THE name disappeared from buses more than 30 years ago, but the centenary of Hants & Dorset is being celebrated this summer.

It started as a small business running four charabancs and went on to become part of a nationalised industry.

Today, its successor company Morebus – together with its competitor Yellow Buses – has seen Bournemouth and Poole lead a revival in the popularity of bus travel.

Morebus will celebrate the Hants & Dorset centenary with celebration on Poole Quay on Sunday, July 10, with 40 vintage vehicles running, plus stalls, memorabilia stands, refreshments and entertainment.

Morebus is the descendant of two private companies – Wilts & Dorset, which was established in the Salisbury area in 1915, and Hants & Dorset, which was established as Bournemouth and District Motor Services Ltd the following year. Originally based at Poole Hill, the Bournemouth company mimicked its counterpart by taking the Hants & Dorset name in 1920.

Hants & Dorset’s founder was William Wells-Graham, who had four Straker-Squires charabancs painted silver.

The First World War saw his buses requisitioned, but he replaced them with four second-hand vehicles.

In those days, Bournemouth council would not let him compete with its own tram service, so his services could not come any closer to central Bournemouth than County Gates to the west and Boscombe to the East.

The company’s routes expanded rapidly in subsequent decades. Both Wilts & Dorset and Hants & Dorset had Southern Railway and the Tilling Group as shareholders, and by 1949 both were state-owned.

Mr Wickham says: “In 1969, one National Bus Company was set up and they merged Wilts & Dorset and Hants & Dorset together.

“Hants and Dorset buses used to be green and Wilts and Dorset used to be red. As some sort of weird compromise, they made all the buses red but made them Hants & Dorset buses.”

In the 1980s, the bus industry was returned to private hands, and in the run-up to privatisation, Hants & Dorset was split into three. The result was that the Wilts & Dorset name was revived and became the name for the local operation.

Some Morebus staff remember the Hants & Dorset days.

“We do have people who go back 30-40 years and the odd 45-year person,” says Mr Wickham.

“I think they look back on it fondly because they were younger then and people tend to look back fondly but what people do sometimes say to me is that life was much easier then – because the big routes had a huge supply of government money then but they weren’t as efficient and the buses weren’t as busy.”

For many years, bus travel was in decline, but the trend has been reversed in recent times.

In 2014, it emerged that bus travel had grown in popularity faster in Bournemouth and Poole than anywhere else in England. Poole had seen the number of bus journeys per head increase 72 per cent in the previous decade, while in Bournemouth the figure was 62 per cent.

Mr Wickham says: “We’ve seen a high rate of growth. Clearly something good has happened here and we’re much busier than we were, with a much smaller subsidy.”

The centenary celebration next month will allow passengers to compare the modern buses – with their low floors, free Wi-Fi and phone charging points – with their forerunners.

“We’ll have a number of old vehicles, most of which did actually run in this area in the Hants & Dorset era,” says Mr Wickham.

“We’ve got some other old vehicles that didn’t particularly run in this area but we think people will like.”

Many of them will be running on some of the old bus routes. “The idea is to go and have a ride to see what these buses were like,” he adds.

“A lot of people here, and certainly myself, are immensely proud of our history. We moved people in the Second World War and even in the First World War, just about.

“I’m just the latest keeper of the business after many years. It’s been through the Second World War, privatisation, nationalisation, regulation, deregulation, fuel shortages, all these challenges.

“Although sometimes people say buses are a thing of the past, you go out and look at the M1 or M2 or the Bournemouth University buses we do and there are many thousands of people travelling every day who don’t think it’s a thing of the past. Our real challenge is to keep it up to date, keep it relevant to people."

To mark the centenary, former Hants & Dorset employee Christopher Harris will be publishing Hants & Dorset Recollections, covering the 100-year story of the company, with an introduction by Andrew Wickham. Due out next month, it will be a slimmer companion volume to last year’s history of Wilts & Dorset.

The centenary event takes place on Sunday, July 10, 10am-4pm, at Poole Quay.

All photographs on these pages are courtesy of Christopher Harris