NEW SEPTEMBER 2023. One of the bus routes established by the GER ran from Lowestoft to Southwold.  By 1913 they were happy to transfer the route to a company called United Automobile Services.  United subsequently expanded its routes in the area, and because of their growing need for buses they set up a coach-building factory in 1920.  Its purpose was to re-body government-surplus lorry chassis from the First World War.

That was the start of the Eastern Coach Works.  By the 1950s they were one of Lowestoft's biggest employers. They had become part of the Tilling Group - a company which the LNER had had an interest in and which owned bus companies all over the country, including Eastern Counties and Eastern National. The buses they built supplied all those companies.

The Hooter was a magazine produced by the workers, not by the company.  They described it as 'the official magazine of the Eastern Coach Works Sports and Social Club'.  In a typical issue around half the pages contained reports from secretaries of the various sports groups and other activities.  The other half was general material intended to be of interest to people of the time who lived in Lowestoft and whose work was building bus bodies, and it is those pages which feature here.

A pile of fifty Hooters from dates ranging between 1950 and 1958 was available.  It was not a complete run, and there were gaps in their sequence. 

You do not get them in their entirety.  Instead 'cuttings' from them have been assembled into eight different 'scrap books' (not literally - no Hooter was harmed in the production of these files!).  The themes of these 'scrap books' are: 1 Some sample covers; 2 About the work they did there and the buses they built; 3 Some glimpses of the E.C.W. in the past (memories rather than a formal history); 4 Some technical notes (on things they worked with, such as glass and modern plastics); 5. Glimpses of life back in those days; 6 About Lowestoft and its region; 7 Adverts; and 8 Cartoons and jokes.  These vary in length from 8 to 30 pages giving over 130 pages in total, but since those pages are landscape in format and can hold two of the original pages side by side they contain up to double the number of magazine pages.

Three bonus files give more information about the history of the ECW, about Works hooters in general and about The Hooter in particular.

If you add the item to your cart and buy it, you will be able to download a zipped file of a bit over 50 MB.  If you are using Windows on a PC, right-click on the folder to get a menu and choose 'extract all...' or 'unzip...'.  What you then get are a set of files arranged as they would be on a CD.