The Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Company Limited (BMMO—Midland “Red” Motor Services) first started operating local Malvern area services during the First World War, first taking over routes abandoned by other operators when their vehicles were requisitioned by the War Office, and then introducing new routes as the network expanded. Initially all of the local routes ran with the same route route number, but this must have been rather confusing as by 1924 there were eight different local routes for the area, all running as Service 48.
On Saturday 16th May 1925, the company renumber their entire network based on geographical area, and local Malvern routes were given numbers in the range 270–279. The first local route operated in Malvern had been between Great Malvern and West Malvern in 1916, and this route received the first number in the new sequence, becoming Service 270.
For details of early local motor omnibus operations in the Malvern area, see Service 48.
With the new route numbering system introduced on Saturday 16th May 1925, the Service 48 route between Great Malvern, North Malvern and West Malvern became Service 270. From 1922, certain journeys on this route had been extended to Wyche Cutting during the summer season, returning to Great Malvern via Wyche Road. This variation was known as the “Round the Hills†route and was renumbered separately to Service 277.
With the renumbering, timetables initially remained largely unchanged with ten or eleven return journeys to West Malvern each day from Monday to Saturday. Until this time, running of local services in Malvern on Sundays had been banned by the local authorities, who objected to working on the Sabbath, but in the face of increased Sunday traffic from outside of Malvern they finally relented, and so starting from Sunday 2nd August 1925, a new licence was granted and West Malvern finally had a Sunday bus service.
Further changes came on Tuesday 1st December 1925, when local Malvern Service 272 and Service 275 were rerouted to serve Great Malvern Railway Station. Times for Service 270 were adjusted and the routes were inter-worked to provide a through service from West Malvern to the station.
With the BMMO network as a whole expanding rapidly, further changes to the route numbering system were required and on Saturday 11th February 1928 the West Malvern route was again renumbered, this time to Service 366. In 1935, the route became Service M16.