Bus driver cleared of assault on schoolboy (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Bus driver cleared of assault on schoolboy

A BUS driver found guilty of assaulting a schoolboy has had his conviction quashed.

John Telford, manager of Cross Country Coaches, was found guilty in March of assaulting a 13-year-old boy who harassed and insulted him on his school bus.

But that verdict was overturned yesterday when Swindon Crown Court ruled Mr Telford had merely used reasonable force to remove the boy described as 'cocky' by a friend from the bus.

"I am relieved," said Mr Telford, 54, of Windrush, Highworth, after the hearing.

"Common sense has prevailed.

"It means my record is now clear and I don't have to start thinking 'Do I have to start getting permission every time I do anything to do with children?'"

Mr Telford and his wife Barbara, 53, who is director of the company, said the boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had sworn at and continually harassed drivers.

"He would belittle the fact that you are a bus driver," said Mrs Telford. "It is quite subtle but it is constant.

"The thing with being harassed like that is you feel you are not in a fit calm state to drive, it is a distraction."

The boy would stand on the seats of the bus while it was moving and refuse to sit in an allocated seat, leading one driver to ask not to drive that bus.

"If you are the driver you are responsible," said Mr Telford, who was originally sentenced to 60 hours community service and told to pay the boy £25 compensation and court costs of £350.

"If we had left him upstairs running about and something had happened we would have been sued."

After several incidents the company told Swindon Council it would not take the boy any more but the next day, May 13 last year, he tried to get on to the bus.

He claimed Mr Telford punched him, grabbed him round the neck and shoved him off the bus so he landed on his back on the pavement.

But Mr Telford always insisted that after repeatedly asking him to leave he gripped the boy's anorak, turned him round and pushed him forwards off the bus using reasonable force.

Mr Telford thinks the boy should be publicly named but is not angry with him.

"He doesn't need my feelings," he said. "He has got enough problems of his own.

"I don't know whether he actually knows what happened or not. It was the fact that he could make an accusation and get more sympathy from his father."

And neither does he have bad feelings towards the pupils who gave evidence that he had hit the boy as he thinks they simply believed what the boy told them to fill in the gaps from what they saw.

"They were doing what they thought was right," he said. "The judge said once they were taken through their evidence step by step they actually did agree that perhaps they didn't see that."

Mrs Telford thanked everyone who gave them support after the initial court case.

Isabel Field