Roger Atkinson - Blackout, Austerity and Pride

204 6 — February to July, 1947
Parisian holiday – July 1947
When my 10-day leave in July 1947 came round, my school friend,
Mike Drazin, suggested that we go to Paris for a week. Neither of
us, of course, had ever had any opportunity of going abroad before.
It was Mike’s initiative, and he arranged it all. We made the
journey by train and the Newhaven – Dieppe ferry.
By 1947, one had huge numbers of British soldiers in the British
Army of the Rhine, as well as some civilians with the Control
Commission in Germany, but they were accommodated in army
camps or in British-controlled enclaves. The numbers of purely
Open-platform Paris buses
One of the greatest joys of Paris in 1947 was that the buses were
virtually all old ones with an open platform at the rear on which
passengers could travel. Hardly any new fully enclosed buses
had been introduced, but they did progressively take the place
of the older buses over the next decade or so. The rear open
platform was a venerable feature of travel in Paris. Neither of the
two pictures – one adjacent, one at the beginning of the Chapter
– illustrates the entire bus, but between them they capture
the atmosphere.
The letters CMP on an adjacent sign in one of the pictures could
be misleading in respect of the picture’s date. Under the German
occupation, the Vichy government of France transferred all the
Paris buses into the control of the Chemin de Fer Métropolitain
de Paris (CMP), primarily because fuel shortage had heavily
reduced the number of buses that could be put into service
throughout the war, leaving the Métro as the principal public
transport service.
This control continued after the war until the setting up of the
Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens (RATP), which took
over both the Métro and the buses from 1 January 1949. My 1947
visit to Paris was in CMP days; both pictures are from RATP years.
To the passenger, the distinction would pass unnoticed.