Bedford Buses and Coaches E-Book

Nigel R B Furness

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Bedford Buses and Coaches provides a detailed review of the entire range of purpose-built Public Service Vehicle (PSV) bus and coach chassis that carried the Bedford name from 1931 until production ceased in 1986. Bedfords were once a familiar sight on the roads not only of the United Kingdom, but throughout the world. They were produced in such volume that the advertising slogan 'You see them everywhere' was quite legitmately adopted by Vauxhall Motors, the manufacturer of Bedford vehicles. Fully illustrated thoughout with hundreds of photographs, the majority in colour, the book includes detailed descriptions of the Bedford petrol and diesel engines and other manufacturers engines used in Bedford bus and coach chassis. Detailed specifications and production histories are given for all the full-size passenger chassis including the WHB/WLB, WTB, OB/OWB, SB, VAS, VAL, VAM, Y-series and the Venturer. Road tests and owners' experiences are covered along with advice on buying and restoring a Bedford bus or coach. This book will be of great interest to all bus enthusiasts and historians and is superbly illustrated with 200 colour and 50 black & white photographs.

Leseprobe

BEDFORD

Buses and Coaches

BEDFORD

Buses and Coaches

Nigel R.B. Furness

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2016 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2016

© Nigel RB. Furness 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 208 3

CONTENTS

Introduction and Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1 THE BEDFORD STORY

CHAPTER 2 THE WLG, WHB, WLB, WTL AND WTB

CHAPTER 3 THE OB AND OWB

CHAPTER 4 THE SB

CHAPTER 5 THE ENGINES

CHAPTER 6 THE VAS, VAL AND VAM

CHAPTER 7 THE Y SERIES

CHAPTER 8 THE FINAL VENTURES – THE JJL AND YNV

CHAPTER 9 GOODS CHASSIS CONVERTED FOR PSV USE

CHAPTER 10 PRESERVING A BEDFORD BUS OR COACH

Appendix – Engines fitted to Bedford Buses and Coaches

Bibliography

Index

____________________________

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

On mentioning to my wife that I intended to write a book about Bedford buses and coaches, amongst her many observations there was one that stood out – ‘you used to see them everywhere, didn’t you?’, although by this time the Bedford name had all but disappeared. Indeed, buses and coaches of Bedford manufacture had not actually been made for nearly thirty years. This shows how strongly the Bedford name had been impressed upon the public consciousness. The irony is that Bedford once used almost the very same words – ‘you see them everywhere’ – in its advertising. It has also been said that in their most popular days, of all the buses and coaches on the road in the UK, almost half were Bedfords.

Being the progeny of Vauxhall, a volume car manufacture, the characteristics of the Bedford were those of a mass production vehicle: light weight, relatively cheap to buy and easy to service and maintain. As such, Bedford buses and coaches were the ideal rolling stock for the smaller independent operator of private hire and coach tours, who, almost as an addition, might run a single local service to the nearest town on market day. While they naturally became the mainstay of such operators, a use could still be found for them in the fleets of the large territorial company operators. The Bedford OB and OWB in particular were bought by both the Tilling and BET groups during the Second World War and the early 1950s. While Tilling preferred to buy its home-produced Bristol/ECW buses and coaches wherever possible, the role the lightweight bus could play was acknowledged and Tilling/BTC built its own version of the Bedford SB, which they called the Bristol SC, utilizing many Bedford components in its construction. Other Bedfords in due course found their way in small numbers into those fleets, and those of the BET federation too.

Interestingly, the large territorial bus companies that once flourished have now, like Bedford, passed into history, victims all of high finance and changing times, while many small family businesses that built themselves on Bedford and stayed loyal to the marque until the very end are still with us. Coaches may still be hired from Kenzies, Jeffs or Lodge’s and one can still ‘Go Whittle’, though the latter is no longer family owned. On a recent trip north I noticed at least half-a-dozen coaches bearing names that will be familiar to readers who make it to the end of this book.

My own introduction to the Bedford came at the age of eight, when my family first holidayed in Devon. We stayed (in a caravan, naturally, as any working-class family of the time would have done) at Woolacombe. The beach there had this most wonderful of things for the embryonic engineer – a freshwater stream that ran down to the sea that could be dammed and diverted, keeping an eight-year-old boy occupied for hours. I digress, but only slightly; on our first visit to the beach and even before I discovered the pleasures of the stream, my attention was caught by a handsome two-tone blue 1953 Duple Vega-bodied Bedford SB, the property of Blue Coaches of Ilfracombe. This vehicle provided the direct bus service between Woolacombe and Ilfracombe via Mortehoe, as announced by a neatly painted board mounted on the front of the bus, precisely the sort of job the Bedford was made for. I pestered and pestered my parents for a ride on the bus, but my mother was far too proud of our brand-new Vauxhall Viva to consider foregoing its pleasures in favour of its more antiquated and much bluer big brother. So I was denied the opportunity to make a more intimate acquaintance with ODV 38. We returned, year on year, to North Devon well into the 1970s and my blue friend was always there, patiently waiting, until one year it wasn’t, and that was that. I missed it, and regretted an opportunity lost.

By that time I had, however, become much more familiar with the products of Dunstable; they were much favoured by the luxury coach operators in Bristol, the largest of which traded as Wessex and operated a fleet of quite modern Bedfords. Thus I got my first ride on an SB, a Duple Bella Vega coach, the luxury version of my old friend ODV 38. The occasion was less joyous, though, as my school used Wessex to provide transport to their playing fields in the Somerset countryside, where I was able to spend several hours being legally abused by my peers in the name of sport. The one thought that kept me going though this iniquity was of course the pleasure of the ride back on the Wessex Bedford. However, Wessex must have tired of the destruction wreaked by unappreciative schoolboys on its smart grey and red luxury coaches and replaced them for this purpose with a somewhat more robust, but oh, so much slower and more uncomfortable, former London Transport RTW double-decker. This dark blue heap of shivering rust and dripping nicotine did nothing to endear me to London buses. Thus my interest in and affection for Bedford began over fifty years ago and continues to this day. I have found, like my father before me, much to commend in the Vauxhall marque and have owned a number, including Bedford light vans, over the years and have always found them enduring and reliable.

In writing Bedford Buses and Coaches, it was not my intention to set forth the definitive history of Bedford but rather to provide a comprehensive survey of the buses and coaches produced through the years. The UK once had a flourishing and diverse coachbuilding industry, with coachbuilders large and small building on the Bedford chassis. Small operators in the UK often ordered their chassis in ones and twos through the local Vauxhall/Bedford dealer such as Arlington Motor Co., Vincent Greenhous, SMT and others and had them bodied at the nearest coach works. Others still, such as Shreeve, who traded as Belle Coaches of Lowestoft, built their own bodies on Bedford chassis, so diversity was inherent. Because such large quantities were sold in this way throughout the United Kingdom and the wider world, it has not been possible to trace every instance of a Bedford sale and every operator who used them. To do so would be an enormous task. I have therefore included only those sales that I considered significant or interesting; in doing so, I realize that this might be subjective so I apologize if I have neglected to mention the reader’s favourite vehicle or operator. I have also tended to concentrate on the UK market, though Bedford was responsible for significant exports throughout the world. The subject of Bedford overseas remains to be properly addressed and would be an interesting, though challenging, piece of research. I am aware that a number of individuals are pursuing this currently; I look forward to reading the results in due course.

One of the consequences of their ubiquity is that for many years Bedford tended not to be of great interest to the keen public transport enthusiast, whose attentions were often focused on the heavyweight products from manufacturers like AEC, Bristol, Daimler, Guy, Leyland and others. The humble Bedford was ignored because ‘you see them everywhere’. Also, for the die-hard bus-spotters of the author’s teenage years, who immersed themselves in fleet numbers and esoteric details of allocations, transfers and routes, the Bedford was a slippery so-and-so, sold and resold through a network of dealers and in some cases spending only a few years with each owner before passing on to another – much like Vauxhall’s family cars – making them difficult to keep track of, although Buses Illustrated magazine and its contributors recorded as many movements as they could. Without the spotter’s attention to detail the records would be far less complete, and to them we owe a debt of gratitude. Fully detailed records of the sales, resales and movement of Bedford buses and coaches are therefore hard to find and the PSV Circle has only recently been able to produce some data on Bedford chassis.

In the early years of the preservation movement Bedford similarly tended to be neglected, with the exception of the OB/Duple Vista combination, which must surely equal the Routemaster in being instantly recognizable to the general public and in numbers in preservation. With the passage of time, a new generation of preservationists has grown up and thankfully taken the Bedford under its wing, so now we are seeing many of the later models entering preservation. New age travellers need to be mentioned here for they have been instrumental in saving many old buses and coaches, including Bedfords, and many of whom were and continue to be enthusiasts for the vehicles. It is in no small way due to them that such vehicles have survived to find their way into the hands of restorers and preservationists.

In consideration of the vehicles themselves, I have tried to provide as full technical details as possible for all the principal models – that is those specifically intended for Public Service Vehicle (PSV) use. This was the term used to describe buses and coaches that was in common use during the era of Bedford so I have used it throughout; such vehicles are now referred to as PCVs – Passenger Carrying Vehicles. Such is the adaptability and versatility of the Bedford lightweight chassis, however, that many Bedford-based passenger vehicles have been built on chassis whose primary function was as light trucks or vans; these have not been ignored but have been given a somewhat more generalized treatment due to their diversity and the fact that, once purchased, a Bedford chassis could be used for anything the owner could find to do with it within the law. I have, however, tried to describe a good selection of these in the appropriate chapter. It is perhaps surprising that Bedford did not produce a low-cost double-deck chassis in the same idiom as its single-deck coaches and buses. In fact Bedford did consider building a double-deck bus in collaboration with a major coachbuilder in the 1970s, but nothing came of the idea.

In researching this book, my sources have been the manufacturer in the case of technical information, the range of Bedford instruction books and service manuals containing a wealth of detail – though it must be noted that Bedford’s own advertising and technical literature was prone to errors and inconsistencies, so if I have failed to identify (and therefore propagated) any of these errors, I apologize. A particular idiosyncrasy of Bedford was to refer to the capacity of its engines in cubic inches, rather than the more common cubic centimetres or litres. I suspect the reason for this lies in Bedford’s overlord, the General Motors Corporation of America. US car manufacturers were long wedded to imperial dimensions, demonstrating a useful consistency not always found in the European motor industry. Where I quote measurements, I have generally given the metric equivalent in parentheses. The exception to this rule is the chapters on the Y-series chassis and YNV; these chassis were built to metric dimensions and legal limits that were defined in metric units and so, rightly, these take precedence and their imperial equivalent is less meaningful. Where Vauxhall and Bedford used dimensions as proper names, as in ‘the 214cu in engine’, I have not given an equivalent metric dimension in this context as these will be found in the text describing the detailed specifications of the engines.

In pursuance of production and sales figures, it is sad to relate that Vauxhall no longer have any records from that period of their history that covers the Bedford marque and indeed, with the passage of time, no one within the company now or at Vauxhall Heritage knows when, where and how they were disposed of. The PSV Circle records, ‘Bus Lists on the Web’, contemporary press reports and other secondary sources of data have therefore provided the majority of the statistics for numerical analysis and information on individual vehicles. Photographic and other evidence, including comments from acknowledged experts, has suggested that the published records are quite incomplete and contain many errors, so numbers are for guidance and purposely approximate; in their defence it must be stated that the collators of these data have a different agenda and generally focus on the history of individual vehicles.

I have perhaps laboured this point, but feel obliged to do so in light of recent calls in the enthusiast media for authors of bus and coach books to take more care over the accuracy of facts and figures. While an easy request to make, it is somewhat harder to fulfil in practice with anything like the degree of confidence implied, as any researcher into historical data will confirm. However, such calls are well meant so with that in mind, I would be very pleased to hear from anyone who disagrees with my facts and figures – please contact me via the publisher, but in doing so I would ask that you include your provenance and sources for any data you challenge so I can confirm and report the conclusions of your research with confidence.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A work of this complexity could not have been achieved without assistance from others, so now is the time to acknowledge and thank them for giving freely of their time. Andrew Duerden at Vauxhall Heritage, Luton, provided a number of historic images and brochures and expressed his views on the subject matter. Images from the Vauxhall Heritage archive are credited ‘VH’ in the captions. George Atkin, Roger Chambers and William Staniforth provided me with many useful contacts, vehicle details and other information. Bedford bus and coach owners Terry Jones, Cyril Kenzie, Andrew Lodge, Andy Mccarthy, Dave Prosser, Mike Walker and Mark Withers all provided me with information about and images of their vehicles and patiently endured my questions, as did the aforementioned George Atkin and Roger Chambers. I must also mention my Bedford expert proofreader who prefers to remain anonymous (as he put it, ‘I don’t want to have to buy a tin hat’), but he knows who he is.

Uncredited colour images are drawn from my own collection, to which the photography of Stuart J. Brown, Hugh Jones, Kevin Lane and Cliff Essex has made a significant contribution. Other images have come courtesy of Paul Bateson, Les Simpson, Andy Strong and Terry Walker, who also supplied information about the Cravens Homalloy bus, and others as acknowledged in the captions. Terry Jones needs a further mention for reading the manuscript and correcting a number of errors.

My wife Anne made many phone calls on my behalf to badger various people into providing information and vehicle profiles and proofread the manuscript. I know very well that she would really rather I finished all my outstanding preservation and restoration projects rather than spend my time sat in front of a computer surrounded by technical manuals. My daughter Rebecca also performed secretarial duties for me from time to time and helped organize meetings with vehicle owners.

CHAPTER ONE

____________________________

THE BEDFORD STORY

ORIGINS

Vauxhall Motors has its origin in the firm of Alex Wilson & Co. Engineers, a business established by Alexander Wilson in 1857 at premises near to Vauxhall Gardens, a large park and pleasure gardens originally laid out in the late seventeenth century. By Alexander Wilson’s time the place had acquired something of an unsavoury reputation for being the haunt of vagabonds and ‘ladies of easy virtue’ and so the gardens closed in 1859.

The company had principally been involved in the manufacture of marine engines and pumps. Wilson left the company in 1897 and it was at this time that the firm’s name was changed to the Vauxhall Ironworks Company Ltd. This event has some bearing on the history of Bedford owing to speculation on how the name ‘Bedford’ came to be adopted. The first motor car appeared from the Ironworks in 1903 and was called a Vauxhall – clearly in the tradition of names related to place of origin – so it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that the Bedford name is the consequence of the product having been manufactured at Dunstable in Bedfordshire. One might argue that a logically correct consequence would have been to name the product ‘Dunstable’, but Bedford is nearby and trips off the tongue somewhat more easily, an important marketing consideration. It is hard to imagine a purveyor of seaside tours calling out ‘come for a ride in my new Dunstable!’ – with due respect to the denizens of that town, of course.

The griffin emblem associated with Vauxhall and Bedford was chosen by Alexander Wilson for his company as a result of a legend concerning the name of the area known as Vauxhall; allegedly the name is a corruption of ‘Fulke’s Hall’, after Fulk le Breant, a minor thirteenth-century nobleman of Normandy whose coat of arms included the griffin. By curious coincidence, le Breant held the manor of Luton, whence the car manufacturing side of the Vauxhall Ironworks came in 1905, bringing the griffin back to Luton, as it were.

Vauxhall Arrives in Luton

The expansion of the business soon started to put pressure on the south London site, which was leased rather than owned, so Vauxhall Motors came to Luton in 1905. There they found a seven-acre site in Kimpton Road on which they could set up manufacturing premises. On 29 March 1905 the first Luton-built car left the factory. The cars produced by Vauxhall at Luton in the period up to the early 1920s acquired a reputation for quality and reliability as well as achieving a good deal of success in sporting events. These included the famous ‘Prince Henry’ models, which have been called the first true British sports car – entirely fitting, then, that one of best performing and best looking of the recent crop of small sports cars is the Vauxhall VX220. The early cars were not particularly cheap and indeed were often to be found in the possession of the wealthier motorist. By 1922, sporting success was becoming rarer for Vauxhall and sales were dropping off, so the emphasis changed to producing a cheaper range of cars for the ‘ordinary’ motorist in the hope of increasing sales. It was during this period that the name ‘Bedford’ first appeared, being used for a saloon car body produced on the L-type 14/40 chassis.

GENERAL MOTORS TAKES AN INTEREST

Vauxhall was struggling to compete in the mass car market in the early 1920s – its production methods were outdated and expensive and they had yet to apply the techniques of mass production pioneered by Ford and others in the USA. The company tried to address this by reorganizing the Luton factory to incorporate a production line, but as this was largely applied only to engine manufacture it did not achieve the success that was hoped for. It didn’t help that there seemed little will from the most senior management; Leslie Walton, the company chairman, claimed that the Vauxhall workforce was neither trained, nor equipped nor had the desire to produce large quantities of mass produced cars and so would continue the policy of producing a limited number of quality cars at a commensurate price. This ‘can’t do’ attitude, the fall-off in sales and a growing financial crisis within the company put Vauxhall Motors in a position where it was ripe for absorption by a larger manufacturer.

At the same time, US automotive manufacturer General Motors Corporation (GM) was looking for a way to build its market in the UK. GM had established a small plant at Hendon, Middlesex, in 1923 to build cars from its US product range and Chevrolet light commercials for sale in the UK. These were imported in kit form then assembled at Hendon in order to benefit from lower import tariffs compared with bringing in complete cars. This enterprise did not grow as rapidly as hoped, being disadvantaged by competition from cheaper mass-produced models from Austin and Morris; the Buicks, Cadillac, La Salle and Chevrolets attracting higher engine size tax, more expensive insurance and higher servicing costs compared with home-grown models. The Hendon plant was turned over to the production of Chevrolet commercial vehicles utilizing locally built bodies and GM decided that its best option to maintain a slice of the UK automobile market was to acquire a ready-made UK operation. GM’s first choice was Austin. While Herbert Austin himself was favourably disposed to the proposed purchase, the majority of Austin’s board of directors were not, favouring a modest expansion plan of their own rather than allow the company to fall into US ownership, something that was felt would damage the company’s standing in the eyes of the public and attract criticism from the motoring press.

Vauxhall, on the other hand, had no such qualms. Negotiations took around two months and Vauxhall passed into GM ownership on 25 November 1925. GM paid $2,575,291 for Vauxhall, which, taking the gold-standard exchange rate for 1925 at $4.87 to the pound amounted to £528,807. Despite the takeover, Vauxhall’s problems were not over; financial losses continued through 1927 to 1929. As Austin’s directors had feared, the British motoring press were scathing in their criticism of Vauxhall, Motor being the most vociferous in its attacks to the point where Vauxhall withdrew its advertising and loan of cars for testing with the magazine for nearly two years.

BEDFORD COMMERCIALS BEGIN

A significant event resulting from the takeover was the transfer of manufacture of Chevrolet trucks from Hendon to Luton in 1929. This included the LQ model, which could be bodied as a small bus with around fourteen to sixteen seats and from 1928 onwards was fitted with the ‘Stovebolt Six’ Chevrolet straight-six ohv petrol engine. This engine became the foundation from which all Bedford petrol engines would be derived. One of the problems faced by General Motors was that Chevrolet was also an American company, the products of which were not allowed to be exported from the UK. Thus it was necessary to establish a British brand if GM were to break into the export market with commercials made in the UK. It is most likely this factor that prompted the establishment of ‘Bedford’ as a brand for commercials built at Vauxhall’s Luton plant.

In the early years of production at Luton, the name Bedford was used purely as a model name, and the manufacturer’s name that appeared on the instruction book was that of Vauxhall Motors, the address being The Hyde, Hendon, as it had been in the General Motors period before. Indeed, the look and feel of the instruction books for the Bedford models was exactly the same as those of the Chevrolet predecessors, although the latter of course had the General Motors name on the front cover.

This WHB is described by Vauxhall as the first purpose-built Bedford bus. New in August 1931 with a fourteen-seat body by Waveney of Lowestoft, remarkably the bus remained in service until 1956, when it was sold into preservation. It is now owned by Vauxhall at Luton and is looked after by the Vauxhall Heritage Collection.VH

The first commercials to carry the Bedford name were the WHG and the WLG light 2-ton (2,032kg) trucks and vans. These were developments of the Chevrolet LQ, the WHG sharing the same 10ft 11in wheelbase as the LQ and powered by a Bedford-modified version of the Stovebolt Six petrol engine. The WHG and the WLG appeared in April 1931, closely followed by the first proper bus chassis, the WHB and WLB, which were intended for fourteen-seat and twenty-seat bus bodies, respectively. Luton could and did build complete trucks, but the passenger chassis were always bodied by independent specialist coachbuilders, although there were small ‘station bus’ or ‘hotel bus’-type conversions seating around seven passengers based on the standard 12cwt (610kg) van. The light weight per passenger of the Bedford passenger chassis soon became a major selling point – a fully laden twenty-seat ‘Sun Saloon’ body by Duple Bodies and Motors Ltd on a Bedford chassis weighed only 4.25 tons (4,318kg) and was the first laden twenty-seat bus allowed to cross the Menai Strait suspension bridge in north Wales, which at the time had, by coincidence, a weight limit of 4.25 tons!

The last Chevrolets were delivered in early 1932, the overseas success of the new Bedfords being cited as the reason for ending Chevrolet production.

The new Bedford models had a 6-cylinder engine as in their Chevrolet forebears, though this had four main crankshaft bearings as against the three of the Chevrolet, and pressure-feed lubrication instead of the combined pressure-and-splash lubrication of the Chevrolet. Lucas electrical systems appeared for the first time in place of US-made Delco-Remy components.

DUPLE MAKES AN ENTRANCE

Small operators would often have their Bedford chassis bodied locally. Townsend’s Tours of Torquay owned this 1935 WTL with Mumford of Plymouth coachwork. It had twenty-six seats, a sunshine roof and a rear entrance.A. CROSS

It is probably no coincidence that Duple of Hendon emerged as the most prolific body builder on Bedford chassis, being physically located almost next door to the site of Vauxhall’s sales office. The introduction of the Certificate of Fitness (COF) by the Ministry of Transport in the Road Traffic Act 1930 encouraged chassis builders to work more closely with coachbuilders to ensure that requirements of the certificate could be met – this affected things like the size and positions of entrances and gangways, seat spacing and so on. As far as Bedford was concerned, this meant building relationships with coach-builders constructing complete vehicles that could be sold through the Vauxhall dealer network. Duple thus became a principal, though not the only, approved body supplier for Bedford chassis.

At the 1931 Commercial Motor Show, twenty-seat buses based on the WLB chassis were on show from: Waveney of Lowestoft (who had bodied the first WHB); Grose, who also built bespoke car bodies on Vauxhall chassis; and Duple. All were similarly priced at £545 for a complete bus from Waveney and Grose and £550 for that from Duple. Interestingly, Waveney had a history of supplying typically fourteen-seat buses on the earlier Chevrolet LM and LQ chassis, Lincolnshire Road Car Co. Ltd and the United Automobile Omnibus Co. Ltd being just two of the larger territorial bus companies that took a number of these in the late 1920s. Waveney was based at Lowestoft and its fourteen- to sixteen-seat bus bodies were marketed as the ‘Hendon’ – clearly intended to associate them with the Chevrolet make; however, the association did not prosper and while Waveney continued to trade throughout the 1930s, it did not survive the Second World War.

While there was some competition from the likes of Morris Commercial, Dennis, Guy and others, these products tended to be more expensive, so by 1932 Bedford had made the small-bus market its own; 65 per cent of the twenty-seat-and-under buses registered in the UK in that year were made by Bedford.

Spurling Motor Bodies Ltd was another company located close to the Vauxhall sales office in Hendon and also became closely associated with Bedford over the years, particularly in the manufacture of twelve- to fourteen-seat bodies on Bedford goods chassis. However, the first reference to Spurling in connection with Bedford comes in a review in 1934 of a power-assisted brake conversion for current Bedford chassis, which at that time were powered only by the strength of the driver’s leg applied to the pedal and thence through mechanical rods and linkages to the brake linings.

The 1935 WLB with Duple twenty-seat forward-entrance body was new to T. J. Roberts of Bethesda in northwest Wales. The driver stands proudly by waiting to take the bus to Bangor, his fare collection bag over his shoulder. Roberts traded as Purple Motors.VH

New in March 1936 to Enterprise & Silver Dawn of Scunthorpe, this series 1 WTB has a rare twenty-six-seat body by Layne & Co. Ltd of Brigg, Lincolnshire.VH

Bedfords continued to sell well throughout the early 1930s, and in 1934 the WT 3-ton (3,050kg) range was introduced. A passenger version built by Duple from the WTL lorry chassis was not available until later in the year and the WLB continued in production alongside the WTL. This was only a stop-gap measure as a passenger chassis proper – the WTB – appeared in November 1935 and superseded both the WLB and the WTL. The same straight-six engine was employed as before, although now the power had increased to 64bhp at 2,800rpm.

This 1937 WTB bus belonged to the Lancashire Electric Power Co. Ltd, seen here on a works outing in Manchester. The body was the standard Duple twenty-six-seat product.VH

The rapid success of Bedford stabilized the fortunes of Vauxhall and by the end of 1937 Bedford sales in the one-ton and heavier commercial market were exceeding 26,000 per year. In 1938 the Luton factory gained a new engineering block, known rather appropriately as the ‘V Block’. It cost £175,000 and provided accommodation for 335 staff, giving Vauxhall the most up-to-date design and development facility in the UK at the time. Production was now running along modern lines and Vauxhall was in a strong position by 1939, with several new models ready to come to market, notably the new OB bus and coach chassis, introduced in August as successor to the WTB. However, on 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland and the deadliest conflict of all time began.

The 1946 OB brochure issued by Bedford.GM

THE RISE OF MOTOR COACH TRAVEL

It was the arrival of the railway as a common carrier in the early nineteenth century that brought the idea of leisure travel to the general public. The roads in Britain had suffered little attention since Roman times and had largely fallen into disrepair until the emergence of the turnpike trusts in the seventeenth century. This brought some improvement, but the canals provided a better way of moving goods so there was little impetus to invest heavily in the roads. Despite this, the need for good roads was recognized and Telford’s great highway from London to Holyhead (today the A5) was completed in 1826. Such was the success of the Holyhead road that plans were immediately drawn up to improve the Great North Road (today the A1) on the same model. However, the demonstration of railway locomotive power at the Rainhill trials of 1829 brought a premature end to road development, at least for the next couple of decades, and a rapid rise in the fortunes of the Stephenson family. Long-distance travel before the railways was generally by stagecoach and something one undertook only if absolutely necessary; there are numerous horror stories of the tribulations that befell travellers on the roads at the time. The rapid development of railways meant that for long distance, rail would be the only real choice until the second decade of the twentieth century.

The formation of the county councils under the 1888 Local Government Act brought with it some responsibility for maintaining the highways in the counties but it was the emergence of the internal combustion engine motor vehicle in the first decade of the twentieth century that stimulated improvement in the roads, largely as a result of private individuals acting in cooperation with the county surveyors and engineers. By 1907, things had advanced sufficiently that mechanized road maintenance was taking place. By 1913, Great Britain had a greater mileage of properly built roads than any other country. A Roads Board was set up and funded through new taxes on fuel and a great deal of work was done as a result, then the First World War intervened and the labour force was sent off to war.

Work on the roads resumed after the war and, by the 1930s, the roads in Britain were in a good state. A good network of stage carriage bus services was in place; similarly express services with more luxurious vehicles, some even with toilet facilities, had been in operation since 1925 and were already challenging the supremacy of the railway. Charabancs, long vehicles with car-type bench seats and often a door for each row, provided opportunities for outings that became a way to enjoy precious leisure time in the Edwardian period before the First World War, and their popularity grew throughout the 1920s.

Bedford arrived on the scene just too late to be part of the heady days when the bus and coach industry was a free-for-all and an operator had great freedom over where and when they undertook journeys carrying passengers. In those days, operators would often compete on the same route and drivers of rival companies would sometimes engage in racing, with the consequent effect on health and safety. The 1930 Road Traffic Act brought regulation into the industry; it defined the term ‘Public Service Vehicle’ as a motor vehicle capable of carrying eight passengers or more for the purpose of hire and reward and brought the term ‘PSV’ (currently PCV) into common usage. Amongst other far-reaching effects it introduced licensing administered by regional Traffic Commissioners, in particular the Road Service Licence, which an operator needed in order to run buses or coaches on scheduled services, tours and excursions. A Road Service Licence did not apply to private hire work, but because the scope of ‘private hire’ was not clearly defined this led to anomalies and on occasions absurd cases in the traffic courts when the organizers of annual holiday outings were fined for running a regular scheduled express service without the appropriate licence! Following the Second World War there was something of an upsurge in such cases as small operators sought to reinforce their earnings, which as the 1950s wore on tended to decline in proportion with the rise in private car ownership. By the mid-1970s, the golden age of motor coaching was really over.

One effect of the licensing of operators was to promote a division between those for whom the main business was stage carriage and express services and those whose main business became excursions and tours, a separate licence and costly quasi-legal process being required for each. It has been said that the these proceedings were weighted in favour of the large companies, and indeed the vast majority of stage-carriage services were run by the major bus groups and only the largest of the independents played any significant part in this. Many existing smaller operators sold out to the territorial companies rather than face the cost and difficulties involved in applying for a Road Service Licence for stage carriage services.

For the small operator, an ‘E&T’ licence required that the operator’s vehicle or vehicles complied with a level of fitness for purpose defined by the Ministry of Transport – Bedford was soon advertising that their products complied fully with these new regulations! The lightweight, low-cost Bedford made an ideal E&T and private hire coach, which goes some way to explaining why so many were purchased in just ones and twos by so many businesses throughout the period that Bedford’s star was in the ascendancy.

W. S. Hunt’s OB/Duple Vista passes the Downlands Cafe and Garage on the A23 near Brighton in the early 1950s. Neither NGP 750 nor the Downlands Cafe and Tea Lounge are still with us, although the pub in the background is still open and Downlands Garage now operates out of the service area on the A23 dual carriageway that now runs a few hundred yards to the left of the road in this picture.VH

LUTON DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND AFTER

JTN 915. The OWB was the wartime version of the OB and the only single-deck bus available for operators to buy new during the war. This is the 1,000th OWB leaving Duple’s works.VH

During the First World War, Vauxhall had manufactured 25hp staff cars for the British army. The Second World War brought a much larger role for Vauxhall; car production was suspended except for a few for the military and the factory turned over to the war effort, initially manufacturing large numbers of Bedford trucks for the British services and later the OWB bus chassis for civilian use. The OWB was a slightly modified version of the new OB, fitted with very austere bodywork for wartime production. For a time the OWB was the only bus chassis available until a few other manufacturers were allowed to restart production in a small way. Over the course of the war, 250,000 Bedford trucks were supplied to the services.

David MacBrayne was the name for transport in the highlands and islands of Scotland. Here is one of its OB/Duple Vista coaches having just turned off the A9. The destination blind suggests the coach is en route for Carrick Castle, some distance from its pictured location.

The Luton factory’s most significant contribution to the war effort was undoubtedly the Churchill tank. Designed and brought to production at Luton in less than twelve months, ten other factories were soon building Churchill tanks from Luton-manufactured components. Over 5,000 tanks had been built by the time the war was over. But that was not all: Luton’s contribution included armour-piercing shells and components for rocket projectiles, 750,000 steel helmets and panel work for millions of jerricans. The first twelve aircraft jet engines were largely built at Luton, a fact that is rarely mentioned. Given Vauxhall’s role in the war effort, the Luton factory attracted attention from the German air force, the worst raid taking place on 30 August 1940, when thirty-nine people lost their lives. Despite this, production of the Churchill tank, which had just started, was not interrupted. The work was divided over the ten ‘shadow’ factories set up to ensure that production would not be stopped if one received serious bombing damage.

When the war was over, it took until early in 1946 for the factory to return to something like normal and no new car models appeared until 1948.

Production of ‘civilian’ Bedfords resumed towards the end of 1945 and the OB now became the standard production bus and coach chassis from Bedford. While mechanically similar to the WTB in many ways, the OB came with hydraulic brakes, a longer wheelbase and a new-look V-fronted cab and scuttle shared with the 5-ton (5,080kg) O-series trucks.

The Dunstable Factory Opens

The Dunstable factory from the air. The rail connection, abandoned by the time this undated image was taken, can be seen curving in from the bottom right of the picture.GM

The Dunstable factory was opened in 1942 to provide additional space to assist with Bedford’s contribution to the war effort. The new plant was opened at Boscombe Road. Covering 98 acres (40 hectares), the plant was served by a rail connection to the Midland main line at Luton and the West Coast main line at Leighton Buzzard, which enabled efficient distribution of Bedford products. After the war, production of Bedford models continued at both Luton and Dunstable, but by the early 1950s demand for Vauxhall cars was putting pressure on space at Luton so all Bedford bus and truck production was moved to Dunstable, leaving only the light vans to be made at Luton. Between 1955 and 1957 two new two-storey factories were built on the Dunstable site, creating a production line nearly a mile in length. At the time, over 5,000 workers were employed on building Bedfords.

BEDFORD THROUGH THE 1950S

Bedfords were popular in the Antipodes. This Australian Bedford is a 1949 OB with a thirty-one-seat forward-control conversion body by CAC – Commonwealth Air Corporation (later Comair) – of Australia. General Motors held an interest in CAC.H. SCHICK

Changes in the maximum dimensions of PSVs became effective on 1 June 1950, making it legal to operate coaches and buses of 30ft overall length, paving the way for new models from a number of manufacturers. Petrol came off ration and there were fears in the bus and coach industry that unless it was made easier for operators to obtain tours licences, the public would take to their cars instead – a touch of crystal-ball gazing that proved remarkably accurate in the long term.

From February 1950 hydraulic shock absorbers became standard equipment on all Bedford PSV chassis, those at the front being mounted directly to the chassis frame; at the rear a bracket was added, allowing the shock absorbers to be mounted horizontally.

For 1950, the bare OB chassis retailed at £533; a similar chassis from Austin, never as popular as the Bedford, was £559. Complete Bedford-Duple vehicles were priced as follows: those with the ‘MkIV’ thirty-seat service bus body cost £1,571; for the Duple Vista luxury coach, the twenty-seven seat version was £1,725 and the twenty-nine seat version was £11 more.

Although the OB had proved tremendously successful, by 1950 it had become outdated and a new passenger chassis, the SB, was introduced as a part of the Bedford ‘S’ range of 7-ton (7,112kg) payload commercials. A new version of the straight-six petrol engine had been introduced in 1950, producing up to 84bhp; with the commencement of the SB came a new 300cu in (4.9-litre) 110bhp engine. An example with a thirty-two-seat Duple body was exhibited along with the S-series trucks at the 1950 Commercial Motor Show at Earls Court. The SB in time was enormously successful and would prove to be incredibly long-lived for a PSV chassis, its main appeal being its rugged simplicity – though it did undergo a number of revisions as time went by, keeping pace with Bedford’s developments in other spheres. Indeed, the SB would remain available until the end of Bedford production at Dunstable, though in later years the majority of sales were overseas once more sophisticated Bedford chassis became available.

This 1952 SB with Duple Vega thirty-five coach seat body was photographed in the livery of J. A. Harvey of Evie, Orkney. It later passed to J. D. Peace of Kirkwall, Orkney.

At this time the range of available bus and coach chassis was essentially divided into what were considered ‘heavyweight’ – the products of, typically, AEC, Bristol, Daimler, Guy, Leyland and, to a lesser extent, Foden, Maudsley and Tilling Stevens – and ‘lightweight’, made by Bedford, Ford, Commer and Karrier. The manufacturers of heavy chassis also often included double-decks in their range. All had their role to play, though there was a degree of overlap and tradition and politics that influenced sales, but in the main the heavyweights were diesel-powered, designed for long life and day-in day-out stop-start service or regular long-distance express services, where the lightweights were expected to be cheaper to buy, have a shorter life, be serviced more regularly, carry fewer passengers and generally be powered by petrol engines.

As the 1950s wore on, the desire for economy (intensified by the Suez crisis of 1956) meant that operators of lightweight Bedfords were now looking for the kind of the fuel consumption figures enjoyed by the operators of heavyweight chassis, which, since the war, had been fitted with diesel engines. Proprietary conversions had been available from several sources since 1950, usually based on the Perkins P6, R6 or Leyland O.350 diesels, and from 1954 the SB was available from Bedford with the Perkins R6 as an option. Despite the economies available with diesel, petrol engines remained available in Bedfords well into the 1970s. Bedford launched its own 300cu in (4.9-litre) diesel in 1957.

Richards Bros’ SB8 is a 1962 model with Leyland O.350 engine and Plaxton Embassy body. The Leyland engine had been available as an option on the SB from 1957.

The Small Coaches

With the demise of the OB in 1950, the market for small coaches with seating capacity in the range twenty to twenty-nine had not been specifically catered for. A number of small coaches were built by Duple on the OLAZ 4-ton (4.064kg) long-wheelbase lorry chassis during this period. In 1956 the forward control four-ton C4 and five-ton C5 lorry models were introduced, and these became quite popular as the basis for modifying to suit a small coach body, Duple and Plaxton building bodies that were a scaled-down version of those built for the SB. A further basis for smaller buses and coaches appeared in 1958, with the introduction of the TJ range of trucks. What became known as the J1 and J2 chassis were bodied as PSVs.

In the smaller PSV range, the CA van introduced in 1952, based on running units taken from the contemporary range of Vauxhall cars, was the starting point for a conversion into a twelve-seat mini-bus passenger carrier. Martin Walter, another Hendon business, in particular became associated with light van conversions into small buses and coaches.

THE SWINGING 60S

The 1960s was to be a decade of innovation for Bedford, with a new range of passenger chassis that, while clearly descended from what had gone before, set new standards for lightweight PSV chassis.

The first to appear was the VAS, which at least partially took on the role in the product line previously occupied by adapted goods chassis. It was announced in August 1961, and both Duple and Plaxton designed twenty-nine seat bodies for it. With its smaller-than-usual 16in wheels it had echoes of Issigonis’ Mini about it and seemed entirely in keeping with the new decade.

KEN 381G. The J2 chassis was a popular choice for small buses. This example with a bus version of the Duple Compact body was owned by Bury Corporation. This photograph was taken on 8 August 1969, when the bus would have been about a year old.

The Bedford torch was, however, not held by the VAS for long, for at the Commercial Motor Show at Earls Court in 1962 Bedford introduced to the world the VAL – a 36ft-long (11m) maximum-dimension coach with three axles, twin steering wheels and capable of seating fifty-two passengers. The show example was fitted with a Duple Vega Major body. The 1960s was perhaps the last period when elegance in engineering was considered important; one thinks of Concorde and the first River Severn road bridge, both of which combined imagination and engineering excellence. The VAL became a symbol of modernity and a film star, featuring most famously in The Italian Job (alongside a fleet of Issigonis’ Minis) and in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. While the latter was perhaps not the Fab Four’s finest hour, it helped to strengthen the image that Bedford was in tune with the times.

The Duple Firefly body was introduced in 1961.GM

IN PRESERVATION

Bedford J2/Plaxton Embassy KNK 373H

Year new: 1969

Engine: Bedford 4-cylinder 220cu in (3.6-litre) diesel

Gearbox: Bedford four-speed

Body: Plaxton Embassy coach, fifteen seats

Current owner: Cyril Kenzie

History

KNK 373H. Cyril Kenzie’s superb and very original J2/Plaxton Embassy coach, finished in its original Rickards colours.

KNK 373H was one of fifteen identical vehicles purchased new by Rickards to run a service between each of the main line stations in London and Heathrow Airport. For this service, several seats were removed at the rear and an additional luggage shelf fitted in the space created. However, the service annoyed the taxi drivers who worked the stations, who saw the coaches as competing for their jobs and so they boycotted the stations. The Ministry of Transport stepped in and Rickards was forced to abandon the service. The J2s were all sold and the luggage racks were replaced with five seats to provide the twenty seats usually found in bodies on the J2 chassis, with the exception of this example, which retains the luggage rack and is therefore unique. After being sold by Rickards, the coach passed through a number of owners, including the brewing firm of Greene King of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, who used it to take ex-employee pensioners on outings and the brewery bowls team to matches. The coach ended its working life with Felix Coaches of Long Melford, Suffolk, from whom Cyril bought the coach around fifteen years ago.

Owner’s Experience

Cyril Kenzie is perhaps not a typical preservationist. Far from being an amateur enthusiast working out of shed on a farm, Cyril was Chief Engineer of Kenzies Coaches of Shepreth, Hertfordshire for many years. He is also a highly experienced coach driver, and three times winner of Coach Driver of The Year and many other awards at the annual British Coach Rally at Brighton in the 1960s and 1970s; he even starred in a film about coaching made by the BBC in 2010.

Cyril joined his father’s coach firm in 1946, having previously worked in a garage from leaving school at the age of fourteen. His employment was interrupted by two years’ National Service in the army as a mechanic, where it was, in his own words, ‘all fix this! Fix that!’ Cyril’s father started the business that became Kenzies Coaches with just two taxis, and then expanded it with the acquisition of a twenty-seat Bedford WTB. Kenzies went on to purchase many more Bedfords over the years, as well as AECs and Leylands; these days the fleet is largely Volvo, though most of Cyril’s awards were won in Bedfords.

Cyril now maintains a fleet of vintage coaches (which he calls his museum) for Kenzies, exclusively Bedford with two OBs (his personal favourite), the only surviving VAL with a Harrington Legionnaire body and several other Bedfords, including another VAL, a YLQ and the J2.

Cyril recalls that in the early days of his career as an engineer and driver, he would take oil and water out with a coach and service it while waiting for his passengers to return. ‘No rules or regulations in those days!’, he says.

In Cyril’s opinion, his J2 is the best surviving example. Apart from the external paintwork and routine mechanical servicing, no restoration has been performed on the coach and it is completely original, even down to the vinyl antimacassars on the seats. The red moquette trim on the seats is the original and typical Plaxton; it is in fine condition and appears neither worn nor faded given its forty-six years of use. The floor covering is in equally good condition. It is clear, despite the goods origins of the chassis, that this is no simple conversion but a proper small luxury coach. The J2 was painted by Cyril in Kenzies’ own body shop, and the finish is superb. Of driving the J2, Cyril says ‘Because it is a diesel, it doesn’t have much go. Whoever drove it between northern and southern Ireland (one of its regular trips as a touring coach) was a hero. The brakes are good – hydraulic with a servo – and there is no power steering but that’s OK as it is so small’.

The Golden Age of Coach Travel, a BBC4 Timeshift documentary featuring Cyril Kenzie and his Bedford OB, was first broadcast in 2011 and is available as a YouTube download.

Bedford’s Market Position in the 1960s

The market for Bedford throughout the 1960s continued to be largely the independent operator who favoured lightweight chassis and body combinations; the only real rivals for Bedford in this market were Commer and Ford with its ‘Thames’ range. No real attempt seems to have been made at this time by Bedford to break into the market almost totally occupied by the heavyweights – the large bus groups of BET and the government-owned BTC group of bus companies (the former Tilling group) and the municipal fleets. For example, It was reported in November 1962 that UK municipal fleets were operating just twenty-eight Bedfords and, of these, remarkably, twenty-two had petrol engines with just six being diesel powered. Even this small total showed a slight decline on the previous year and serves to illustrate well the role that Bedford was expected to play in the industry. One municipal operator who had some success in the tours market was Edinburgh Corporation Transport, who were operating a fleet of a dozen Bedfords in 1963, consisting of nine SBs with Duple Bella Vega bodies and three VAS with Duple Bella Vista bodies, all painted in a special black and white livery in contrast to the corporation’s usual madder red and white livery. These coaches operated a series of two- and three-hour tours to places of interest in Scottish history in and around the city, including a boat trip to Inchcolm Island.

Orders for Bedford/Duple coaches for delivery in late 1964 and early 1965 remained healthy; a snapshot of the order book for 1965 shows the following: for George Ewer and Co. Ltd (Grey-Green and Orange Luxury Tours), ten Duple Bella Vega on SB13 chassis; for Wessex Coaches Ltd of Bristol, seven forty-one-seat Duple Firefly coaches on SB5 chassis; and five forty-one-seat Bella Vega on SB5 for Wilts & Dorset Motor Services, an unusual purchase for a former Tilling group company.

Coachbuilders Consolidate

Some consolidation in the coachbuilding industry took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Having acquired Nudd Bros & Lockyer of Kegworth to form Duple Motor Bodies (Midland) Ltd in the 1955, followed by Willowbrook of Loughborough in 1958, Duple acquired H. V. Burlingham of Blackpool in 1960, followed by the coachbuilding activities of W. S. Yeates of Loughborough in 1963. The latter had built a few bodies on OB chassis in 1948 and 1949, but made a larger contribution on the SB chassis. Yeates continued to trade as a dealer in the PSV and general motor trade until the 1980s, when the company ceased these activities and became involved in property development. Another reduction in the number of coachbuilders took place when Martin Walter acquired Kenex and its product range in 1963.

The former Burlingham works in Blackpool subsequently traded as Duple (Northern), while the Yeates’ operation became part of Duple (Midland). Willowbrook continued to trade under its own name, while financial control passed to George Hughes, who also owned Duple, in 1971. The Duple (Midland) and Willowbrook factories came to concentrate on bus body production while Willowbrook was part of Duple, whereas the Hendon and Blackpool factories’ output became predominantly coach bodies, sometimes producing the same bodies with slight differences. Willowbrook closed in 1984; however, the business restarted in alternative premises in Loughborough in 1985, with two new bodies – the Crusader, intended for the Bedford YNV Venturer chassis, and the Warrior bus body.

Hulley’s of Baslow ran this 1961 SB with striking Yeates Fiesta coachwork until 1975. It is seen here in the picturesque Derbyshire town of Bakewell in the late 1960s.

This 1972 SB has a Willowbrook bus body to a Duple (Midland) design. It was owned by Rochester & Marshall, part of the Moor-Dale Group, and used on Hexham town services, where it is seen in September 1980.

The range of bodies available for the larger Bedford chassis in the early years of the 1960s was quite extensive. From Duple, the smallest body in its range was the nineteen-seat metal-framed bus body manufactured at Blackpool for the J2 goods chassis converted to forward control. Next in line was the Bella Vista twenty-nine-seat body for the VAS, with a larger version known as the Bella Vega and capable of seating forty-one passengers. From the Duple (Northern) factory again came the Firefly, also seating forty-one but in a style that harked back a decade rather than looking forward like the Bella Vista and Vega bodies. The largest model for Bedford was the Vega Major, with fifty-two seats for the VAL.

From Plaxton there was the Embassy II, seating forty-one when mounted on the SB chassis, twenty-nine in the version for the VAS and eighteen to twenty in that for the J2 chassis. The Embassy had replaced the Consort body in 1960. The Plaxton Panorama body with its trademark panoramic side windows, unique for the time, had first appeared in 1959 and was available for the SB with forty-one to forty-three seats. A restyled version appeared at the 1964 Commercial Motor Show and could be had with forty-nine to fifty-two seats on the Bedford VAL chassis in addition to the smaller-capacity version on the SB.

From Thurgood of Ware there was the Forerunner, available in various seating capacities up to twenty-nine and with versions to suit the J2 and VAS, while Thomas Harrington of Hove was building the Crusader MkIII with thirty-seven or forty-one seats for the SB. A body rarely seen in practice was the Metropolitan-Cammell-Weymann (MCW) Amethyst, whose appearance was somewhat less attractive than its name might suggest; it was described as having a seating capacity of ‘as required’ but nominally forty-one for the SB.

Another distinctive, though fairly uncommon, body was the Yeates Fiesta Continental, a forty-one-seat model for the SB chassis with quite purposeful and individual looks. Of special note was the FE44 version of this body, which embodied a conversion of the SB chassis to allow the entrance to be positioned in the front overhang ahead of the front wheels. A bus version was also available, called the Pegasus. The conversion caused some discomfort to Bedford and was never supported by them. Another well-known name in other branches of PSV manufacture was Strachans (and Brown) Ltd, originally at North Acton but by this time based in Hamble, Hampshire. Strachans also built on Bedford chassis, offering utility bus bodies on the Bedford SB chassis.

Barton Transport of Chilwell fleet no. 1027 was one of the unapproved Yeates Fiesta front-entrance conversions on the SB chassis. Originally owned by Price of Halesowen, it was bought by Barton in 1965.

Strachans of Hamble was advertising its Pacesaver body on the SB in 1965.

Prices for bare PSV chassis from Bedford in 1963 were as follows: VAS with petrol engine £860, with diesel engine £1,045. The SB petrol chassis was £1,035, SB with Bedford diesel £1,165; SB with Leyland diesel £1,465. The VAL was £1,820. In comparison, lightweight chassis from Ford cost £1,040 for a petrol-powered Thames Trader and £1,170 for a diesel version of the same chassis, which competed directly with the SB. Another rival for the SB was the Commer Avenger, priced at £1,580. To compete with the VAL, Ford was offering the new Thames36 chassis. This was quite a bit cheaper than the VAL at £1,500 for a petrol-powered chassis and £1,620 for a version with a diesel engine, but of course was of conventional design with the less exciting configuration of only two axles! All of these were classified as lightweight chassis; if one wanted a heavier chassis from AEC, Daimler, Guy or Leyland then prices started at around £2,500 and ranged to £3,000, so a VAL at just over £1,800 seemed like a good buy in the short term for a fifty-two-seat coach.

A New Chassis

New for 1965 was the VAM. This was an entirely new chassis, not just an updated version of the SB and was designed for true front-entrance bodywork from the start and therefore rendered redundant the disapproved-of conversion of the SB chassis offered by Yeates. The VAM was suitable for bus and coach bodies of around forty-five seats. Despite the almost universal adoption of horizontal, amidships-mounted underfloor diesel engines by the heavier chassis manufacturers, the traditional vertical front engine, including a petrol option, and unit-mounted gearbox were retained. Though clearly intended to replace the SB, such was the popularity of the latter that Bedford continued to produce it, while the VAM carved its own niche in the market. VAM chassis commenced production at the end of June 1965, a year that had seen the 50,000th chassis leave the Dunstable plant, a VAL chassis bound for Australia, thirty-four years after the first Bedford passenger chassis appeared.

A forty-five-seat Alexander Y-type body is fitted to Highland Scottish’s fleet no. CD20, a 1967 VAM5, seen on 6 June 1981.