The origins of Service M23 can be traced back to Saturday 15th July 1922, when Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company Limited (BMMO—Midland “Red” Motor Services) extended one Great Malvern to West Malvern Service 48 journey to continue to Wyche Cutting and back to Great Malvern via Wyche Road. This was a circular route around the North Malvern Hill and was thus dubbed the “Round the Hills” service, and ran once a day during the Summer Season, Monday to Saturday. For the 1925 summer season the route was renumbered to Service 277 in line a general renumbering of all routes that had taken place on Saturday 16th May 1925, and for the 1927 season (starting Saturday 23rd July 1927) the route was extended to include British Camp and Malvern Wells.
On Saturday 8th October 1927, winter service timetable came into operation and Service 277 was suspended. By the time the summer timetable restarted the following year, the service had been renumbered to Service 373 in line with BMMO renumbered their entire network on Saturday 11th February 1928. Service 373 started operation on the reintroduction of the summer timetable on Wednesday 30th May 1928.
“Round the Hills” Service 373 continued to operate during the summer months, which for this route were usually early July to late September, with an additional Sunday service added at some point, until the close of the 1934 season. By the start of the 1935 summer season, the service had again been renumbered to Service M23.
During the 1930s, the BMMO network was expanding rapidly and the company was starting to run out of numbers that were available to use on new routes. To solve the problem, local bus networks were renumbered with numbers prefixed with a letter to denote the area. Thus, on Monday 7th January 1935, all local services in Malvern were renumbered with @#8216;M’ route numbers, and Service 373 became Service M23.
The route for “Round the Hills” Service M23 was the same as that for the predecessor, Service 373, and like that service, it was only operated during the summer period with three journeys each day in each direction, Monday to Saturday, and two journeys in each direction on Sundays. Service M23 was operated by Worcester depot, probably using vehicles housed at their Portland Road “dormy garage” in Great Malvern on some or all journeys.
For the 1936 season, the Saturday operation of Service M23 was withdrawn, but the service continued otherwise unchanged on other days of the week.
Following the declaration of war on Sunday 3rd September 1939, many bus services throughout the country were suspended, but BMMO closed their summer season and suspended Service M23 as scheduled on Saturday 23rd September 1939. Surprising, Service M23 was reinstated for the 1940 summer season and continued to operate throughout 1940, until the end of the season in September 1940 as normal. At this time, Service M23 was withdrawn and like many of the pre-war summer services was not reintroduced by BMMO after the war came to an end, and despite calls for its return from members of the public, “Round the Hills” Service M23 never returned.
| M | 2 | 3 |
| July | 1938 | Great Malvern ↔ West Malvern ↔ British Camp |