On the buses
Last week, Mr Crownfolio and I scored that increasingly rare thing, a bargain on eBay. Although this did involve us chancing a reasonably large sum of money on what was described as
a lot of old railway posters that i got when i was turning out my grandparents old house they are at a ruff guess about 25 plus
along with a picture that didn’t give a lot away.
A bit of additional description says that there were some half-page posters as well as some full page ones, but we had no idea what would turn up. Well apart from this, of course.
And the knowledge that at least some of the posters would have tatty edges.
Fortunately we weren’t disappointed. As a starter, this Alan Durman on its own would have been quite enough to keep us happy.
Fortunately there were more goodies even than that.
But what I don’t think we’ve ended up with is a set of railway posters. The Butlins one does say ‘Travel by Train’ at the bottom, but there’s no British Railways logo or anything. More importantly, they’re all 20″ x 30″, so standard advertising display size, Double Crown, rather than British Railways standard display size of 40″ x 25″ or Double Royal. To prove my point, here is the Alan Durman Butlins poster as a Double Royal with the British Railways logo on.
I don’t think I will be complaining about the misdescription though. Because Double Crown wasn’t just the preserve of commercial advertisers. The other big advertisers who used it as standard were the coach companies, and that’s what I think we’ve got here, a batch of coach posters. Which isn’t a very difficult deduction to make looking at a set of posters like these.
The bottom one is by Lander and is I think particularly nice. If you needed any more persuading, this one even says coach on it, with a handy picture too.
That seems pretty certain then. Even better, there are some good posters amongst the lot, not least of which is this Daphne Padden.
There are also some artists I’ve not come across before. These two posters are signed Greene.
I think this is John Greene, quite possibly working with his wife Margaret too. But I’m not going to go off on a research digression for once, they can wait for another day. Meanwhile one of my favourites isn’t signed at all.
There are few more as well, and among them a set of these oddities.
Mr Crownfolio reckons that these must have been put up by the various stops at bus stations so that people knew they were getting on the right coach. But if there’s a transport historian out there with a better theory, do let me know.
Now we just need to decide what to do with a whole heap of posters with a lot of blank space on. Perhaps we’ll frame them on magnetic backing and use them as notice boards. Even then, we’ve probably still got quite a lot…