Buses on the Frontline

One of those iconic images of the Troubles

is that flaming double-decker bus in the middle of a riot.

Buses made the perfect barricade and there was always one coming along.

We were all equal then, we all felt the same fear.

We provided buses without favour to all sections of the community

-but we got attacked by all sections!

-HE LAUGHS

In Northern Ireland, you can't run public transport

from a desk in the office.

Who would have been a bus driver in Belfast?

I was hijacked a total of eight times.

I was just on the point of walking up to it to have a look

when the bus blew up and was no more.

They are the real heroes of the past.

There was always a degree of fear.

We'll continue to operate, no question about it.

Northern Ireland's transport system played a crucial part

in its growth throughout the 20th century.

In Belfast, the early 1900s saw trams

and buses dominating the streets.

Even back then, political rumblings

put public service vehicles in the firing line.

Transport has always been used

in revolutions, civil disturbances, rioting,

erm, in Ireland, really north and south.

In November 1921, you have two very serious attacks on shipyard trams

passing through central Belfast.

In one attack they threw a Mills bomb in,

and if you can imagine the impact of that kind of bomb in a confined space

of the ground floor of a tram...

There were shocking and horrific injuries

and about five people killed.

But despite the occasional skirmish,

public transport mainly escaped unscathed

during the first half of the 20th century.

Through the '50s and most of the '60s, Belfast was

just like any other city, and buses were just like any other buses.

It was a regular city, yes.

I wasn't aware of any reason why I shouldn't go anywhere.

People worked from 9 to 5 and they went to the pictures

and the new theatre. I mean, this was normality.

This was the O'Neill era of good feeling in Belfast.

Double-decker buses for me were fantastic,

because I travelled into Belfast from Glengormley past the zoo,

and if you were on the top floor of the bus, you saw,

and I did every day, you saw the elephant and the lion.

You only saw that from the top floor of a red Belfast bus.

There was always a conductor, and the fascination you had as a child

was the little machine that they had to churn out the tickets,

and there were so many different tickets throughout the ages.

I remember getting tickets that were stamped

and were easily forged throughout the years,

where people at school would put wax on their tickets so that

when it was stamped you could scrape off the date on it.

Not that I ever did that, but I saw it being done.

In the early days, it was just an ordinary job, you know,

and it was a reasonably good job,

wages were reasonably good.

There was manual steering in them and sometimes on country roads,

on bends, you would nearly have to stand up in the seat

to get the bus round the bend.

They were called heavy steerings, they were called.

Now little girls can drive now, and wind them round their fingers,

which is much different, I can tell you now.

One of the most distinctive public transport vehicles of the '50s

and '60s was the trolleybus.

I remember the trolleybuses from a very young age

and they always struck me of being absolutely enormous vehicles.

They were amazing things, really, they were so quiet for a start.

So quiet that sometimes people would have stepped out in front of them.

I remember as a little kid just the spark that sometimes

came off the bit where the pole met the wire.

On a wet day, as you were getting off, you had to be very careful,

because if the electric kind of terminals touched the wires

or water got in, you would get a shock actually, getting off,

and you'd be quite electrified going to your school day.

They were very economical.

They were clean, they were good for the environment,

and the powers that be, in their wisdom, decided to...

do away with them.

In 1964, Belfast had a taste of things to come

with the Divis Street riots.

The first that I knew

that there was anything untoward in Northern Ireland,

that wasn't just like anywhere else that I'd read about,

was when the buses were stopped, because of the Divis Street riots.

It was during a British election campaign for Westminster.

Sinn Fein were running a candidate.

The Sinn Fein candidate had displayed a tricolour

in election headquarters in Divis Street.

The Reverend Ian Paisley, beginning his long political career,

demanded that the police remove the flag,

or he would lead a march up the Falls Road to remove it himself.

The RUC smashed a window, took a flag.

The flag was replaced, and soon there was rioting on the street.

MUSIC: "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen

Buses and vehicles were attacked.

A trolleybus was hijacked and set on fire.

A trolleybus hijacked - people throwing stones,

the police with batons.

It was my first experience of rioting -

the smell of cordite, of burning rubber tyres, you know,

of this beautiful trolleybus, was, I suppose, petrol bombed -

but we hadn't invented the word yet.

1969 saw the beginning of the Troubles.

Belfast became a violent and divided city.

From this moment on and through the following three decades,

buses and their drivers became targets.

They just sprinkled petrol over the vehicle and set it on fire...

..a bus was hijacked in West Belfast...

..fiery overnight reminder of the violence...

The driver and passengers had just been ordered off the bus by...

..youths began to show their anger in its tradition form,

burning buses.

A bus was hijacked by youngsters and used as a barrier...

The bus was hijacked by masked men...

EXPLOSION

Belfast became a war zone.

The burning of buses became routine from 1969 on, in Belfast.

You know, buses were hijacked, buses were burned,

passengers in buses were shot up, or worse.

We were the easier targets, I think, was the main thing.

The easier targets.

And would have caused the most disruption - like, a burning bus,

you'd have seen it for miles,

-throughout the city.

-Mm.

And on those roads, well, it was a nightmare to get home.

When the buses came off the road, it created panic.

And people couldn't get home from work.

People had to leave work.

So you were creating mayhem.

Not only in the bus industry, but throughout.

It made people nervous.

This was a transport system that people had used

and been fairly confident in, it was pretty good, I think, for its time.

All of a sudden, you were wondering,

"Do I really want to get onto this bus?"

The buses seemed to be a symbol of authority.

And then when the bus was set on fire, it was quite spectacular.

And it made news.

When you hear one burning, it's a very vicious noise.

A lot of cracking, a lot of banging, a terrible pungent smell.

Glass cracking, petrol tanks exploding.

There's a lot of bus to burn.

Can you imagine the fear?

And when the bus driver went up the road,

the only thing he had was the bus.

You know, if the army went up the road they went out in dozens,

with jeeps and guns.

The police went up in armoured vehicles.

But he had no-one but himself.

In them days, not like now. No such thing as a mobile phone.

At times you were in places

that you weren't too happy you were in.

Things were going on - maybe bombs going off around you,

you know what I mean?

You were diverted because of a roadblock or for whatever reason,

and you were going down roads that you didn't know.

It must have been very, very frightening being a bus driver.

Waiting for the brick, waiting for the petrol bomb,

waiting for some lad to stand out in the front of the road

and block wherever you were going.

I would say a lot of our wives would have been finding it very

difficult to settle for the night,

knowing that your husband was on the late bus.

And hearing on the news the hijacking of bus drivers.

In Londonderry a bus was hijacked by masked men...

The bus was hijacked in West Belfast...

..at the time of the shooting there was an Ulsterbus coming over the...

A number of vehicles including buses were hijacked and set on fire.

They didn't know from night to night

whether they were going to come back home again.

My own wife quite often would have phoned the depot

just to see if everything was all right,

if she had heard some news on TV or radio.

And then when I come home I had to sit maybe for half an hour, an hour,

just to unwind.

We had a situation where we wouldn't allow Protestants

to drive Protestant routes,

or Catholics to drive Catholic routes.

We kept them mixed, and in that way, I think,

we minimised the effect that the Troubles would have on them.

Because if they were going to attack,

they didn't know if it was one of their own,

if it was a Catholic or a Protestant they were attacking.

We were just bus drivers -

it didn't really matter what part of the road you came from.

We are and have been, always, a big bus family.

Irrespective of your religious, your cultural or political beliefs.

Well, we were a family, and we all shared one another's hurts.

We were all equal, then.

We were all comrades. Everybody was out to do the same job.

We all felt the same fear.

We provided buses without favour to all sections of the community.

But we got attacked by all sections!

If a passenger was causing problems on the bus,

or the bus was late, or something had been against them,

you were automatically the opposite persuasion to they were.

And they took it for granted that you were either one or the other

because you weren't being good to them.

And we used to joke about this.

Hijackings became routine,

and the bus drivers never knew what was around the next corner.

I was hijacked a total of eight times.

When you were being hijacked, you just didn't have time to think.

It all happened so very quickly.

We were told, if a guy gets on that wants the bus,

no hassle.

Give it to him. Don't argue with him.

Your life is worth more.

I've been hijacked six times.

I was on the Falls Road, and just outside the Whitefort,

they just came from behind the wall.

Donegall Road, just at the chip shop.

They just came racing out of there.

And the last - Glen Road, believe it or not.

They always told you to take everything with you.

Your coat and your money bag, and if you had a lunch pack or anything,

you just cleared everything, and then you got off the bus.

I've been on a number of times on the buses when somebody steps on

and asks you to, politely - or sometimes not so politely -

vacate the bus.

And the irony about this is,-

I would have been 14 or 15 on the bus,

and it was probably some 12-year-old

with a scarf wrapped round their face, "Right, everybody off the bus.

"Everybody off bus now!"

And then the petrol bomb would come in and whatever,

and it was just pathetic.

Sometimes when people came on to hijack the buses,

you wanted just to hit them and say, "Oh, clear off."

And sometimes people did!

Two young fellas got on and said, "We're hijacking your bus."

A chap sitting on one of the front seats, he overheard it,

and he jumped up and he hit one of these young fellas

and threw him out on the street.

And then the rest of the passengers joined in -

and it was almost like a lynch mob.

They threw the both of them off the bus,

and said, "We've been out working all day,

"and the last thing we want is eejits like that getting on

"to hijack a bus when we're trying to get home."

These guys were really very vulnerable

in the situations that they were in,

and some of them were enormously brave,

and really did look after their passengers tremendously well.

Another particular instance was, I seen a crowd of youths at the side

of the road, and I sensed that there was maybe something going to happen.

And as I got closer to them, one or two of them

walked onto the pedestrian crossing, and I had to stop.

And of course, when I stopped the bus,

that was the signal for the rest to try and hijack me,

and one of them got onto the step of the bus,

and he says, "Drive the bus up there, we're hijacking you.

"Drive the bus up there beside that van."

And I said, "Just beside the van, there?"

And he said, "Yes, yes, quick, hurry up.

"Put the bus beside the van."

And as soon as they got back off the bus again, I just continued on,

and drove away on up the road.

And didn't obey their instructions at all,

and managed to escape.

If they took your bus and burnt it, it was good -

-good in the sense that you got away safe.

-Yeah.

But the other way when you were hijacked

and asked to take a bomb into town was a different thing entirely.

We were not experts to decide which was the real thing.

-Mm.

-And that's the dilemma that we were being put into.

A few of us had to carry that out, because a lot of the times

they were asked for their ID, while you're being hijacked.

Therefore the terrorist had their ID, of the guy that was taking this.

That put an awful lot of pressure on the guy to take that bus

to where they wanted to take it to.

I know those who did take buses into town with bombs,

and laid bombs, at that.

And, believe you me, they were never the same.

There are always fellas, buses hijacked, bomb put in -

not in a bus, now, onto the seat -

and asked to drive the bus

to Ulster Police Barracks.

I think there was two drivers

was asked to do that.

One driver was actually coming down the Oldpark,

into the Crumlin Road area.

Two kids came down the stairs when they were getting off,

and told him, "Mr, there's a bag up the stairs."

And one of them handed the driver a package...

..and he put it behind the seat, thinking it was lost property.

They get off, and as soon as he went to move off,

it was an incendiary device that he didn't know.

It went off.

And he was badly burnt in that.

It took over a year, a year and a half,

for him even to recover the physical wounds.

The mental wounds, never.

And he had to retire through ill health.

During the course of the Troubles,

the bus drivers lost 12 of their colleagues,

and numerous others were injured.

There were some very, very horrific incidents, and one of them, actually,

was to change the law, and the nature of courts.

This was the case of Sydney Agnew,

a bus driver who was ordered off his bus by three men

from the nationalist Short Strand area in 1972.

His bus was subsequently burned, and he was due to give evidence

in a major court case in Belfast as a key prosecution witness.

The poor man was shot dead.

And this was to lead to a change in the law - the Diplock Report,

which led to non-jury trials, you know,

to prevent jurors and witnesses being intimidated.

Which came in, really, at the end of 1972.

It wasn't just the Belfast buses

that became involved in the conflict.

One cross-border bus service based in Londonderry, the Lough Swilly,

believes that their involvement in a major political event

meant that perhaps they weren't hijacked as often

as other bus services.

# In the days of my youth

# I was told what it means to be a man... #

In 1969, the Battle of the Bogside took place in Derry.

The RUC attempted to disperse nationalists

protesting against an Apprentice Boys march.

Rioting continued for three days,

and the army was deployed to restore order.

It must have been horrendous for those people, because the Battle

didn't just last for two or three hours, it went on night and day,

and there was loads of youths

up on the top of the Rossville Street flats.

They were so determined back then

that the police couldn't enter the Bogside,

they weren't strong enough to get in.

A deputation from the Bogside came to Lough Swilly and asked,

would they consider coming into the Bogside and taking the mothers

and small children and the elderly grannies

and grandads over across the border to Donegal for a few days' respite.

So we decided that providing we were going to get safe passage

in and out of there, because it was like a warzone at that stage

on the Bogside, we decide that we would take the chance.

We were all a bit worried for the first few hours,

when the buses went into the Bogside - is that the end of them?

But, no. They were fine. They were true to their word.

The job that I got was taking them from the Bogside

to an army camp outside Letterkenny.

I done about three or four runs.

And it was people who wanted - who HAD to get out.

that was a full day's job.

I think that we started that morning about nine o'clock,

and we were working until ten at night.

I remember that was a long day,

because there were so many people who wanted to get out.

I believe that went a long, long way in the eyes of those people,

that the Swilly buses weren't as often hijacked

as maybe they could have been.

Amongst the worst days of the Troubles was July 21st 1972.

I think at the beginning of the Troubles,

people couldn't quite believe that this was happening.

By 1972, people knew that they were in a very, very bad place.

Bloody Friday was the flash that lit reality.

You could feel, over the city, that was really bad,

and something evil was happening.

The attempts to bring about a peace settlement involving the IRA

and the political parties had failed.

On this day, the IRA planted more than 20 bombs across the city.

All three of Belfast's Ulsterbus depots were targeted,

with the worst casualties at Oxford Street Bus Station.

It was the first time, actually,

that ordinary people watching their black and white TVs

saw something as ghastly

as human flesh and bone

being shovelled up on the streets of their own city.

It really brought home to you the reality of violence.

We swept up the body parts that day.

My God, it was shocking. It really was shocking.

130 people were injured,

nine killed.

Amongst them, four Ulsterbus employees.

It was a real test of everybody's humanity.

There were so many people injured, and so many killed,

and they were all innocent bystanders

and people going about their daily business.

That day was... It was horrific.

Even though that happened in Belfast,

I don't think there's a part of the country that didn't affect.

That day was a direct attempt at Oxford Street Bus Station,

to kill large numbers of people.

Belfast bus depots weren't the only ones to suffer.

In Derry, Ulsterbus property also came under attack.

I remember very clearly going to Londonderry,

where a number of buses had been burned at the Pennyburn depot.

What sort of price would you put on the damage that has been caused?

The extent of the damage, the replacement value,

will be something to the order of about £400,000.

There was just bus skeletons all over the place,

some of them still sort of on fire,

there was smoke coming from them.

Horrible smell of burnt plastic and engine oil and metalwork

and so on, and it was a scene of real devastation.

And one of the biggest depot fires that happened during that period.

MUSIC: "Let's Stick Together" by Bryan Ferry

During the '70s, two notorious political strikes

were to place buses directly in the firing line.

One was The Ulster Workers Council strike of 1974,

which had a massive impact.

It led to widespread power and fuel shortages

and brought Northern Ireland to a virtual standstill.

No surrender!

However the 1977 strike, led by Ian Paisley,

was to pose a greater threat to bus drivers.

Do you think that we have no honesty or decency or honour left in us,

as Ulstermen?

Although this strike did not have the same impact as the earlier one,

for the bus drivers, it led to a tragic event.

They were finding it very, very difficult

to get people to go on strike.

So what they were doing was intimidating people

into going on strike.

And you had a situation where if you could get the buses up the road,

well, then, people couldn't get to work.

So obviously the bus man then became...

He was the front line of the assault.

In this case, the Ulster loyalist paramilitary

began to flex their muscles - principally the UDA.

They stopped a bus on the 10th of May on the Crumlin Road in North Belfast,

driven by a family man with five children called Harry Bradshaw,

in his 40s, and he was shot dead on the bus.

A few days earlier, he'd been threatened by a woman

passenger who said he should be on strike supporting Ulster.

We had buses off the road for two days.

The day Harry Bradshaw was buried, I had...

I was at the funeral, it was in Carnmoney Cemetery.

We then had a meeting at Transport House at two o'clock,

and we were back on the road the next morning.

This might have intimidated thousands of workers

from going to earn their daily bread - in fact, actually,

people deliberately made their way to work

in protest at his assassination.

Very shortly after that, Paisley called off his strike,

because he hadn't been able to intimidate us.

Even murder didn't put us off the road. That was it.

This determination to keep the buses on the road

was a major objective of Ulsterbus at the time.

At the helm during these dark days, was an extraordinary man

who was known for his unorthodox management style

and his perseverance in keeping things running at all costs.

Enter Werner Heubeck.

Mr Heubeck, Werner Heubeck - our boss, as everybody called him.

He was a rare character.

It's quite a pleasure to drive a bus on the motorway at 70mph.

I know the general public knew him

all through the years as the man who took the bombs off the buses.

Werner Heubeck was one of those exotic creatures

in Northern Ireland in the 1970s - he was a foreigner.

What do they make here of your accent?

I think people are resigned to it.

-They've got used to it now.

-Yes.

He was very German, and being very German in the '60s here

wasn't necessarily a good thing.

Werner had a colourful history

that shaped his management style throughout the Troubles.

He served with the German Army during World War II,

but was later captured and sent to America as a prisoner of war.

He was elected by his colleagues to be their interpreter.

Even though his English wasn't great -

but he had to learn it!

When the prisoners of war were repatriated

he joined his family in Nuremberg and

he got a job as a translator with the war crimes trials in Nuremberg,

which was his home city.

During his time in Nuremberg, Werner met his wife and moved to the UK.

At the end of 1965 we were living in Aberdeen.

My dad was working at one of the paper mills on the River Don.

We came back from holiday and my wife said, "Could you run a bus company?"

So I said, "Yes, why?"

And she showed me the advert and I applied and I'm here

and that was nearly 20 years ago.

I've no idea why he decided that was going to be a new challenge,

but that was it, so we moved in January '66.

There were some at the beginning of the company who were very critical

about this man who had come in with no background

in their industry, as it were. And what did he know about it?

He very soon put them right.

WERNER HEUBECK: I was meant to be here in these times.

He had a way with him.

-A real gentleman.

-He was a worker's person, you know?

I had an awful lot of respect for Werner Heubeck.

In Northern Ireland, you can't run public transport

-from a desk in the office.

-You have to get out and do it?

-Yes.

He operated far beyond his pay scale by personally going to

the hijacked bus and going on board

and very often lifting these bombs off, and surviving.

The Army would have turned up with all their protective gear,

all of their protective clothing on

and normally Mr Heubeck had arrived before them.

He was just in his civilian clothes and he just went into the bus

and he knew right away it was just a hoax

and he lifted the object or the box

and took it off the bus and the Army then just went away again.

So Heubeck became a kind of a symbol of heroism.

-He was like a James Bond type of guy.

-He carried the bombs off buses!

To me he was either fearless or stupid,

I don't know which!

I'm sure that opinion ranges from being completely irresponsible

to being very heroic, it's nothing of the kind.

It wasn't a gung ho operation.

He didn't go in and retrieve it until he was fairly confident

that he had understood why it had been put there.

Sometimes it was a hoax, sometimes it wasn't.

He very near come a cropper one day, it was up at Finaghy.

We got a report that a double-decker was sitting on that bridge

and when I arrived the Army were already here and so were the police.

I happened to be there that day and I said, "I think it's the real thing,"

and he stood for a moment and he says, "I shall go and take it off."

I was just on the point of walking up to it to have a look when...

Up it went!

If he had have been... Only for the length he talked,

he would have been blown up.

I think we all turned white and nobody said a word.

Werner Heubeck just wouldn't roll over

and say, "I'm going to accept what's going on here."

He was saying, "Look, I've been through the Second World War,

"you think this is tough?"

I grew up when Hitler was in power

so I do know what it's like to believe in something which is...

..which finally turns out to be completely criminal.

"The odd package, the odd petrol bomb,

"the odd brick through a bus window ain't going to stop me and ain't

"going to stop the service that I am going to provide for this city."

Surely there must come an end when you say,

"How long can I continue to operate?"

Oh, we'll continue to operate. No question about it.

Werner was very keen to get the service

back on the road as quickly as possible.

We knew the public required public transport to live their ordinary

life and everything was geared to trying to maintain normal life.

One afternoon a double-decker came into Oxford Street bus station

and the bottom deck was jam packed

and there was nobody on the top deck, said the inspector was curious

and said to the driver, "Why aren't they going upstairs?"

"Oh, he said, they won't, there's a bomb upstairs."

I can't believe that paramilitaries didn't think at one point or another

that this man is a pain in our side

and we need to do something about him.

We would settle down for a game of canasta one evening and then,

of course, the phone would go and that was that.

He carried a weapon, I mean a lot of people in those positions did,

and you never knew when he was going to come back,

or whether he was going to come back.

I think it was a kind of fury that drove him.

He just wasn't having it,

he wasn't having this happen to his buses on his watch.

He couldn't have done it on his own.

There was all the bus drivers, there was all the depot managers,

there was everybody else that had equal determination

just to keep the service going.

While the drivers kept the buses on the road

the impact of the Troubles began to take its toll.

I have been bad with my nerves ever since

and I'm on a course of treatment from my doctor with tablets

and sleeping tablets and I've had to leave work on my doctor's advice.

Would you ever go back to being a bus driver?

There is no chance whatsoever I would never drive another bus again.

There was drivers who never went back to work

and there was drivers who went back to work and had nervous breakdowns

and had to pack it in.

You tried not to let it play on your mind, but it was very hard not to.

It affected the way you done your job.

There is a great talk now about post-traumatic stress,

an awful lot of bus drivers suffered from it.

An awful lot of guys gave up driving buses over that.

I know quite few colleagues who left the buses and never worked again.

Stress wasn't a recognised illness back then.

The philosophy that the drivers and also management,

the only advice that they could give is once it's over,

get back on your bus,

because the longer you stay off your bus the harder it's going to be

to get back, and we had to get back

because that was our living that we provided for our families.

I ended up with being an easy-going sort of person,

I carried it with me for quite a few years

and it was only after the Troubles had subsided

that a lot of things came back on me from that time

and I had to receive help just with my thoughts.

It was like flashbacks from those times.

About five years ago was actually the worst time for me.

You can weather the storm a bit better when you're young,

it's when you get older you become a wee bit more vulnerable

and think you are a bit more vulnerable and these thoughts

and recollections of those times come back to you.

When something's happening, you don't realise it's happening.

As I got older, I started thinking about things, you know.

I didn't realise that I had a problem.

Whether it was the Troubles,

I can't put it down to one thing or the other.

But I ended up with stress and anxiety.

I was coming from Claudy on the school run,

pulled the bus into the lay-by,

I pulled the hand-brake on and got out of the bus,

and never got into a bus.

It was happening to me, and I didn't realise it was happening to me.

It's like the end of the world when something like that happens to you.

MUSIC: "The Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats

# We can dance if we want to

# We can leave your friends behind. #

In 1988, the streets of Belfast were still dangerous,

but the buses would now have to operate without the leadership of Werner Heubeck.

I think he had the wisdom to realise that he needed to, you know, change -

to think about something else.

Eventually, he reached woodwork,

and that was the craft that really got him.

His retirement gift from the staff was a huge bundle of mahogany.

It was hung from a crane,

and I remember the press photographs had Werner standing like this

and the load of wood behind,

as though he was supporting the whole load.

'Today was Mr Heubeck's last in charge of the bus company,

'and he drove the Dungannon to Belfast express

'to mark the occasion.'

# We can dance, we can dance. #

I remember on the last day, he was finishing up,

I was doing the next bus from Belfast to Enniskillen.

"Ah, Mr Hughes, you're going to Enniskillen!"

"Oh, I'm only going to Dungannon but the bus is going to Enniskillen."

"Ah, right," he says, "I'll take her off the road." I says, "No bother."

I got down to the back of the bus and sat down.

He got on and he introduced himself.

He says, "I will be driving the bus up to Dungannon,

"and I can assure you and Mr Hughes can assure you, I have a licence!"

I think it's the end of my working life,

but it's not the end of life itself.

I have Werner's famous hat - the hat that he wore through the Troubles.

And even the union, who often crossed swords with Mr Heubeck,

finally got him to give them something for nothing.

The hat will be raffled and the money given to a busman's charity.

I ended up winning it!

I can't think of anyone else I know of in the transport business

in Northern Ireland who could have held the whole operation together.

If you knew him in his latter years

living here in Shetland, he lived a very quiet, unassuming life.

He would spend his days making cushions for the charity shops in Lerwick,

or Christmas, he would bake cakes for the staff in the local shop,

and the local doctors' surgery.

Nah, he wasn't a hero.

He was just a man who did his job and enjoyed doing it well.

Although the '70s is considered the worst period for attacks on buses,

in 1998, an horrific atrocity took place

in Omagh on Saturday 15th August.

The buses were to play a vital role in what was to become known

as one of the worst incidents of the Troubles.

I was in the Mountjoy Road when there was a massive explosion.

I ran on cos I could see the smoke, and I ran into it,

and I met people coming screaming and children screaming and blood,

people with blood on their face and blood on their hands,

and it was just like a war zone, you might say.

At that stage, we hadn't any ambulances.

They hadn't been called at that stage.

It was just happening.

At that very point, a bus coming from the depot

heading obviously to our garage, he could not get through

because the road was then closed,

and they were shouting at me, "What do we do? What do we do?" And I said,

"There's no ambulance - they haven't arrived yet,"

I said, "Put them on the bus."

One must really thank the people who carried them onto the buses.

These were only...these were people who ran out of shops

and who were in the town shopping.

These were the people who carried them onto buses.

We filled that bus to get it to the hospital,

but there were far more than that,

so there was a driver come along from the depot, and I said to him,

"Go back and find another bus."

I think somehow or other, we must have transported 80 or 90 people

to the hospital by bus. The drivers who were able to do that, you know,

they were marvellous men who were able to cope with that, you know?

Since the peace process,

the bus driver's life has become somewhat easier.

Attacks on buses still occur,

but they aren't anything like as frequent.

But to the bus drivers of Northern Ireland, who risked their lives and lost their lives,

to keep the transport system on the road,

we have a lot to be grateful for.

Transport is one of those industries for many of us,

it's more than just a job, it's...it's life.

I don't think that it'll ever be appreciated,

the contribution busmen made to normality in Northern Ireland.

The bus drivers of those days are very much among the unsung heroes.

They were very brave.

They kept us safe, as far as they could,

and they kept the wheels turning.

I mean, I think they were immensely brave people.

I've asked myself many, many, many times how we came through it.

I often wonder how we all got through those years,

but I would do the same thing all over again. No regrets. No regrets.