I was very excited when I found this little booklet at a book fair recently. The front cover is rather grandly titled ‘Visitor’s Guide to Bath and District by Electric Car and Motor Bus’ and it was issued by ‘The Bath Electric Tramways Co. Ltd.’ There is no date and the only copy on LibraryHub suggests 1913, which looks a little late. I was intrigued by the ‘electric car’ aspect but this, in fact, refers to the body of an electric tram and not an electric car as we know them today. The company was established in 1902 and began operating their six electric trams in 1903. You can read all about them here.
At around the same time my home town of Brighton went one better than trams and ran a fleet of 12 electric buses. These proved very popular with the public, because of the quiet engines, but the company manufacturing them went out of business. You can read about it here. I recall reading elsewhere that the company only went bust because of internal fraud – the buses were reliable and popular. How things might have been..
I will be off to Bath at the end of the month for the PBFA Bath Book Fair. This is a huge two-day event with 75 professional book sellers converging on the city with countless thousands of rare old books, maps, prints, ephemera and more. Bath is a delightful city and the fair is well worth a visit.
I’m really looking forward to it, although I still need to buy stock for this and all the other book fairs later in the year. Can you help? If you have a collection of books, maps, postcards, photographs or ephemera to sell, please get in touch. An email, text or phone call is all I need to start with and you never know – you might have just the things I’m looking for…
