THERE’S been some noise in recent times about how progressive Worcester is running a Beryl bike scheme.
This allows punters to hire a bike on a short-term basis.
But in fact the city was doing much the same more than 100 years ago.
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In those days anyone seeking two-wheel transport would make their way to Cecil Marks’ workshop in Little London, just off Barbourne Road, and put their money down.
Adults could hire a bicycle for nine pence an hour while for children the cost was sixpence. In old money, of course.
This little nugget of information came my way when I was researching the life and times of Worcestershire’s first woman bus driver, a lady by the name of Sylvia Marks who was Cecil’s daughter.
Not even in her teens, she was born in 1908 and we are talking pre-1919 here, Sylvia was her dad’s main bike mechanic.
“My father hired out the bikes but it was my job to look after them,” she said.
“A lot of the cycles used to be returned either damaged or with punctured tyres and it was my job, as the girl, to do most of the repairs.”
This was Sylvia’s grounding for a career in transport and when she retired in 1967 she still proudly claimed to be the county’s only woman coach driver.
She eventually died in 1996 at the age of 87.
Cecil was born at Shrawley but, after fighting in the Boer War with the Worcestershire Yeomanry, he emigrated with his wife to Canada, working as an engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway before setting up on his own in the timber business.
Cecil James Marks (Image: Newsquest)
Sylvia was born in Canada but after her mother died her father returned to Worcester in 1914.
Sylvia Marks at the age of three in the grounds of her father’s sawmill business near Vancouver, Canada. She’s the girl at the wheel – obviously! (Image: Newsquest)
He was employed for a while at the Vulcan Iron Works in Shrub Hill before setting up his cycle sales and repair business in Little London.
In 1919 he moved to The City Garage in The Tything and opened a taxi and coach business.
Two of the first buses owned by Cecil Marks pictured in 1920 outside the Red Lion pub at Powick (Image: Newsquest)
This later moved to Bath Road before a final move to a large garage in London Road in 1925.
The Marks fleet in 1930 lined up in London Road, Worcester (Image: Newsquest)
By then the company had 15 vehicles and was running services across a wide span of south Worcestershire villages and along some main road routes.
These including taking workers to the Longbridge car works in south Birmingham and the Cadbury chocolate factory at Bournville.
However, the main road services were sold off in the 1930s so Marks could concentrate solely on services to Worcestershire’s rural areas.
Sylvia was a vital cog in the company machine and by her mid-teens was a self-confessed ‘Jack of All Trades’, touching up paintwork and doing repairs.
She began collecting fares on Marks’ buses in her teens and then in 1930 at the age of 22 qualified as the first woman licensed conductress in the West Midlands.
Young Sylvia Marks with colleagues in the early 1930s when she had just qualified as the first woman licensed conductress in the West Midlands (Image: Newsquest)
Nine years later she became the first woman in the West Midlands to be accepted and registered as a Public Services Vehicle driver, in other words a bus and coach driver.
This was in 1939 when Sylvia was 31 and over the next 28 years she drove hundreds of thousands of miles conveying a huge number of passengers.
Sylvia standing by a Marks bus in the 1960s (Image: Newsquest)
In the 1930s to 40s it was estimated Marks’ buses were used by an average of 2,000 passengers a week.
The company motto was that it ‘never missed a pick-up’. A claim aided by the location of its HQ.
If a bus refused to start on a cold morning it was simply pushed out of the garage and roll-started down London Road hill.
One of Marks’ regular services was between Worcester and Norton Barracks.
This was a lively job on a Saturday night for a lady bus driver with a full load of boozy soldiers after a night on the lash in the city’s pubs.
Sylvia spoke of two categories of soldier she took back to the barracks – those with passes and those without.
For the latter there was a gap in the hedge before the main gate, through which they hoped to creep without alerting the guards down the road.
Apparently the shout would go up: “ Stop at the gap, Sylv!” Which she always did before driving on to the official drop-off.
Sylvia at the wheel. No messing with this lady (Image: Newsquest)
After Cecil died in 1954, his daughter married Jim Williamson and the company changed names to S and J Williamson before being sold to Evertons of Droitwich in 1967.
And it all started by renting out bikes for nine pence a time.
