Routemasters trundle into retirement

... and another London icon is set to vanish along with them: the bus conductor. John Walsh hops aboard for a trip down memory lane

They were custodians of a warm, throbbing, mobile cave. They were greeters and bouncers at the door of a very peculiar club. At different times of the day they were supervisors of an unruly mixed-infants class, an old-people's outing, a tourist charabanc, a convention of drowned rats in mackintoshes, a loose association of furtive exhibitionists, and a late-night dormitory of snoozing alcoholics. They were called bus conductors.

In the last three years, Transport for London has been phasing out the old, classic Routemaster buses, with their distinctive open back platforms, to replace them with the new "bendy buses". Despite Ken Livingstone's promise during the mayoral elections, "to start to get conductors back on buses", TfL decided to replace any buses that were "inaccessible" to "wheelchair users and parents with buggies" by the end of this year, and that was that. This autumn, only two of the capital's 700 routes featured Routemasters: the 38 and the 159. The last No 38 went home to Clapton bus garage on 28 October. The 159 will trundle and wheeze its last on 9 December - and the job of London bus conductor will be as redundant as dirigible pilot, lift attendant and public hangman.

They retain a place in the collective memory, however, for the curiously ambiguous role they played: the conductor was both the stern, tax-collecting, rule-observing, horseplay-vetoing transport cop who informed freezing refugees at bus stops in the Brixton Road that there was no room for any more inside; but he was also the kindly, helpful, luggage-storing, baby-soothing, advice-dispensing public tour-guide and counsellor, who would be sure to tell the freezing refugees in the Brixton Road that time-honoured fib, "there's another one just behind."

Like rough-diamond, Cockney air stewards, they'd look after you during a journey, though only if you begged them for help. Like special constables, they could defuse trouble, discourage fights and eject drunkards. And, sometimes, as they moved down the aisle in their dark suits, clumpy shoes and breastplate-machines, calling out "Enn-ny more fares, please?", scrolling out tickets with that strangely satisfying end-stopped rasp and sending the bus on its way with a delicate two-fingered touch ("ting-ting!") on a wire, they seemed balletic, fluent, positively heroic.

In his book The Bus We Loved, Travis Elborough waxes lyrical about the now-moribund Routemaster, from its birth in 1954 to its many reincarnations and facelifts: "There was the look of them for a start. Roll-top baths in Guardsmen's red, they exuded an air of implacable, if polite, majesty. At night they glowed like lanterns; harbour-lights beckoning us home. Then there were the conductors, commissionaires of the road, a reassuring presence. Like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, their being there, watching over us, changed everything. They were a reminder that London was different."

But despite their pivotal role in shepherding generations of Londoners from A to B, bus conductors as a breed have remained relatively unsung. The only book in which they feature front-of-stage is The Busconductor Hines, the first novel by James Kelman, a glum chronicle of Glasgow life in the absolute pits. Rock and roll gave us the wonderful "Magic Bus" by The Who and the unspeakable "Bus Stop" by The Hollies, but next to nothing about conductors. On the Buses, a smash-hit sitcom (the spin-off movie was the biggest UK box-office success in 1971) featured a conductor called Jack Harper (played by Bob Grant) as a rat-faced lecher in a Rod Stewart haircut; a far cry from the dull Humphrey, conductor on the No 19, who (played by Graham Stark) marries Julia Foster in Alfie. It's not a terrific pedigree.

But now the conductors' hour has come, in the shape of an Arena documentary, "Little Platform, Big Stage: A Celebration of the British Bus Conductor", to be broadcast on 9 December as part of Bus Night, a nostalgia-fest for the double-decker's life and chequered times. Among the high points of omnibus culture resurrected for the evening - Cliff and the Shadows in Summer Holiday, the first episode of On the Buses, a documentary about the Routemaster called Perpetual Motion - Zimena Percival's documentary stands out for its freshness and charm. Percival interviewed 700 conductors and splices together their thoughts and stories (shocking tales of public misbehaviour, casual racist or sexist slurs, violence, eccentrics) with close-up testimonies of six vivid characters from five decades.

There's the gravel-voiced Betty Gallacher, who got so hacked-off with the monosyllabic surliness of her travellers in the late Sixties that she rigged up a blackboard in the front row, upstairs and down, to lecture them on the art of saying "Please" and "Thank You" - the Lynne Truss of Route 64. There's Ruel Moseley, one of the earliest wave of West Indian immigrants who came to England in the 1950s in response to British Government appeals for workers from Commonwealth countries. A large, dignified Barbadian, he recalls how some passengers used to lay the bus fare on the seat beside them, then snatch their ticket away, rather than risk touching his black hands. He remembers very un-Caribbean smog, and his disorientation, calling out place-names that he'd never seen. "Why," he complains, "did the Government send for the black folks, then put him on a bus when he doesn't know where he is?" There were compensations, however, in the number of women this silver-tongued cavalier won over with his "hold very tight please" badinage.

Also romantically disposed was Andrew Johnson, a flaxen teenage Ganymede in the early 1970s, the object of much eyelash-fluttering and stolen glances. Men passengers would press their bus tickets (with their phone numbers) into his hand when alighting. He had a long affair with a driver called Frank (they could conduct a lover's tiff via the bell and Frank's driving style); when they were growing apart, he had a knee-trembler with "a beautiful young businessman" in the upper-deck back row ("He got off the bus four minutes later - but it was a wonderful four minutes.")

Somewhat less appealing are the combative Meager family, John and Helen. John used to be a bus driver, Helen a conductor. Then he lost his licence over a drunken-driving rap and they swapped jobs. Perhaps feeling emasculated by this exchange of roles, John proceeded to make his wife's days hell. Anywhere between Finsbury Park and Battersea Bridge, the warring pair would conduct amazingly public rows. John would jump off at a bus stop, nip up to the front and attack his wife verbally about some driverly shortcoming, sometimes banging on her windscreen with a walking-stick, or openly taunting her in front of passengers on the lower deck. The worst advertisement for marriage since the Borgias, they sometimes found themselves on different transports - he would abandon the bus they were on, catch another bus, and wave at Helen from the back platform, as it sailed past her astonished eyes.

Most appealing of the bus stewards, however, is the 39-year-old "Duke" Baysee Rowe, a conductor on the No 38 for the last 15 years. Of Jamaican descent, hyperactive, charismatic and irrepressible, Rowe plays a mean blues harmonica on the platform, swings off the strut like a pole-dancer and regularly serenades his passengers (though, as he concedes, "I started singing to piss people off - some miserable wankers who were giving me a hard time.") He appears in the Arena film as a kind of cheerleader - the bus conductor as a card and caution - but off-screen, he has a grimmer tale to tell.

He joined the bus world in 1990 when his picture-frame company went bust. "What drew me to buses? Bankruptcy, man! I hated it at first. It was like begging, man, stretching out me hand for the money - like saying gimme the price of a cup of tea." His fastidiousness got him into trouble, when he was sent before a supervisor for "uncollected fares" and almost sacked. He attributes his long history of enduring violent attacks to the nature of the No 38 route. It runs from Victoria to Hackney, stopping on what's called "Murder Mile". There he was attacked on two occasions. On the first, he tried to stop a man dragging a woman down the aisle and was head-butted in the face: "I was out cold for two hours, man - I still get double vision." The miscreant, who also pushed the woman over a 20ft drop and took a swing at the bus driver, was jailed for eight months. On another occasion, Baysee was jabbed repeatedly with a Epson mini-computer until his kidney ruptured - and as he got his assailant in a head-lock and tried to make a citizen's arrest, the police arrived and arrested him.

Baysee cut records, one under the eye of Simon Cowell on the Arista label, a cover of the Archies' "Sugar Sugar". It reached No 30 in 1994, was a No 1 in South Africa and, even more remarkably, made No 12 in Japan. But an international pop career did not ensue and he stayed on the buses for 10 years, as the crime zeitgeist changed. "I've seen lots of pickpockets, drug dealers, criminals jumping on my bus. The junkie and the dealer go upstairs and do business in 30 seconds, then back down the stairs and they're gone. I would approach them. I used to challenge them. But I've seen seven guns in my time and I got a bit wise."

He grows reflective. "I seen so many things on buses. The reality of what you see is this - a 12-year-old kid boasting he's got a gun and then showing it to you. I said, 'You know, you could hold up a Mercedes at the lights with that,' and he goes, 'Yeaaah', and I say, 'You could, because the guy wouldn't know if it was real or not. And when the police come for you, they won't know either, and they'll kill you.' I told him, 'Get off my bus, get rid of that thing, or I'm calling the police.'"

Baysee is confronting retirement with stoicism mingled with relief. "What am I going to do? Sleep, man!" After which he'll resurrect his singing career, release another record, visit Germany, Colombia and South Africa, and work on an album called Ready for a Party. Believe him, he's ready. And so is his counterpart on the 159. On Saturday night, after 51 years of keeping the show going with the "Ting!" of the cord and the cries of "Hold very tight!", the Last Bus Conductor will issue his last, metal-rasping ticket, utter a final gruff "Goo'night" and turn out all the lights.

'Arena: Little Platform, Big Stage' is part of BBC4's Bus Night, which runs from 7.30pm to 12.20am on 9 December; 'The Bus We Loved: London's Affair with the Routemaster' by Travis Elborough is published by Granta Books (£12)