A life-long fascination with buses fails to hide in this musician and TV star’s garage
WORDS SIMON HUCKNALL PHOTOGRAPHY STUART COLLINS
Fuzz Townshend neednʼt have given me his address. As we enter the small Leicestershire village where he lives, X – or, in this case, a 54-year-old double-decker service bus – marks the spot. For not only does the 58-year-old presenter of TVʼs Car SOS and Shed & Buried own an eclectic mix of classic cars, as youʼd expect, but also an ex-West Midlands 1969 Daimler Fleetline. And at 14ft 9in high, 33ft long and 8ft 2in wide, itʼs a bit of a landmark.
“My first word was ʻbusʼ,” says Fuzz. “My foster family lived on the Walsall Corporationʼs bus route, and from a very young age I was fascinated by the variety of different models they operated.” Ronald Edgeley-Cox was the Corporationʼs chief engineer in the 1950s and ʼ60s and it was his experimental bus fleets, including the first 30ft-long double-deckers in the country, that fuelled Fuzzʼs life-long love of buses. That passion led to an apprenticeship at the age of 16, qualifying four years later as West Midlands Passenger Transportʼs youngest mechanic. He also co-owned his first bus – a ʻshort-lengthʼ Daimler Fleetline – at the tender age of 17: “We paid £823.40 for it, and kept it for a couple of years. I think we just about got our money back when we sold it.”
Other buses came and went, including an ex-Greenslades Tours, Plaxton-bodied Bristol LH, which Fuzz converted into a camper: “Everything was reversible, so that it could be used as a bus again.” But with his career as a musician developing (heʼs the long-standing drummer for Pop Will Eat Itself and The Beat), and an unexpected move into television 12 years ago, it was some time before he saw another chance to rekindle his interest in passenger service vehicles. Then, during a visit to the Transport Museum Wythall just over three years ago, he spotted the ʻlong-lengthʼ Daimler Fleetline that weʼre standing in today: “It was just sitting there and, because Wythall already had a few Fleetlines, it was surplus to requirements. It n
