"Gasbags & Gliders"(the history of Barton's Transport)
February 2008 Meeting Report
Speaker - Alan Oxley
The February 2008 meeting of the Keyworth & District Local History Society was held in The Centenary Lounge, Keyworth on the 1st of February. The meeting was very well attended, not only by Society members but the audience was also swelled by the addition of eighteen visitors. The guest speaker for the evening was Alan Oxley and the topic of his presentation was ‘The History of Barton Transport’ (Gasbags & Gliders). The talk covered the history of the company from 1908 up to 1989.
The central character in the talk was Thomas Henry Barton, born in 1866. He founded the company that was to bear his name for a great many years and become a household name in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Residents of Keyworth will be particularly acquainted with the name Barton since it that company that has provided public transport into Nottingham for the villagers for a great many years now.
The Barton family owned a quarry in Little Eaton, in Derbyshire, and this eventually came into the ownership of Thomas. Thomas Barton was an entrepreneur by nature and whilst the quarrying business provided him with a secure financial base his interests lay more in the mechanical field.
Around 1904 acquired a small, second-hand bus and ran a service during the winter months between Little Eaton and Derby. This proved relatively successful but the following year Thomas took the little bus to the Lincolnshire seaside resort of Mablethorpe where the vehicle took passengers along the sea front there. The work suited Thomas to a ‘T’, he had found his vocation and over the ensuing years the business would continue to expand.
However, this work was seasonal in nature and Thomas had to look elsewhere for other business. Then, as now, Nottingham’s Goose Fair was a major attraction in the city during the month of October. Scores of people travelled into the city to enjoy themselves with ‘All the Fun of the Fair’. Whilst the fair is held on The Forest these days, then it was held in the Market Square in the centre of Nottingham. Thousands of people travelled into the city from near and far to this annual event. To satisfy the good citizens of Long Eaton who wished to travel to the fair Thomas set up a scheduled service that took them, though the service only operated for the duration of the fair.
The following year saw Thomas taking his little bus down to Weston-Super-Mare where he provided the same type of service that he had done in previous years at Mablethorpe. However, other local operators were jealous of Tommy’s success and tried to prevent him from operating. To operate a public service required the permission of the local council and this would have presented quite a headache to Tommy. To get round the problem Tommy rented a piece of land at each end of the route that his service took and sold tickets for the journey on private land. The journey began and ended on private land, so, according to the law, he wasn’t operating a public service and did not need a licence from the local council. In this way Tommy ran his service, made his money, and infuriated the local operators! That episode would typify Thomas Barton’s approach to life; problems were there to be overcome, rather than a possible cause of failure.
Back in Nottingham Tommy continued to operate his service from Long Eaton to Nottingham. The outbreak of World War 1 saw a large increase in the number of personnel employed at the Royal Ordinance depot at Chilwell and, as ever, Tommy was swift to take advantage of the opportunity to provide bus services for the workers there. During World War 1 there was a national shortage of petrol and, once again, Tommy showed his innovative nature in responding to the problem. He converted the whole of his bus fleet to run on town gas. Each bus was equipped with a huge container, which sat on the vehicle’s roof and provided the necessary fuel for the bus to operate. Hence the ‘Gasbags’ part of the title for tonight’s presentation. Again, Tommy showed his entrepreneurial spirit by manufacturing the gas containers and selling them to other bus operators.
The end of the war signalled a huge increase in the expansion of bus services. Competition was fierce but Tommy rose to the challenge. He bought some buses from the Italian company of Lancia but they were smaller than was required. To solve this problem the chassis was saw in half and an extra section fitted into the centre of the vehicle. This elongated the interior of the bus considerably, greatly increasing the passenger carrying capability. These buses gained a reputation for their smooth riding and became known as ‘Gliders’, and also the second part of the title for tonight’s talk.
The next major innovation that Tommy Barton introduced was equipping his fleet of buses with diesel engines. Up to that time diesel engines were primarily used for marine purposes, no one had though it practicable to use them for road vehicles because of the difficulties that such use presented. However, once again Tommy saw what benefits were possible if these technological problems could be overcome and worked towards solving them. This he did and Barton Buses became the first fleet in the country to operate vehicles with diesel engines. Thomas Barton had worked for the Hornsby engineering company prior to setting up his own transport business and the knowledge that he gained there working on the early ‘oil’ engines (as diesels were known as then) proved invaluable. Thomas’s engineering background proved invaluable to his career in transport and during his lifetime he would find innovative solutions to a great many engineering problems, many of which resulted in him registering his ideas with the Patents Office.
The Barton empire continued to expand and provide a very comprehensive public transport network throughout the counties of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire. During this period Thomas also expanded the business into road haulage. In 1929, after fierce competition for particular routes Barton’s took a 50% holding in the South Notts Bus Company who were based at Gotham. Over the years Barton’s would continue to absorb other smaller operators, notably; Hall Brothers of South Shields, and Robin Hood Coaches of Nottingham, (though both these acquisitions occurred in the early 1950’s). Post-war Barton’s became involved in operating bus tours to various parts of the country and even across the English Channel into Europe. Amongst the many slides that Alan showed the audience was some movie footage (transferred from cine film into a digital format) taken during the 1950’s which showed Barton’s buses at various locations in England, Scotland, France, Germany and other locations. The quality of the footage was not very good but the scenes that were captured were very evocative of transport from a bygone age. The old Bedford OB bodied bus being particularly so.
By the early 1980’s the Barton Bus Company had grown into the largest private bus company in the country but in 1989 Barton’s were absorbed into the Trent Bus Company which was renamed as Trent / Barton. The company name lives on however, as Keyworth residents are all to well aware as it is a Barton’s bus that still provides the villagers with their principal means of public transport between Keyworth, Tollerton, Edwalton, West Bridgford and Nottingham. Alan’s talk was well over an hour long and continued until after 9.00pm. So interesting was his subject though that the audience was kept entertained throughout the presentation. Well done Alan for providing the Society with such an absorbing talk on a very interesting topic.