REVIEWS
Title: 45 Years an Eastbourne Busman
Author: Mick Hymans
Publisher: Heathfield Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-904235-26-5
Specification: 210mm x 145mm, 136pp, softback
Price: £15
These are the memoirs of someone — now 66 and retired — who fell into the bus industry in 1972 and remained for far longer than he had intended when he applied for a conductor’s job with Eastbourne Corporation.
Mick Hymans had held some unsatisfying jobs since leaving school four years earlier, trained as a driver when he turned 21, became a trade union representative and experienced the upheaval that took the Eastbourne bus operation through local government reorganisation, deregulation and restructure as an arms length company, operation of the short-lived Topline joint venture with Southdown in Hastings, partial privatisation to French partner Keolis and finally into Stagecoach ownership.
He starts the book with an enthusiast’s health warning that it is different from most others about buses, saying we will not find it packed with technical details about the vehicles. It may not present such dry information, but there are descriptions of what many of the vehicles were like to drive, especially the art of double declutching to ch…
