Tales of a 1970s west of Scotland bus conductor: My drunken driver pulled a knife on me after crash

Hugh Dougherty recalled that bus inspectors would jump out of roadside bushes to catch wayward staff, who in turn called passengers "punters" because of the gamble they took by stepping aboard.

Dougherty, 74, tells of his adventures working weekends as a conductor, then driver, while a student at Glasgow University in Holiday’s Busman - Working on the Western SMT 1969-72, published by Stenlake.

Based at the Mearns and Thornliebank garages on the southern edge of Glasgow, the company’s routes took him as far as Paisley, Ardrossan, Kilmarnock, and Ayr.

Dougherty said: “Starting conducting as a naïve 18 year-old was much more of an education than I ever got at university. I had to learn fast to think on my feet, keep my balance on a speeding bus, know the fare tables, handle my ticket machine and handle myself, when trouble called, too.

“We had everyone from the douce matrons of Newton Mearns angling for a cheap fare to the drunken mob which invaded the bus on the ‘Last Ardrossan’ - the most dreaded shift in the garage - on Saturday nights.

“They came on at the Maple Leaf Inn at Ardrossan, crammed both decks, singing and shouting, and worse, and went all the way to Johnstone. It was survival on that shift.”

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Dougherty said the knife incident was one of his worst experiences. He recalled being confronted by the “alcoholic” driver he was with on one shift, who “drove like a maniac” and took the side off a car while trying to undertake it on Cathcart Bridge in Glasgow.

Later, when Dougherty told the driver, after he asked, what he would put in his accident report, the conductor said he had “pulled out a flick knife and threatened to ‘do’ me”.

The conductor wrote “survival instinct took over, as in all situations on the buses” and he waved his ticket machine in the driver’s direction “leaving him in no doubt that I meant business, shouted at him to back off, which, incredibly, he did ... as I collapsed in a terrified heap on the back seat”.

But it wasn’t just drunk colleagues he had to watch out for. Equally reviled were the dreaded inspectors or “hats” - on account of their headgear - who were forever trying to catch staff with untidy uniforms, running early or issuing the wrong fares.

Dougherty said one, named Reynolds, was known to hide by the roadside and “erupt from the bushes, board and check the bus”, only to leave snarling if he couldn’t find fault with the crew, in “shades of Inspector Blakey of the TV programme On the Buses”.

He said a female inspector resorted to donning a wig and glasses to pose as a “punter”, so she could jump up “to catch some poor soul committing a minor indiscretion”.

As to why bus staff called passengers “punters”, Dougherty recalled: “The idea being that they took a gamble travelling with us.

“We eyed them with a mixture of pity, trepidation and caution, for you never knew what a punter, any punter, was capable of when getting off or on, or just being near a bus. All common sense seemed to go out the window.

“Training in customer service excellence in those days was unknown on the buses. But behind the persona of the professional busman and woman was, in reality, the desire to look after your punters, remembering that they were all half daft, and to see them safely off your bus.”

Some “punters” liked to create a bit of drama in a fashion that might get them shot dead by police these days. Dougherty said one man, inspired by the plane hijackings of the early 1970s, shouted as he boarded a Neilston-bound bus in Glasgow with a bulge showing under his coat: “Right youse, ah’m hijackin’ this bus, so Ah am. Take me tae Baurheid! [Barrhead].”

Dougherty said: “The other punters looked on worried, but I said to him, calmly: ‘That’s fine, Jimmy, we’re going there anyway.’ At that, he meekly went up the aisle, sat down and paid his fare.”

In a more serious incident, a “half-bevvied punter” took badly to Dougherty refusing to follow a common ticket scam in which only half the fare was paid and no ticket issued - known as “Keep ra’ ticket, Jimmy” - so both punter and conductor benefited.

Dougherty wrote: “I issued the full ticket and gave him his change. Sometimes, the enraged punter would tear up his ticket and spit out the words ‘f***ing company man’ But this punter decided he was going to ram the ticket down my throat, with the help of a broken bottle.”

As with the drunk driver, the author said survival mode had kicked in, despite him not being in a fight since primary school.

He wrote: “A struggle ensured, involving taking my punch off its backplate, as another guard had advised me, for emergency use, other than punching tickets.

“Let’s just say that the punter went down the stairs and out the back of the bus as we charged along past Darnley Farm.”

It was a violent era, with Dougherty, then a bus driver, also recalling seeing a plain clothes police squad known as “The Untouchables” dressed in “jeans, teeshirts and early trainers” pouring out of a Commer van after being alerted to a punter attacking his conductor, who “proceeded to kick the wee man up and down the top deck”.