College Record 2019

And what, precisely, was the relation of any or all of these to the original Bristol registration
number? Buses had been unfeelingly butchered and carved up, the chassis of one being
combined with another’s body, and engines endlessly dispersed. The task he had set himself
was to trace every single integral part of every single bus, and to redeem so far as he could,
at least on paper, the lost identity of each. There followed a rigmarole of labyrinthine
complexity involving numbers, parts and far-flung places.
The eloquent chronicler of the lives of these mute creatures developed an almost
Dantesque intensity and sweep as his litany droned on. His eyes shone and flashed as one
possessed, and it became clear that the very quiddity of bushood was somehow at stake
in some vast cosmic drama into which, unaccountably, we were being permitted to peep,
but which we could never hope to understand. Yet there was some kind of consummation:
only last year, on a trip to – was it Singapore? – he had traced the last chassis, the circle had
closed, the mission was now complete. Then, at midnight, he suddenly rose, and stalked out
with all the inscrutable mystery of a high-priest.’
MEMORIES OF WOLFSON
There is now a postscript to this article. The College Archives were contacted by Anthony
Moyes, who informed us that Peter Hulin’s great work on the Bristol Bus – his photographic
catalogue – was now complete. Mr Moyes kindly sent us some notes, together with a few
photos. Some (slightly revised) extracts from his notes appear below.
Peter Hulin was a founder member of the Bristol Interest Circle, in 1938. This was a group of
people who admired the buses manufactured in his native city of Bristol. ‘Bristol’ buses were
quite successful in the British market. Eventually the bus side of the Bristol company was
absorbed into British Leyland in 1968.
Many ‘Bristol’ vehicles survive in preservation because they were well-engineered, economical,
more than fit for the purpose, aesthetically pleasing, and consequently long-lived and
widely respected. The Bristol Vintage Bus Group was formed in 1972; it is the BVBG which
compiled the catalogue.
From the 1930s particularly, many ‘Bristol’ buses were sold to businesses and municipal
operators all over Britain. So, for someone keen to see every ‘Bristol’ bus made, quite a lot of
travel would be needed.
The first 150 entries in the Hulin catalogue give few details of where or when he photographed
them, and it appears to have started in the early 1940s. But from 1951, he began
to record where and when he took each photograph. The catalogue gives a good idea of his
pilgrimages, which would take him to places not generally on tourist circuits.
From the later 1940s, Bristol buses started to be exported outside the UK, and Peter
documented many of these on his travels as a Near Eastern archaeologist. The largest single
delivery was of 100 chassis to the Nizam of Hyderabad’s State Railways in India, in 1948.
Over 100 were also exported to South Africa. In June and July 1972 he was able to see the
last survivors of these machines. His last South African bus pictures, in August 1975, show
‘Bristol’ single deckers only in scrapyards. Peter also encountered some in places such as
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COLLEGE RECORD 2019