Title: Muddle and Get Nowhere
Author/publishers: Ben Colson, Robin Bennett & Keith Shayshutt ISBN: 978-1-3999-5386-3
Specification: 295mm x 210mm,
348pp, softback Price: £40
Two years ago, Ben Colson wrote and published one of the best books ever about the bus industry, A Journey’s End (Reviews, September 2021), documenting the many ways in which the bus industry, and Eastern Counties Omnibus Company in particular, failed to address the changing needs of its market in the quarter century after World War Two.
The seeds of that book were sown over 11 months in 1969/70 when, between leaving school and starting a degree course in business studies with transport, he worked for Eastern Counties in Cambridge and at its Norwich head office, hired to gather the information on how the company matched its 765 vehicles to the routes it operated across Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire.
This hefty volume is what he recorded for one week in May 1970: over 3,000 bus workings out of 79 depots and outstations, each of which he visited by bus (sometimes with difficulty) on a network that was more the agglomeration of four businesses — United Auto’s Norfolk division, Eastern Counties R…
