The day a London bus jumped Tower Bridge to avoid disaster
Of all the trivia about London’s iconic public transport, one example sounds a little too extroardinary to be true.
A few days after Christmas 1952, a London bus jumped the gap between the two halves of Tower Bridge’s road section after it started to open.
If something similar happened today, it might sound like a publicity stunt.
But for driver Albert Gunter it was more or less a matter of life or death.
His number 78 bus was travelling northwards on the bridge’s southern bascule when it started to rise.
‘It seemed as though the roadway in front of me was falling away,’ Mr Gunter would later say.
In those days, a gateman was supposed to ring a warning bell to confirm the bridge was clear, after which another watchman would order it to be raised.
But on December 30th 1952,the process failed, and Mr Gunter faced a difficult choice: stop the bus, and hope someone noticed before it began slipping backwards, or head on.
‘I realized that the part we were on was rising. It was horrifying,’ he said in an interview a couple of weeks after the incident.
‘I felt we had to keep on or we might be flung into the river. So I accelerated.’
His quick thinking allowed the bus to reach the northern bascule, despite reaching a speed of just 12mph.
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The horizontal gap was not very wide, as the northern bascule had not yet begun to rise, but the vertical drop was around six feet.
Twelve of the twenty passengers aboard received minor injuries, while Mr Gunter broke his leg.
Meanwhile, the bus suffered no notable damage besides a broken suspension spring.
Peter Dunn, a boy who was riding the bus, said he hadn’t noticed anything was amiss until ‘there was a loud crashing sound and I was thrown onto the floor’, according to a testimonial published by the City Bridge Foundation.
According to Peter, Mr Gunter explained to the bewildered passengers that his experiences as a wartime tank driver gave him confidence the bus could make the jump.
Mr Gunter was rewarded with a day off and £10 (about £360 in today’s money).
Asked how he would spent it, he said: ‘Five for me, and five for the missus’.
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