BUS

I kept hearing about buses being used to start Sunday Schools in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs, but I couldn’t work out how many buses there had been.

I asked one participant about this and she replied,
The bus? I think there was only one. Johnny Harper bought it from a camp. When he tried to drive it back to Blackburn South, he discovered it didn’t have any brakes.

Here are a couple of bus stories.


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Having attended both Presbyterian and Methodist Sunday Schools, my first contact with Congregationalists came when the Rev Doug Riley from Kew Congregational Church set up an outreach Sunday School on the block behind my home on the second highest hill in Melbourne [near the Balwyn/North Balwyn border]. He arrived in an old tramways bus, complete with seating and a little organ. Very few children to start with, but the area started to go ahead- we had shifted there in 1946, and the ‘Bus’ appeared-I think- early 1950. I believe I was still 13 when I was asked to play the organ for the singing, and to help in other ways.


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In the early 1950s I was a member of the Congregational Youth Fellowship at North Balwyn. We became involved in an outreach programme which used a rather elderly bus which we drove each week to a site in East Doncaster where we conducted a Sunday School and (I think) a monthly church service. The bus was of the old type with seats around the perimeter so it worked out quite well, I do not know how long this all lasted but certainly there was no Congregational Church in East Doncaster by the late 1950s.

Elsa and I married in 1957 and during that year I applied for every school in the metropolitan area as Elsa was still nursing in the city. I was appointed to Forest Hill Primary School in the 3rd term—and had to look up a map to find it! After we moved into the area in 1958 we decided to attend the nearest Congregational Church and found it was in Charlotte Street, South Blackburn. We found that the services were being conducted in the old bus, now parked permanently on the South Blackburn site. Within a couple of years an all-purpose hall was built on the site and a very faithful church community developed.

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Next: Chapter 5. Growing up Congregationalist

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