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Who's Who
Dr Caroline Cahm MBE PhD, President Based at Portsmouth.
Caroline is a regular bus user (she doesn’t drive, for which all road users in Portsmouth and Southsea can be eternally grateful!) and has been involved in campaigning for bus passengers since 1981, when she set up a local bus users group in Portsmouth. In 1985 she helped found the National Federation of Bus Users to protect and promote the interests of bus passengers. She has an unfailing conviction that pressure on the industry to provide good services should come from the ‘grass routes’, and has a healthy disdain for pomposity and over-formality. As President (formerly Chairman) of BUS USERS UK she has pioneered the scheme for providing bus users’ surgeries throughout the UK to help develop a constructive dialogue between passengers and the providers of bus services. She also worked with the Confederation of Passenger Transport in setting up the Bus Appeals Body to deal with unresolved complaints in 1999. She devotes almost every waking hour to the cause, but still does so on an entirely voluntary basis. Caroline was awarded an MBE in 1995 for her services to public transport. |
Gavin Booth, Chairman Based in Edinburgh
After a long career in the Scottish Bus Group, latterly as the group's marketing manager, he turned to transport writing and consultancy following the group’s privatisation. He has edited the magazines Buses Focus and Classic Bus and has written or edited some 60 books on buses. A regular bus user, he produced the original Good Practice Guide for BUS USERS UK to encourage bus operators to consider the needs of their passengers on and off their buses. Gavin lives in Edinburgh and is married with two thirty-something children and two grandchildren. He is an Elder of the Church of Scotland and has been known to write and perform in musicals in what little spare time he has left. |
Phil Tonks, Assistant Areas Officer Based in Stourbridge, West Midlands.
Phil has already assisted with Bus Users’ Surgeries, special projects and with Bus Appeals Body cases, and will develop that work now he is fulltime. It is also expected that he will help with Bus User in future. He sits on various committees and project working groups in the Midlands area, as well as campaigning for better bus services in the local media. Phil joins BUS USERS UK after 15 years working in the National Health Service, most recently as a manager in Support Services. He says: 'It's great to be joining BUS USERS UK on a full-time basis at such an exciting time for the organisation. Public transport and buses in particular are a great passion of mine and everyone within the industry needs to work together to unlock the fantastic potential I believe buses have.' |
Barclay Davies, Acting Officer for Wales Based at Cardiff.
Following the sudden and sad death of our Officer in Wales, Leo Markham, in April 2007 he is more involved in strategy and policy and in raising the profile of the organisation in Wales. Barclay joined BUS USERS UK from a finance and administrative background, and yes, he did work for the bank named after him, for 16 years. He took voluntary redundancy from Barclays in September 2000 and took time off to go travelling. During this time he met his wife, who was working for Reebok in Thailand, and he is learning Thai to enable him to communicate better with his Thai family. They have house and a farm in North East Thailand though he doesn’t tell us quite how he intends to commute to Cardiff! He is also learning Welsh to enable BUS USERS UK to offer a bi-lingual service. Barclay is a keen follower of most sports, particularly Rugby, cricket and football. He is an elected committee member of The Co-op Group representing both the South Wales area committee and the Wales & Borders Regional Board. ‘I’m involved with BUS USERS UK as, when they were alive, both my parents had to struggle to go anywhere, my mother being blind and my father suffering from heart problems’, he says ‘I know how important a reliable and robust bus service is to those without access to a car. Bus users need a strong, independent voice that only an organisation like BUS USERS UK can provide.’ |
Stephen Morris, External Affairs Officer Based in Shepperton, Middlesex.
He become a freelance writer on buses in 2000, after Caroline Cahm agreed to take him on to relieve her of the task of editing the news sheet, Bus Stop Jottings, which he has transformed into the all-colour magazine Bus User. He joined the staff of BUS USERS UK in March 2007, working part time to fit in two days a week as an elder of his local church. (Church eldership is not, incidentally, a pre-requisite of being a BUS USERS UK officer!) He continues to edit Bus User and other BUS USERS UK publications, writes press releases and is also BUS USERS UK’s representative on the Bus Appeals Body. He is married to a Kentish schoolteacher, Heather, and they have one late-teenage son. When time allows between buses, music and the church, he and the family love to get away from it all to Pembrokeshire to walk and watch birds. |
Stephen le Bras, Treasurer Based in Windsor
After leaving school, he joined an accountancy practice whose senior partner was also a bus enthusiast. After training and passing his exams, he set up his own practice and became part of his local business community in Windsor. He jumped at the chance of becoming a representative of the organisation which safeguarded the interests of bus and train passengers in London and spent four happy years on that committee. During that period, he was introduced to Caroline Cahm who happened to need an honorary treasurer and Stephen was delighted to be chosen. Having recently passed the magic 6-0 (he obtained a free bus pass on his birthday), Stephen is very much involved in the day to day routine of keeping the BUS USERS UK accounting records in shape, whilst continuing with his own practice and taking time out to visit places by bus, whenever he has an opportunity. |
Susan Dawson, Administrator Based in Stoke-on-Trent
Sue has an excellent track record of working in and for the voluntary sector and is a leading light on the North Staffordshire, now West Midlands, Passenger Transport Users Forum, in which role she has been successful in attracting some high-profile transport figures to Stoke-on-Trent where she is based. Many of the tasks traditionally carried out at Portsmouth are transferring to Sue. Married to a painter and decorator and with a son in late teenage, Sue modestly describes herself as ‘attractive, young, slim, 36 year old brunette, with a sense of fun’. |
Natasha Wedlock, Administration Assistant, BUS USERS UK in Wales Based in Cardiff Natasha is a politics and economics graduate from Cardiff University. Her role in BUS USERS UK fits in ideally with her post-graduate study at Bristol University, where she is reading International Relations. She hopes to pursue a career in politics. Her main hobby is cheerleading; ‘I’m not sure you could find something more removed from buses than that!’ she says. Natasha is Coach of the Cardiff University Cheer squad and she coaches several after-school clubs around Cardiff. She has always used buses regularly in and around Central Cardiff, and when she had been working for BUS USERS UK for less than a week she got excited when she saw her first ‘Bendy Bus’ around Cardiff. ‘Barclay had told me so much about them —how could I not!?’, she says. |
Caroline is a well-known figure throughout the bus world, and is a tireless campaigner for bus and coach passengers. She fills the bus operating industry with a mixture of fear and great respect, but by a non-confrontational approach she has managed to keep many operators ‘on-side’ with us to develop constructive dialogue. As a result the industry does sit up and take notice when it needs to.
Since May 2005 Gavin Booth has been Chairman of BUS USERS UK, with a particular involvement in matters affecting bus users in his native Scotland.
Before working full time for BUUK Phil did a lot of work in his own time when we were still the National Federation of Bus Users (NFBU). He is already very well-known by the major operators in the West Midlands and Centro, the West Midlands Passenger Transport Executive, and has also contributed a good deal of material to Bus User. 
Barclay is the first full-time paid BUS USERS UK officer in Wales, and runs BUS USERS UK’s office in Cardiff, which is commercially rented from Cardiff Bus. He provides advice to bus users and other agencies in Wales and handles users’ complaints. He also plans and organises the surgery programme in Wales. 
Although Stephen Morris is based in Shepperton, just west of London, he considers himself a Mancunian, having been brought up in Manchester. A keen amateur musician, he studied music at London University, and plays the bassoon and sings tenor — indeed he and Gavin Booth do a formidable double act. But his career took a very different path when, following a lifelong interest in, and use of, buses, he joined Ian Allan Publishing to edit Buses magazine in 1979.
Stephen Le Bras was born in Portsmouth, though a little before BUS USERS UK was set up there. His interest in buses seems to have arisen at an early age when he noticed the local transport passing his pram and resolved to find out more!
Sue Dawson has recently joined BUS USERS UK as our new administrator, and has set up our new headquarters in Stoke-on-Trent.
BUS USERS UK,
PO Box 2950, Stoke on Trent, ST4 9EW, UKT 01782 442855F
01782 442856E
enquiries@bususers.org
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