Hugh Delaine-Smith

Hugh

Delaine-Smith

MBE

1920-95

One of the best known businessmen in Bourne in recent years was Hugh Delaine-Smith, chairman and managing director of the local bus company known as Delaine Buses Limited, founded in 1890 and now a household name in the locality.

He was born in 1920 and became involved in the business while still a boy, cleaning the buses at the age of eight and by the time he was 13, he was helping his father, Thomas Arthur Smith, with the company book keeping, becoming employed full time when he left school at 18. During the Second World War of 1939-45, he joined the Royal Air Force, serving with both Fighter Command and Coastal Command and at one time was involved in the development of the Spitfire fighter.

By 1958, he was running the bus company with his sister and fellow director, Mrs Beryl Tilley, and was subsequently joined by his sons Ian (1965), Kevin (1972), Anthony (1982) and Mark (1989). In 1995, he was awarded the MBE in the New Year Honours List for his services to public transport but tragically, he died on 15th March, aged 74, having received his summons to Buckingham Palace in May only a few days before.

The award was later presented posthumously during a ceremony at the company's premises by the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire. He also left a widow, Julia, and a daughter, Sandra. The Abbey Church was packed for his funeral on Wednesday 22nd March when the cortege from the bus depot in Spalding Road was led by one of the company's new double-decker buses that had gone into service only a few weeks before and was filled with floral tributes.

The business is currently run by the fifth generation of the family with his sons Ian as chairman and Anthony as managing director - the name Delaine comes from their grandmother's side.

HUGH DELAINE-SMITH - a profile by David Kaye
reproduced from Lincolnshire Life, June 1980

Photographed in 1980

On the outskirts of Bourne, along the Spalding road, stands a bus garage which has become the Mecca of transport enthusiasts from all over the country. They arrive in parties from as far away as Halifax, Leeds and Maidstone to see the Delaine fleet, and when Mr Delaine-Smith takes one of his Yeates-bodied double-deckers to a rally they are in ecstasy.
There has always been something a little different about the vehicles that this family firm have operated, their flamboyant light and dark blue and white livery, their chrome fleet legend affixed to the sides of the buses, and their decision to maintain double-deckers on country routes when all other independent operators in Lincolnshire now employ coaches on their stage carriage work.
But then Hugh Delaine-Smith is the fourth generation of the family to have transported the local populace and their goods. His great-grandfather (Bennett Smith) was a general contractor as far back as 1890, whilst his grandfather (William Smith) began to extend the business to include carrying passengers and acting as the local undertaker. However, it was really in the time of his father (Thomas Arthur Smith) that the transformation came about with taxis and then, in 1919, the first motorbus routes from Bourne to Grantham, Spalding and Stamford, using a 14-seater Ford Model T. In those days cars were repaired and various joinery jobs were undertaken to supplement the income from the pioneer bus services. His father even built the body of their third bus, a Lancia, in 1925.
Hugh Delaine-Smith recalls how his first connection with the firm was to clean out the insides of buses at the age of five. He remembers vividly the disaster when much of the growing fleet was destroyed in a fire on November night in 1928. By the age of thirteen he was keeping the books and finally he became a fully-fledged member of the Delaine staff at the age of. eighteen, just before the Second World War in which he served with the RAF for five years. Now he has his two eldest sons, Ian and Kevin, as well as his sister, Mrs B P Tilley, helping to keep the seventeen modern buses on the road.
During his association with the firm, which takes its name from his mother, he has seen the emphasis change from providing the peak number of journeys at the weekends when, in the time before the family car, bus outings were the order of the day. Nowadays, contract work, especially for educational institutions, provides much of the work, whilst recently there has been a marked increase in the volume of traffic during the mornings and afternoons of weekdays. On the other hand the Sunday and evening work has virtually disappeared (except during the summer months), since bus services and television programmes seem to be mutually exclusive.
His well-groomed buses are not the only thing that Mr Delaine-Smith takes an especial joy and pride in, for he is a collector of what he terms "transport nostalgia". He has a wonderfully comprehensive collection of old transport magazines, timetables, postcards (including Skegness in the days of its dog carts), and all the proceedings of the East Midlands and Eastern Area Traffic Commissioners dating back to their formation half a century ago. Public transport is his life, and he looks very happy on it.