Naming our buses

Before the London Games began, the organisers put out an SOS for extra buses to ferry the media and VIPs around the capital’s venues.

Thamesdown answered the call by sending six state-of-the-art Wrightbus StreetLite single deckers.

They’ve been hard at work since before the start of the Games, and won’t complete their duties until after the end of the Paralympics on September 9.

The buses will return to their home town in mid-October to be given a thorough check by maintenance crews and assigned normal routes across the borough.

But before they hit the streets they’ll be given a special naming ceremony, and the company wants our readers to choose those names.

To honour the vehicles’ service, it has been decided that the names will be drawn from those given to one of the most prestigious series of locomotives made at the Swindion Works in the early part of the 20th century – the Star Class.

Many of those locos were named after royal figures of the day, and we’re inviting readers to choose from this category.

This week it’s the turn of princesses’ names, and we invite you to select your two favourites from a shortlist of four. These will be added to the four names you’ve already chosen over the last fortnight, and we’ll announce the final result once we’ve counted all the votes.

The shortlist ...

Princess Mary

BORN in 1897, Princess Mary was the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. The princess, who died in 1965, was the sixth Princess Royal, and the honour was not bestowed again until Princess Anne became the seventh in 1987. Mary had an strong sense of public duty and did a great deal of work during the First World War to arrange for packages of treats to be sent to service personnel overseas. She was later honorary president of the Girl Guide movement.

Princess Patricia

PATRICIA isn’t a conventional name for a princess, but the daughter of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, a younger brother Edward VII, was no ordinary princess. Princesses, especially granddaughters of Queen Victoria, were expected to marry princes or kings in those days, but strong-minded Princess Patricia married a commoner instead. Admittedly the commoner in question was a future admiral and the son of an earl, so the other royals didn’t exactly end up having to count the silver when the couple came for tea, but the marriage was nevertheless a major Edwardian news item. Patricia died at 87 in 1974.

Princess Maud

THE name ‘Maud’ isn’t exactly a popular one for newborns these days, but when the youngest daughter of King Edward VII was baptised with it in 1869, many other British parents followed suit. While still in her early twenties she married the future King Haakon of Norway, and she was queen of that country from 1905 until her death in 1938. Her grandson, Harald V, is the current monarch of the Scandinavian nation.

Princess Eugenie

THIS princess, who lived from 1887 to 1969, was the daughter of Henry, a German prince, and Princess Beatrice, a daughter of Queen Victoria. She married King Alfonso of Spain in 1906, and on the way back from the ceremony in Madrid the royal procession was ambushed by a bomb-throwing anarchist. The Royal couple were unharmed. Exiled liked the rest of the Spanish royal family by political upheavals at the beginning of the 1930s, she eventually settled in Switzerland.