trolley buses that used to turn round at the roundabout here, at… where the Swan Pub is. Then that roundabout, there used to be wires overhead and it used to be quite interesting because sometimes they’d come unhitched and they have this guy go along with a great big pole to put them, to hang them back up again because they couldn’t go anywhere until that was done.
David
Yeah, you’d buy tickets and then I think you’d probably get a weekly pass so you normally queue up there was always a queue on Monday morning to get a pass and you get a pass that lasted a week, a month, the longer the time the monthly card worked a bit cheaper than the weekly card.
John
Cars
So the first car was the old Ford, we had that, and my dad used to drive that, but also when he worked for the Council he had a little van, a little Council van he used to give me a lift sometimes. And actually I got injured on a knob that stick out in the middle of the car, I’ve actually got a little scar on my knee which still survives still to these days, where I got quite a nasty cut underneath, sticking out of this car. The old Ford looks a bit of a mess but yes, we had a car and lot of people didn’t. I think the next car was… I’m trying to remember which one was that, I think that was a Vauxall Victor. The main thing about cars was that in those days, compare to now, there were no seat-belts and the front seat was usually one long sort of bench seat so you could have three people at the front, so quite often I’d be seating at the front, right next to the gear stick, and nothing that would considered very safe now, but it was just normal in those days.
John
Well, they were all British built cars, really. That was the main difference to now. They were all British built. We had the Morris. There were Fords. Hmmm, Singer, Humber. You had… there weren’t so many luxury cars. That was the thing. They were all quite basic. Plastic seats. You know but they were all British Leyland. I mean, they were all British cars. There weren’t any Japanese made cars in the 60s. It was only in the 70s when the Japanese cars started to arrive and people found them more reliable because a lot of the British workers would always be on strike. The workers at British Leyland would go on strike for another ten minutes tea break but so, yeah, they were all British. Vauxhall. Er, my uncle had a Vauxhall. One of my uncles had a small Bedford van and we all used to go out in that at the weekends because it had bench seats in the back and you could fit about eight of us in so we’d go out somewhere to High Wycombe or maybe Osterley Park. We used to go down there. I remember playing cricket there with him. Fishing. We used to go… sometimes go fishing down to Hurley which is down the Thames.
David
My father didn’t have a car until he was 33 so he didn’t learn to drive until he was about 33 so I remember we had a car in the early 60s. It was a basic family car. Two-door and we used to go on holiday in it. It seemed to take just as long as it would take now because there’s probably a few less cars on the road but the roads weren’t very well… There had no motorways. A lot of motorways weren’t built then, so you’d rely on the A roads. It took a long time to get anywhere.
David
I remember there’s a used car lot over the road, it’s still there. Opposite The Swan. It used to be called U.C. Slim. It was a U and a C and S-L-I-M and he had another one over this side. Two places and somebody told me the U.C. Slim stood for, ‘you see Slim’ because it meant that he was in the pub, it was him over there. I don’t know whether that was true.
David
I went off to Dublin from my house, then I came down to Euston, but I remember getting out at Euston and looking at Oh my God! This is like, this is like an airport town, rather than a train station! Has these big score boards, big area, xxx I just couldn’t believe the size of it.
Seamus
