Record PS–128 · Coach driver · Snowdonia

Henry Ozanne

Thirty years and four thousand ascents of the same pass, and the point where he stops talking.

Subject: Henry Ozanne
Occupation: Coach driver
Route or region: Snowdonia
Recorded: 22 August 2024
Duration: 2 h 03 min
Reference: PS–128

Introduction

Henry Ozanne began driving coaches in 1994 and has worked the same seasonal tourist route through Snowdonia ever since, for three successive operators. He is due to retire at the end of the coming season.

He is the most formal speaker in the collection and the only one who asked, in advance, what sort of thing we wanted. He also has a professional relationship with the sound of his own voice: he delivers a live commentary on every run and has done for nearly thirty years. Some of the phrasing in this recording is, unmistakably, the commentary.

That is not a criticism, and we have not edited around it. A man who has said roughly the same paragraph four thousand times has thought about it more carefully than most people think about anything.

Four excerpts from two hours and three minutes.

Recording location

Recorded at a coach depot, Llandudno Junction

Excerpts published

4 of the master recording. Timecodes refer to the unedited master file.

Access

Full audio and transcript are available to researchers on written request to the archive.

Transcript excerpts

Master duration 2 h 03 min

00:02:40

Four thousand times

I worked it out once, roughly, and it's somewhere north of four thousand times up that pass. Now you'd think that was a sentence, wouldn't you. A prison sentence.

It isn't. It's the same road and it's never the same day. The cloud sits differently. And that isn't me being poetical — that's a driving matter. If the cloud's down on the top I have an entirely different job on my hands, and I'll know that from the car park at eight in the morning.

00:18:25

The commentary

Interviewer

You do a commentary for the passengers?

I do, yes. The same one, more or less, since about ninety-eight. There's a joke about the sheep which I shan't repeat, because it isn't a good joke.

But they laugh. They laugh every time and I know exactly where it comes. And then there's a point on the way down where I stop talking, deliberately, because the view opens up on the left-hand side. Nobody wants a man on a microphone for that.

00:34:10

The same seats

You get the ones who come every year. There was a couple, from Bolton I believe, twenty-odd years they came. And then one year it was only him.

And he sat where they'd sat. I didn't say anything about it — you don't, do you — but I made certain nobody else was put in that seat. He came another three years after that. Then he didn't.

00:50:55

Putting it down

Interviewer

You're retiring at the end of next season.

I am, yes. And everybody asks me will I miss the driving. I shan't miss the driving. Fifty-two seats and a vehicle that width on that road — no. I'll be very glad to put that down.

What I'll miss is knowing something properly. I know that road the way you know a house in the dark. I don't know anything else like that, and at sixty-three I'm not going to now, am I.

Timecodes refer to the unedited master file. Hesitations, repetitions and dialect are retained as spoken.

Closing note

Henry retired in October 2025, two months after this recording. He has since written to the archive twice, both times to correct details of the route. Both corrections were right and have been made to the catalogue record.

Elsewhere in the collection

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