This time on BACK amongst friends, Ian Jones interveiws Paul Lynch, Manging Director London at Stagecoach Bus and the 2024 president of the Confederation of Passenger Transport.

Starting as a graduate trainee with London Buses in 1984, Paul was promoted through a series of garage management roles in East London. By the time Stagecoach bought East London in 1994 he was District Operations Manager. Moving as General Manager to Stagecoach South in 1996, and to Stagecoach's Swedish company as Operations Director.  He then became Managing Director of Stagecoach East Midlands in 2000 and performed the same role in the newly acquired Stagecoach Yorkshire business from 2006. Next was Regional Director of the northern English part of Stagecoach UK Bus in 2016, switching to the same role for London in 2017, with Wales being added in 2020. 

Following Stagecoach’s most recent reorganisation and 40 years since Paul started with the organisation, he is now MD for Stagecoach London.

Listen to how Paul  gained very wide experience of managing large complex organisations through times of change and difficulty, and with demanding clients. He introduced many innovations particularly in partnerships with local authorities and in commercial operation. 

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From sibling quarrels to inheritance infighting the sky television series “ Succession “ is the penthouse of dramas far above ordinary family mayhem. The award-winning show does not imagine what could go wrong in family empires it plasters together what has gone wrong in case after case of real life melodrama and applies a glorious gloss of word play and satire.

The farce makes for great telly especially as Logan Roy - the patriarch of the family - favours his only daughter. 

Family businesses can have strange dynamics and the show offers a tempting conclusion that you should never work with your family. 

But the truth is that family businesses - at their best - are world beating. They can outperform other businesses because they have high degrees of trust and communication. 

The antidote to the duplicity and shenanigans of Succession ,the tv show , is available for all to see at Earl Transport in Lancashire. 

It’s not uncommon to see curtain-siders with “. & son” after the family name of the haulier. It’s less common to see “ & daughter “ But that’s the position at Earl Transport in Accrington. Peter Hughes started this successful haulage company 43 years ago and his daughter - Rhian was so impressed by her father‘s business acumen that she followed him into the business and Peter’s  personal succession is now secured. But  Peter was farsighted and would not allow his daughter to come straight into the family business even though she sometimes did her school homework in the cab. He wanted her to gain wider business experience before joining the family business and taking it to the next level. Rhian  can now drive every class of hgv but is also no stranger to tv herself. In this edition of BACK AMONGST FRIENDS we  find out how Rhian was taken by Cadbury’s from haulage operator to television ice skating maestro. 

Talking of media this podcast is expertly produced down under. In today’s global village we have our podcasts skilfully edited by Mandy Turner in Australia who can be contacted at www.mandyturner.com.au 

Back in 1984 we were introduced to Beverly Hills Cop an American buddy cop action comedy film starring Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley, a street-smart Detroit cop who visits Beverly Hills to solve the murder of his best friend. The film  shot Murphy to international stardom.

It  was an immediate blockbuster, receiving critical acclaim and was the highest-grossing film released in 1984 . The theme tune was “the heat is on “by Glen Fry and was an up-tempo recording featuring  a steady drumbeat, synthesiser, and guitar, with a repeated saxophone riff framing the lyrical message. 

When the HEAT was ON from former senior traffic commissioner Beverley bell the lawyer of choice  for many operators had to be John Heaton - one of the senior lawyers at Backhouse Jones . John provides a steady drumbeat of advice to the transport industry and BACKS the bus up in this podcast to take us on his BACK to the future journey. 

Hello, darkness, my old friend.I've come to talk with you again “ are the opening lyrics to the sound of silence - the theme tune to the graduate written and sung by Paul Simon. 

This week we go BACK and forth  with an old  friend to many transport operators and he explains how he experienced complete darkness whilst driving a hgv through the deserts of Namibia. If you can connect Switzerland with the plains of Africa then you will have guessed that it is Matt Eisenegger  BACKing the truck up on his life’s journey within the commercial road transport industry. 

Matt ‘s surname is not only keeping up with the joneses it’s uniqueness leaves other names in the dust of his desert vehicle. Unlike the common or garden name of our host Matt’s surname is Swiss and came to the east end of london with his great grandfather. His father made the move north having met his mother through a Wallace Arnold coach holiday in Cornwall. 

In this weeks conversation Matt Circles BACK to tell us how he moved  from maintaining trucks to selling them to reporting on them and then publishing the #FORS Magazine. 

His Afrikaner guide  in the sands of #Namibia realised that Matt and his fellow truck journalists visited an area of Africa that nobody had ever previously visited. 

In this podcast we discover  if like Paul Simon’s lyrics “in restless dreams he walked alone” in the silence of the darkness. Thankfully he breaks his silence on how  his vision came silently creeping  to him whilst he was sleeping under a canopy under the stars .....

The word Apricity appears to have entered our language BACK in 1623, when Henry Cockeram recorded (or possibly invented) it for his dictionary.

It means the warmth of a yellow sun in winter. Despite the fact that it is a delightful word for a delightful thing it never quite caught on, and will not be found in any modern dictionary aside from the Oxford English Dictionary. That’s simply the luck of the English language at work and  shows that whilst chance is a fine thing - opportunity is always better and must be grabbed to avoid slipping into  the oblivion of apricity. 

An introduction to This weeks guest  invites  us to travel  BACK to Wyoming in 1883 when  the name and concept of "yellow pages" was introduced when  a printer working on a regular telephone directory ran out of white paper and used yellow paper instead. The rest became history until in due course the internet confined printed directories themselves  to history. 

This  only serves to confirm that fate can be an important in the creation of a business. 

 We might presume that Coldplay: wrote Nobody Said It Was Easy on white paper but  it was their song “Yellow" that exemplifies much of what has made Coldplay so popular. 

Nobody said it was easy to buy a bus company but David Squire did so in 2019 and then fate intervened in 2020 to made it a darn side harder but ever the optimist David has taken Yellow buses BACK into profit and in this podcast he BACK’s the bus up to tell us the story of his journey  and  he is a glimpse of sunshine after the long chill of a Covid winter. 

Princess Stéphanie of Monaco,Countess of Polignac is the youngest child of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, and the American actress Grace Kelly. She is the younger sister of Albert II, Prince of Monaco, and Is Currently 14th in the line of succession to the Monegasque throne, she has been a singer, swimwear designer and fashion model.

But what does she know about defending an employment tribunal claim during a Covid lockdown that requires ingenuity and a new set of skills during a virtual hearing. Let’s hazard a guess - that it’s nowhere  near as much as our own Stephanie. In this impromptu podcast Stephanie Walkerdine - a gifted solicitor in the employment team at Backhouse jones - takes a break from her digital court hearing to tell us how a court hearing might in retrospect  be understood BACKwards but must be progressed forwards and for this reason flexibility of thinking can sometimes be as important thorough preparation. 

This week’s guest is not the first ever female transport lawyer but she’s in the first three. She is a Solicitor of the Supreme Court and 
101 years ago she was not even allowed to be a solicitor. Indeed in 1913 the Law Society refused to allow four women to sit the Law Society examinations. 

The Court of Appeal upheld this ruling that women were not "persons" within the meaning of the Solicitors Act of 1843.

It was not until 1919, when the Sex Disqualification Act was passed, that women were allowed to practice law.

The first woman  to pass the examination  and be admitted to the role of solicitor was Carrie Morrison in 1922.

In 1931, nine years after Carrie  had been admitted, still only about 100 women had qualified as solicitors. 

The numbers continued to rise relatively slowly but as recently as 1967 less than 3% of solicitors were women.

Today almost a third of solicitors are women including Laura Hadzik of the parish of BACKhouse Jones. 

In this podcast Laura circles  BACK to tell the story of hurdles she has  overcome. 

For the record she wears rigger boots and lipstick  and does not think they are mutually exclusive. Prince William once warmed a seat for her on a train journey. Listen how here. 

BACK in 1953 Marilyn Monroe sang Diamonds are a Girls Best Friend in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.  Libby Pritchard - a legally blonde litigator - at Backhouse Jones is presently a Diamond’s best friend as she sparkled whilst representing Diamond buses NW at a  recent Judicial Review  and ensured that Deansgate in Manchester was opened up to buses after being closed by Manchester City Council. Also what exactly is the syrup she adds to her morning coffee? 

“A journalist enjoys a privileged position. In exchange for not being able to participate in the rough-and-tumble issues of a community, we are given license to observe it all, based on the understanding that we’ll tell everyone what happens fairly and squarely. That’s harder than it sounds.” So said the American journalist Bill Kurtis. In the haulage industry this privileged position has been achieved by a few but one name stands out and that has to be Brian Weatherley who started as the secondary photographer at Commercial Motor way BACK in the mists of time. After a 40 year career and rising to the position of editor Brian became  a champion of the industry and wrote about it with honesty and intelligence whilst also undertaking great feats such as driving a lorry from Munich to Moscow when the latter was BACK in the  USSR. 

It was all very well for Rudyard Kipling to bang on about “treating triumph and disaster just the same” but he did not have to return to the clerks room after the High Court rejecting his submissions as raising no arguable point of law. So said David Pannick QC in his Tales of Unimpressive Advocates . But in this podcast we hear from the clerks room itself which is the powerful BACK office in every barristers chambers. Tom Handley was the CEO of Exchange Chambers for 25 years until his retirement in April 2020. Tom collected legal anecdotes like others  collect stamps , butterflies or air miles. He BACK’s the truck up to take us on a journey from Reading jail to Bootle Magistrates’s court and in so doing confirms Lord Diplock’s assertion that the route of the common law is a maze not a motorway and involves regular detours past unexpected sights.