grandad wrote:
Anyone on here that drove PH before mobiles were invented? How did things operate back then?
OK. I'll admit to that, I'm not proud.
I started part-time in the PH trade in 1973, before the LG (MP) Act 1976. Ahhhhhhhh........., those were the days!!! I remember I drove a metallic dark green Vauxhall Ventura VX 4/90 3300cc automatic to begin with. Loooooovely car, purred along ….. & the poke ,,,,,,,,,,,,
Then after I middled a bus with that beautiful motor & wrote it off, I became the proud owner of …………. a slate grey Triumph 2.5PI automatic. I still remember the Regd No. AAW 994L. The Triumph 2.5PI was the first British car with Petrol Injection, as it was then called, when they first came out in the tail-end of the last millennium. Now the Ventura was a statesman like car, but this 2.5 PI was raw muscle & power. In those days it was fast; 0-60 in 9.7 secs. I retro fitted one of the first electronic ignition systems ever made to that car; a Lucas system that involved throwing away the contact breakers (points to all you grease monkeys) inside the distributor & substituting a ‘helicopter type’ blade (fixed onto the centre shaft) that had the equivalent number of blades on it that your car had cylinders. This blade then rotated through an electronic beam which created a very much enhanced spark, so the PI went even faster. The problem was that being the first petrol injection system on the market it was a mechanical system & very prone to going out of tune & required constant setting-up & re-tuning. Average fuel consumption was just 14mpg & if you thrashed it around town (& it was very nippy for a reasonably big car), you could, if you tried, get 9mpg.
After the Triumph 2.5PI auto, I had a beige Simca 1301 & got married.
Anyway, enough reminiscing; back to your question. I worked on PH from 1973 to 1979, when I became a licensed Hackney driver. It was a different ball game then, totally unrecognisable from today’s high technology systems that the trade now uses.
When you started work & left home you needed to make sure that you had enough coins for telephone calls to last you for the whole shift. I think it was a two pence piece for a call from a public telephone box in those days, but I may be wrong. And the two pence piece & public telephone box then, was equivalent to your dispatch system of today. There were no two-way radios in those days at the PH firm that I started with, but they soon came on the market for those concerns that could afford them.
So the first thing I did when I set out for work was to phone the base, tell them where I was & they would give me a job that was the nearest to me that they had, & you wrote the details down on a piece of paper. But, the base operator soon became much more efficient. When you phoned in they would give you two jobs instead of one. The first one was usually quite a short job with the pick-up quite near to the driver’s public telephone box location & the second job to follow on to, was near to the drop off destination of the first job. So, that way the whole PH firm became more efficient. Except, there were problems. Mrs Smith who you picked up first from the Co-op (everyone shopped there because you got a divi; like today’s Tesco, Asda or Sainsbury, but an awful lot smaller), had changed her mind & instead of going home now wanted to go & pay Mrs Brown a visit. And Mrs Brown lived a few miles from where you were supposed to be picking up Miss Nuthurst, your second run-on job. So after uniting Mrs Smith & Mrs Brown, you had to tear-aser over to pick-up your second run-on passenger, but now you were late. Often by the time you arrived to pick-up your second passenger, they had either been picked-up by one of your colleagues, or you arrived just in time to see them getting into another car.
So in the days before the 1976 Act came in, you certainly had to have your wits about you. When you were taking a passenger to their destination & didn’t have a follow-on job, you would always clocked all the public telephone boxes on the way, so that you knew which was the nearest to the drop off, & get round to it asap to call base for your next job. And in the days pre-mobile phones, it was very common to arrive at a public telephone box to find it being used & a queue of perhaps several people before you all waiting to use the telephone. So now, you had to try & remember where the next nearest phone box was & shoot round to there, hoping it was not in use & so on. In those days public telephone boxes were not vandalised as much as they are today, because most people relied on them, & as they were almost in constant use, this gave little opportunity for them to be abused. You always asked any passenger that you were dropping off if they wanted a further booking that day or perhaps the next, wrote it down & passed it to the office, either in your next telephone conversation with base, or when you got back to base. The work was almost non-stop in those days, with very few quiet periods as we have now. So, you worked by using public telephone boxes, guile & ingenuity.
As I said, those were the days!
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