99.

Changes to the operation of the very popular and well used 99 bus route will take place in the very near future. The route, which runs between Woolwich and Bexleyheath via Plumstead, Upper Belvedere, Erith, Slade Green and Barnehurst will be changing operator on the 18th of January, when it will be transferred from Bexleyheath to London Central. The existing double-decker buses will be used, but new Wright Street Deck Electroliner EV 10.6m fully electric buses will also be introduced, as you can see in the photo below - click on it to see a larger version. 

The 99 bus route is among the longest, and also one of the oldest continuously used bus routes in Greater London. It has a long and varied history. At the time of the formation of the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, route 99 was an established service between Woolwich and Erith via Belvedere and Plumstead. On 24 January 1970, the route was converted to one-man operation with the AEC RT single deck buses. In 1974, the route converted back to double-deck operation with Daimler Fleetline buses. On 13 January 1979, it was extended from Erith to Slade Green, before reverting to its previous route on 2 November 1985. On 16 January 1988, the route passed to Bexleybus operating from their Bexleyheath garage using Northern Counties bodied Leyland Olympians and Daimler Fleetlines. On 19 January 1991, the route passed to London Central operating from their Bexleyheath garage using Leyland Titans. On 3 March 1996, the Sunday service was converted to single deck operation using Plaxton Pointer bodied Dennis Darts. On 23 January 1999, the route passed to Stagecoach London operating from their Plumstead garage converting to low floor single deck operation using brand new Alexander ALX 200 bodied Dennis Dart SLFs. On 24 January 2004, the route was retained by Stagecoach London and converted back to double-decker operation using low floor Alexander ALX 400 bodied Dennis Tridents. On 24 January 2009, the route was extended from Erith towards Bexlyheath replacing part of the route 469. On 22 January 2011, the route was retained by Stagecoach London. In March 2011, the Alexander ALX 400 bodied Dennis Tridents were replaced by brand new Alexander Dennis Enviro 400s. In 2014, brand new Alexander Dennis Enviro 400Hs were introduced alongside the existing Alexander Dennis Enviro 400s. On 20 January 2018, the route passed to Arriva London operating from their Dartford garage using Wright Gemini 2 bodied VDL DB 300s. On 13 July 2019, the allocation was transferred to the Manor Road, Erith garage. On 18 September 2021, Manor Road, Erith garage was announced closed and the allocation was transferred back to Dartford garage. After some years of neglect, and many bus breakdowns, as I have explored on several occasions in the past, it would appear that route 99 is shortly to get some much needed brand new electric buses. More on this subject in the near future. Comments to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Another piece of little known local history; you may be aware that one of the roads in the (relatively) new Erith Park development is named Downton Road - well, it is not named after the television series, but after a chap called John Downton - his self portrait is above - click on it to see a larger version.  He was an English artist, philosopher, musician, and poet. Born in Erith on the 27th of March 1906 to Albert Victor Downton (1873 - 1925; an engineer) and Flora Edith (1875 - 1962; née Mitchell) both of Wiltshire, Downton drew well from an early age. He was educated at Erith Convent, followed by Erith Grammar School. At the age of fifteen he won the youth silver medal of the Royal Drawing Society. He was educated at Queens' College, Cambridge (1925–1928), first in English and then in Art History, and then trained as a painter at the Slade. Downton played the violin all his life, was often invited to give performances, and always participated in the fortnight-long Grittleton Summer School of Music in Malvern, Worcestershire. He also wrote books, such as The Death of Art (1937) and Craftsmanship, Art and Criticism (1983). But it is his paintings for which he is now chiefly remembered. He travelled regularly around Europe, and was particularly happy in northern Italy. His main subject was young girlhood, rendered in the manner of the Italian old masters and with the tempera technique that had been revived by the Birmingham Group. Both his subject matter and his techniques were deeply unfashionable during most of his adult life, and he ceased to exhibit after the start of the Second World War, during which he was a conscientious objector, working on the land in Shropshire and Pitlochry, Scotland. He had two sisters: Hilda (1901 - 2006) and Mary (1903 - 1989). Hilda, who lived to 104, was a talented artist. Her painting of Ightham Mote is owned by the National Trust, and it was she who established the John Downton Award in 2000. Her legacy also provided for a specialist music room at Walthamstow Hall School in her brother's name. John Downton's portrait of Hilda was gifted to the Hull Museum Collection He never married, and lived mostly in Cambridge. On his death in 1991, all his work passed to The Downton Trust. A major retrospective exhibition and catalogue was produced in 1996, and the exhibition toured the UK. His three main masterpieces are: The Battle (1935, now in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery); Portrait of a Girl (1938, now in The Tate); Nora Russell (1935, which was gifted to the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, Bournemouth, in 1998). There is an annual John Downton Award for Young Artists, given to those attending secondary schools in the county of Kent.

The images above - click on either for a larger version - come from an early 1970's trade catalogue from Erith based manufacturer Burndept Electronics. Amongst other things, Burndept made two way radio equipment for the emergency services and the government, along with aircraft radios and emergency location beacons. The radio in the image above is a 500 mW UHF transceiver used by many Police forces in the 70's and 80's. Burndept Electronics began life in the early 1920s as a wireless and speaker manufacturer based in Blackheath. In 1934 the company was bought out and amalgamated with Vidor, a maker of batteries, and a brand that survived well into the 1970s. Vidor batteries were cheaper than Ever Ready or Duracell, and very popular, if not so long lasting. The brand Vidor was based in Erith, and they produced a range of consumer electronics in the years after the war; their battery production facilities were located in South Shields and Dundee, whilst their television and radio factory was in St Fidelis Road, off West Street, Erith. In 1934 T. N. Cole, managing director of the Lissen battery company, left that company sometime after it had been taken over by Ever-Ready; he purchased the Burndept radio company and set up the Vidor battery company, in direct competition with Lissen/Ever-Ready. Vidor's name came from the initials of Thomas's two daughters, Valerie and Denise, and his wife Rebecca. As a concession to Ever Ready and his agreement with the company, he did not run Burndept and Vidor himself, but employed Mr. R.P. Richardson as Managing Director. In 1935 Thomas brought an action appealing against the agreement with Ever Ready. An out of court settlement was made and from that time on, relations between Ever Ready and Vidor were strained, not helped by popularity of Vidor batteries with radio dealers because of their competitive prices, which were around twenty five percent cheaper than their rivals. Fellow company Burndept Electronics appears to have been absorbed into several others in the late 60's / early 70's, and the battery making part of the business was sold to an Argentinian company, who as far as I can ascertain, still own the brand. Comments to me at the usual address - hugh.neal@gmail.com.

Did you know that the World Wide Web was thirty four years old last week? On December 20, 1990, a Fellow at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, had been noodling around with ideas for getting hypertext documents onto public networks so that researchers around the planet could share information. He called it the World Wide Web, and he was given a NeXT workstation to develop his system. Berners-Lee – now Sir Tim – built a very basic website that had further details about his World Wide Web project plus some software for accessing it. You can read about it by clicking here. (Although the website was built around Christmas 1990, Sir Tim didn’t hook the server up to a public network until 1991.) To call the website basic is an understatement, but it did spread the word about the WWW's protocols. Crucially, the project's designs were published openly along with the source code for servers and browsers, allowing anyone to set up on the web without having to pay a penny in royalties or licenses. It's probable that this was the biggest boost to mankind's ability to share information since the invention of moveable type. Now there are websites for everything and anything. Sir Tim freely admits that he did not get everything right at the start; Sir Tim was also focused on text; the initial proposal states: "Where facilities already exist, we aim to allow graphics interchange, but in this project, we concentrate on the universal readership for text, rather than on graphics." Marc Andreessen told The Register website that Sir Tim called him while Andreessen was developing the NCSA Mosaic web browser, and castigated him for supporting images in the program – saying that adding more than words at this stage was pointless. Security, or rather the lack of it in the original HTTP standard, is another area that Sir Tim admits to getting wrong. Now he'd like to see all web traffic and email encrypted, although he acknowledges that there are times when investigators legitimately need access to encrypted data for criminal prosecutions. Sir Tim has been steering the development of the web since its inception, and has drawn flak from all sides for some of his views. He supports the adding of anti-piracy mechanisms, aka DRM (Digital Rights Management), to the HTML5 web language, saying it is needed for high-value content, and some companies wish he would stop defending net neutrality so vociferously. I actually encountered Sir Tim almost by accident nine years ago. I attended a meeting at The Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace, London. As I came out from the meeting room and headed into the reception area, I noticed a tall figure waiting close to the main entrance; he was wearing a long and rather impressive drover style coat. I recognised him, but could not recall his name. I then realised that there was a life - sized portrait of the same person on the wall, right next to where he was standing in real life. The penny then dropped. I must admit that I was tempted to go up to him and say hello, but fearing I would only make myself look like an idiot, I thought better of it and left the great man alone. 

A forty sixth birthday took place recently - a ground breaking cult comedy series that changed many things, and certainly influenced Sir Terry Pratchett and his much beloved Discworld novels; Back in 1978, the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. At the time no-one - least of all its creator Douglas Adams - would have known that the story of galactically - displaced nobody Arthur Dent would one day travel as far in the pop-cultural landscape as the book’s characters did across the universe. I got into Hitchhikers pretty early on - I recall that when I was at school, I could recite, word perfect, entire chunks of the first two books. In the years since in inception, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy has existed in almost every form imaginable - first a radio series, then a book, record albums (different to the radio versions), a television series, various stage productions, a computer game, a towel and a major motion picture - each one expanding on or compressing previous versions, using some aspects, flatly contradicting others and completely ignoring the rest. It has proven astonishingly prolific as a franchise, and that’s probably because its main thesis – that the universe is an idiosyncratic and absurd place as viewed from a human perspective – is one that cannot help but resonate with audiences across time and space.

The end video this week is a short film showing Woolwich "Then and Now". Comments and feedback as always to me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.