Mike Rhodes describes this almost entirely colour album as a recollection of his memories and experiences of Ribble rather than a history of the company.
Those memories go back to childhood journeys in and beyond Preston in the 1950s, bus spotting ventures with an eight-day all-routes rover ticket in 1963 that took him as far as Carlisle and Manchester, and comprehensive travels around Cumbria over a week in 1977. The photographs — mainly his, but also some by his friend Ian Derrick — cover a 20-year period from 1974 to 1994. Early enough to include vehicles in the classic dark red and cream of its golden years in BET ownership and late enough to show a Leyland National with Stagecoach’s orange, red and blue stripes.
Many, therefore, are shown in National Bus Company (NBC) poppy red bus or National coach white, neither of which Rhodes considers improved their looks. He describes both as “insidious”, an adjective the Oxford English Dictionary defines as meaning “treacherous, crafty; proceeding or progressing secretly or subtly”.
He also seems to have been less than enamoured of Ribble’s trademark triangular destination displays on its double-deckers, which he suggests were smaller than necessa…
