Brilliant find. Looks like it was the collapsed lady who my mother seen being taken into the pie and cake shop not the deceased in pieces. Thought that was an awful thing to do to the poor tea time pastie buyers.
There was somebody hit and killed by a bus at the bottom of Balls Rd East at the intersection with Borough Rd, sometime in early '60's. I remember hearing the inspector say to the driver "If you don't get in that bus now and take it back to the Depot, you'll never drive a bus again"! Funny how things stick with you.
I remember in the 1960s when travelling through lower tranmere on a bus. It stopped at a bus stop and failed to start again. Eventually it was realised that the driver was experiencing a heart attack.
Some passengers removed the seats from the frames and made a sort of bed for the poor chap to lie down on, and an ambulance was called from a local house.
I remember being absolutely shocked though, to find that a fair percentage of the passengers' sole concern seemed to be that they would now be late for work, and how disgusting it was that a replacement driver was taking so long to be supplied! I never thought apparently ordinary people could be so casually callous.
I never found out how the driver got on. I rang the hopital, but not being a relative of course, they could tell me nothing.
A fuller description of the inquest (held the previous day) was given in the Wallasey News, Saturday August 22, 1931. As was the way of reporting things then, some of the text becomes a little repetitive, as each party is reported saying almost the same thing. The Wallasey News did however, include a photograph of Mrs. Whitman. This section of the article is appended here. Apologies for the quality as it is a scanned photocopy, but from the original newspaper. It appears that two of the four bolts on the prop-shaft coupling had already broken and dissapeared, so when the third one did likewise it left the shaft to pivot on the remaining one, which it did, so hitting the underside of the floorboards. The bolts had been replaced earlier in the year, and the bus checked a few days before the accident. At the inquest, the bolts were said to have 'crystalised' - what we would call metal fatigue these days. Other operators did not seem to suffer the same problem.
I read the news report from the newspaper earier in this thread and it turns out that my brother now lives in the house that the deceased Mrs Whitman and her husband lived in at the time of the accident, how bizzare!
