NOVEMBER 1971
MARBLE ARCH, LONDON
Tourists in London aboard a double-decker bus with a wartime past are themselves unwittingly the focus of this week’s nostalgic city scene
Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Now there was a wonderful children’s movie. One particular scene saw museum exhibits coming to life to defeat dastardly Nazi commandos, so it’s perhaps appropriate that a museum exhibit that survived World War Two happens to be passing the Odeon Marble Arch cinema built four years previously in this 1971 shot.
ST922, a 1930 AEC Regent I with Thomas Tilling body, served as a guardroom during the war and also went to Birmingham to bolster the Birmingham & Midland Motor Omnibus Company’s fleet that was devastated by bombing. Here, in happier times, it has just been restored and put in to service on sightseeing route 100. Its passengers would have been marvelling at the 19th century Marble Arch coming up on the right.
Designed by John Nash, Marble Arch is the state entrance to the cour d’honneur of Buckingham Palace. A common myth is that it was once a police station, yet despite occasionally being used as accommodation for officers and a useful outpost during demonstrations, it’s never served as a place to report crimes.
Those in the cars surrounding the Arch would probably have been more jaded to its sight than the tourists riding aboard ST922, assuming, of course, that they are ‘Lahndeners’. The driver of the 1965 Austin FX4 taxi cab no doubt was, while we can imagine the owner of the gold Jaguar Mk2 being just the type who would have inhabited this posher part of the city.
Note the roof-mounted indicators on this FX4, a feature abandoned in 1969. They’d been adopted as customers often used semaphores of the previous FX3 as grab handles.
Trailing behind the Regent, we have more typically mainstream cars such as the Clarendin Grey Morris Minor Traveller, possibly just back from the continent judging by its yellow lights. A French law passed in 1936 compelled all vehicles built from 1937 to have yellow headlamps. The rule lasted until 1993.
There’s also a red Morris 1100 MkI, an obligatory Mini in MkI Austin Super Deluxe form and a nearly new J-reg Ford Escort XL. At a time when round headlamps were the norm, rectangular units were seen as more prestigious; hence the Deluxe/L Escorts having circular ones and the Super/XL cars going for oblong items.
There’s also a Triumph TR6 with its hood up to battle the late autumn chill; perfect for prowling the West End by night with a gentleman driver who’d no doubt be partial to a tipple of what ST922 is advertising on its flanks. Especially as he, ahem, ‘attempts to stay warm’, although were not entirely sure that this sort of excuse would have worked with any police officers that might have been stationed at Marble Arch at the time.