The Number 60 Bus To The Somme

Riverside Theatre, Chichester College, Westgate Fields, Tuesday, November 3, to Saturday, November 7

A NEW community theatre group launches next week with the premiere of an extraordinary wartime story.

Writer Carol Godsmark first heard about the London double-decker buses being used for transportation during the Great War when she read a feature in the Evening Standard.

“I was travelling in rush hour and saw this wonderful picture of this restored bus,” she recalls. “I just thought it would make such an interesting story.”

It was in her novel Ghost Army that she first explored the experiences of the men who drove the then brand-new buses out to the trenches, and the women they left behind.

But when she took part in a playwriting course at Chichester Festival Theatre she was encouraged to reset the story for the stage by her tutor Greg Mosse, who takes a writing credit on the final play.

“It’s very different from the book,” says Godsmark. “We decided to make it a much simpler story. They are very different characters too – Jim the driver in the play is in his early 20s, while in the book Ted is 45. I decided to write a different kind of storyline, but still based around the bus.”

The first half looks at the pressure placed on young men to sign up for the war – which was supposed to be all over at Christmas.

“Jim’s father doesn’t want him to go to war,” says Godsmark. “He has experienced it going overseas to fight in the Boer War.

“But Jim wants to prove himself to Vera his girlfriend so he defies his father.

“Communications were so few and far between back then – the press were far more jingoistic giving a very different slant on war and empire and how Great Britain was seen. People are much more aware today, and much more cynical.”

The second half of the play follows Jim’s experiences in France driving his bus to the battle lines.

The play has been chosen as the first production by Chichester Community Theatre after founding artistic director Roger Redfarn was shown the script by Mosse.

Formed last year by the former artistic director of Theatre Royal Plymouth the semi-professional team of actors and crew aims to help foster participation in live theatre in and around Chichester.

“It’s quite an appropriate topic,” says Godsmark, pointing to the recent centenary of the start of the First World War and the upcoming Remembrance Sunday services. Her own grandfather was poisoned by mustard gas on the front when her father was four years old.

“Greg and I have carefully balanced the history with the storyline so it doesn’t feel like a lecture. We do have a historian in the story to explain certain parts so the audience doesn’t get completely lost.

“Experiences like this do sound unreal especially when you think it all happened only 100 years ago. The buses had only taken over from horse-drawn carriages a few years before. The drivers used to sit outside the bus, so when they were travelling along the Western Front they would have been freezing cold or boiling hot. The soldiers were up on the top deck with all their equipment.

“The buses were used to travelling along cobbled streets and rough tracks because the roads were so different in those days. Most of the buses did come back.”

The full cast, which is led by Ben Cassan as Jim, also perform some of the music hall hits of the day, adding to the period atmosphere and underlining the pressure young men felt in the entertainment hubs of the day.

Music hall stars Vesta Tilley and Marie Lloyd appear as characters having played a part in real life by encouraging men to do what was seen as their duty.

“The stars would cajole men into joining up,” says Godsmark who has read soldiers’ diaries from the time as part of her research.

“They didn’t want to look like cowards in front of their girls or wives or mothers.

“War has changed today – back then it was all about manpower. They didn’t have aeroplanes until 1916. The psychological damage being done was terrible. People didn’t know about shell shock – you were just seen as a coward if you wanted to “do a Blighty” and deliberately wound yourself to get back to England.”

Starts 7.30pm, 3pm Sat matinee, tickets £12/£10. Visit www.chichestercommunitytheatre.org.uk/tickets.php