It's the sort of thing that might be seen onscreen in a bit of far-fetched action but one day a regular London Double-decker bus jumped the gap at Tower Bridge.
On 30th December 1952, Albert Gunter was happily going about his day job, driving the number 78 bus over Tower Bridge towards Shoreditch. To his utter surprise, the road in front of him seemed to drop away.
Back then there was a watchman at the bridge who would ring a warning bell and lower the gates to make sure no-one was on the bridge when it started to open nut on this instance for reasons not quite known, he simply forgot to do so.
Albert Gunter quickly realised that the Bridge was opening, and his bus was on a rising bascule. The bus was doing just 12mph but the driver realised he didn't have the space to come to a halt. Instead, he made a gut decision to slam down on the accelerator; luckily, the south side of the bridge was slower to rise and the bus along with 20 passengers made the jump of around six feet intact.
As a precaution, all those of on board were taken to hospital. Thankfully, there was only one person injured: Gunter who broke his leg. Amazingly enough, the bus was undamaged.
A passenger by the name of Pete Dunn gave an account of what happened.
Before we knew it, we were going across Tower Bridge but just as we had gone over the first half of the section that goes up there was aloud crashing sound and I was thrown onto the floor.
The bus came to a halt and the driver came round to invite us to have a look at the gap that had opened on the opposite half. The driver then told us that as he started to drive across the opening part of the bridge, he realised that the side that the bus was on was going up.
He said he could only think of two options as to what to do: one was to stop the bus and hope some-one would realise what was happening and stop it, but that left the possibility of the bus slipping back and perhaps toppling into the river; the other was to continue driving and to "jump" the gap.
He said that he had been a tank-driver during the war and that a tank would have had no trouble getting onto the other side and decided to see if a double-decker could do the same. So, to his quick thinking, we were all delivered safe to the other side.
Pete Dunn
For this act of bravery and quick thinking, Albert was awarded a day off work and a reward of £10 (around £300 in today's money). When asked how he would spend the reward, he replied "Five for me, and five for the missus"
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