Britain's best selling steam & vintage magazine!

Meals on wheels - The London Transport Mobile Canteen

Despite the impression created by the classic TV comedy series On the Buses, most bus crews did not spend the greater part of their working day sitting in a comfortable canteen enjoying tea and bacon sandwiches and annoying their inspector. While the larger depots and termini did have their own catering facilities, there remained the problem of catering for those staff working on routes which terminated in areas some considerable distance from any of the regular canteen facilities.

London Transport’s solution to the problem was to use mobile canteens which were introduced during the early 1930s. The facilities provided were hardly sophisticated and at first involved the use of tricycles carrying baskets of refreshments until some of the ageing buses were withdrawn from passenger service and converted into canteen units. It was not until 1948 that a small fleet of purpose-built mobile canteen units was introduced and although most of these were later scrapped, it is fortunate that one has survived into preservation.
 
The work on the motive power unit, a Bedford OSS tractor, was completed to a very high standard in 2002, while the restoration of the canteen trailer unit has not yet been started.

The mobile canteen is part of the collection of vehicles owned by the London Bus Preservation Trust and is one of the very few LT service vehicles of the early postwar period to have survived into preservation. LT took delivery of 10 of these purpose-built articulated catering units and the trust’s vehicle represents the sole remaining complete example of this particular type. Another of the Bedford tractor units also survives in private ownership and although well restored, does not carry its original LT livery.

London Transport used a wide variety of trailers and converted buses to provide staff with mobile catering and refreshment facilities at many of the smaller depots.

Retired single- and double-deck buses had their interiors gutted and were fitted out with kitchen and cooking equipment, with the original seats replaced by small tables and bench seats. These buses provided a catering facility which could be moved from location to location as the need arose. In addition there were also a number of static kitchen trailers which could be towed between depots and which were fitted out with basic cooking equipment to provide crews with hot drinks and simple meals.

A more sophisticated approach to the provision of mobile catering facilities came in 1948 with the introduction of the small fleet of new mobile canteens. The fully fitted trailer units were custom built and hauled by Bedford tractor units which had been fitted with a Scammell coupling. The 10 tractor units were numbered sequentially 700B through to 709B while the trailers carried the serial numbers MC1 to MC10 and there were an additional three trailers which were not allocated to a particular tractor unit.

The trust’s Bedford is No 702B, chassis No OSS74343, which was registered as JXC 2 and delivered new to London Transport in May 1948 and was originally paired with trailer number MC3. The tractor unit was delivered to Spurlings at Hendon in May and a month later moved to the garage at Chiswick. As the vehicle was not actually registered until August 1948 it is probable that the final fitting out and commissioning was carried out in that intervening three months.

From the vehicle’s service log it would appear that work on the unit was completed by September and in October unit 702B was allocated to Merton garage and continued to work from there until January 1952 when it moved to Dalston. It spent time at a number of different garages during 1952 and these included stays at Barking and Potters Bar and it was here that 702B would end its service days with LT and was officially transferred to the reserve on April 10 1958.

The canteen trailer units were built by Spurling Motor Bodies Ltd, in Hendon and were designed according to their promotional brochure ‘To meet the needs of those who have to provide refreshments where no ordinary facilities exist’.

The canteen trailer built for LT was based on the Bedford-Scammell articulated unit. The overall length of the unit was 30ft, the body was 24ft 3in long, 7ft 4in wide and 10ft 4in high with an internal headroom of 10ft 4in. Internally the trailer was divided into three main areas: a modern kitchen, a dining room with seating and tables which could accommodate 16 people and a small snack bar. The fittings also included racks for coats and hats and there was a small wash basin with hot and cold running water and a mirror. While the kitchen area was reasonably well appointed, Spurling’s claim that this was ‘a kitchen to gladden the hearts of any housewife’ may have been somewhat overstated.

The kitchen was well equipped and included a gas cooker, refrigerator, water heater, larder, storage cupboards and a sink and there were electric fans which were designed to remove any fumes and cooking smells. Under the floor of the trailer were large tanks which held water and supplies of liquid gas and also housed in the back was the petrol-driven battery charging equipment. This was a 11⁄4kW Stuart Turner which was fitted in a small compartment at the rear and accessed through two hinged doors. Set above these rear doors was a small ‘coffee-stall’ hatch which also had two small fold-down shelves and this could be used to provide quick service refreshments.

The underfloor tanks which held the supplies of water and liquid gas were double skinned and packed with cork slab insulation designed to protect them against any possible frost damage. There was also a separate double skinned tank to hold the kitchen waste.

The body itself was built around a hardwood framework which was double panelled in 18swg aluminium and fitted with bus type windows. The roof was double skinned and insulated while the roof over the kitchen area was fitted with opening panels and some measure of additional ventilation for the kitchen and dining area was also provided by a 12-volt Ventaxia unit. The seating was upholstered in leather and the table edges and other metal fittings were all chrome plated and the floor was covered in thick rubber matting. When in use access to the trailer was through a sliding door in the side which had fold-down steps, while the trailer itself was made steady by the deployment of four Ski-Hi hydraulic jacks.
 
Despite certain limitations these new units offered far superior facilities to any of the converted buses which LT had used previously. The mobile canteens remained in service for nearly 10 years but by 1958 were already considered obsolete.

In that year the first of the units was withdrawn from service and in the following year 702B and 709B were sold to Liverpool Corporation PTB and delivered to its Eagle Lane works at Liverpool for refurbishment. At a later date, Liverpool Corporation also acquired units 703B and 706B and having made certain modifications to the seating and kitchen they continued to fill the role of mobile canteens for many years. The Liverpool units were repainted dark green and 702B remained in corporation ownership until 1974 when it was acquired by Cobham Bus Museum. The museum made some changes to the kitchen facilities and updated some of the equipment and it was again used from time to time to serve refreshments at its events and open days. Subsequent changes in regulations relating to mobile catering meant that the unit could no longer be used and it was put into store pending restoration.

The museum was faced with the usual dilemma of having to apply resources to a number of projects. Eventually it was decided that the first stage of the restoration of the mobile canteen unit would be the complete rebuild of the Bedford tractor unit.

Once that had been finished, consideration would be given to completing the work on the trailer. This in itself would involve a considerable amount of work and could be likened to the restoration of a single-deck bus.

The work on the Bedford proved to be more involved than anticipated and the hoped for ‘facelift’ developed into a complete strip down and ground up rebuild. The six-cylinder petrol engine and four-speed manual gearbox were overhauled, the chassis stripped and the cab removed. Rusting on the cab was quite bad and panels were either repaired or replaced where necessary.

Once the rebuild was completed the Bedford was painted in Chiswick green with light green around the windows which was the only livery the unit carried while in service with LT. That restoration was completed in 2002 and since then the tractor unit has attended many rallies and shows but is still waiting patiently for its canteen trailer.

Hopefully the trust will be able to find the time, money and resources to carry out the necessary restoration work on the trailer and this unique vehicle will be back in action once again.

My thanks to the London Transport Museum Archive, Nick Abbot and Neil Fraser for help with information and photographs.

Further information on the photographic archive held at the London Transport Museum can be found at www.ltmuseum.co.uk