College Record 2019

Peter Hulin and
the Bristol Bus
by Roger Hausheer and Anthony Moyes
(as recorded by the Archivist, Liz Baird)
Keen students of the College’s history may remember the entertaining description of
one of our founding Fellows, Peter Hulin (1923–93), by Roger Hausheer (GS 1969–79, VF
1991–2) in John Penney and Roger Tomlin (eds), Wolfson College Oxford: The First Fifty Years
(2016), 25–31, which also described his fascination for the Bristol Bus. For those who have
not yet read it, here is a shortened version:
MEMORIES OF WOLFSON
‘A tall, stooped figure, like a giant weather-beaten vulture, with a wild shock of light gingery
hair, who was clad in and out of season in a somewhat creased and baggy summer jacket,
open shirt, and billowing light trousers, I early learned to identify as Peter Hulin from the
Oriental Institute, a man deeply learned in Akkadian. I believe a great many senior Fellows
went in terror of him. I soon found that the disposition of this outwardly terrifying figure
was charming and gentle to graduate students, and indeed anyone at all whom he did not
identify with authority and power. His College advisees, to whom he was very kind and
whom he entertained generously, returned from their visits to his house with shining eyes
and fervent tales of a plethora of intriguing bric-à-brac, model railway trains that ran all over
the house through holes in walls, and, above all, a kind of vast museum (or shrine) dedicated
to a now extinct species, the Bristol Bus. On this subject, apparently, their host was in every
sense inexhaustible.
In 1987 I was invited to dinner at Christ Church. To our pleasant surprise, Peter Hulin had
come to dine at his old College, and in the common room afterwards he joined us. Within
no time the conversation flowed smoothly and automatically into the desired course. Yes,
he had devoted a lifetime of study to the Bristol Bus. Why? During an unhappy period of
his Bristol boyhood, he told us, he had found himself, together with his sister, confined by his
parents for several months at a time in an upstairs room that looked out on a major Bristol
thoroughfare. From this vantage-point, and no doubt to employ the energies of his acute
and active mind, he made an exhaustive catalogue of every single Bristol Bus.
Later, armed with his list of registration numbers, he had, with great tenacity, extracted from
a submissive Bristol Bus Company all the chassis numbers, body numbers, and engine numbers,
too. Then began the Quest of the Holy Grail of his entire adult life. That was to track
down, and see again, every single one of these beloved companions of his youth.
Many, perhaps most, of his old familiars had been callously sold off as job lots to Third
World countries. This entailed a prodigious odyssey which took in places from Upper Volta
to Borneo. Luckily, such pilgrimages could be combined with giving learned papers in
Akkadian to the cognoscenti of these countries.
But what in the world was a bus? When was the same bus no longer the same bus? What
really counted for bushood – the engine number, the chassis number, or the body number?
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COLLEGE RECORD 2019