Article by Richard Biddle

In the Autumn of 1976 I decided to move back from Devon to the South Cotswolds, and as househunting at that range was not practical, I had taken a house at Wotton-Under-Edge as a base. However it was not capable of housing my various old cars and my Tiger Moth biplane, most of which needed more or less attention. I noticed that the Old Station Yard at Charfield was for sale, by a Devon based transport and fuel company that I knew quite well. After some hard battling we came to terms, and so keen were they to close the deal that I drove down to The Imperial Hotel in Torquay on Boxing day to exchange contracts with their Company Secretary!

The bus services in those days were nationalized, and they would only sell to registered dealers, of whom I think, surprisingly, there were only 2, one in Essex and one in Barnsley. The requirements were not too onerous, a certain financial probity and the ability to store 20 buses on the purchasers registered premises.
"Simples," as that irritating Meercat would say.

Now we were registered, we were sent a sale list on a regular basis. The other 2 dealers fought it out for the big city sales, 20 to 30 buses at a time, but our Bristol FLF buses were found in small west country depots as well as the big west country cities, and we very quickly learned to buy from these local depots, less buses per sale and much better maintained by the local staff, who took a pride in their small fleets. How much did we pay for these buses? Never more than £2750. As I have said, they were usually well maintained, but you could not select individual buses from a lot, and usually one or two needed a little work before shipping. All had to be immaculately steam cleaned underneath and failure meant rejection by the shippers at the dock.

Shipping was from Felixstowe, and usually in batches of 10. One might think that finding 10 drivers might be a challenge, but I never had to pay a single driver. You would be surprised how many solicitors, barristers, accountants etc. had a childhood ambition to drive a double decker!!
The buses were shipped from Felixstowe to Jacksonville, Florida and in the 102 odd buses shipped, only one broke down on that 1500 mile drive from Jackonsville to Denver, through some quite arduous country.
You might wonder who on earth would want these beasts in the USA.? The very first 2 went to Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood as mobile film set units, some went to Greyhound as tourist buses, 2 to Queen Mary at Fshermans Wharf, 'Frisco, 4 to Williamsburg, but our greatest Coup was 6 to New York. New York Transport Authority decided that they would like 6 new red double deckers, so they ordered them from the makers of the famous London Routemasters.. They had a bit of a shock when they arrived, as Routemaster had not done their homework, so the first time the buses went out on the road, they took out a myriad of power cables and street lights. There was also a N.Y bylaw that all buses had to switch off their engines at stops. It was summer, and the Makers had thoughtfully fitted the vehicles with air conditioning, but it was battery driven. Hence flat batteries when the drivers came to restart! They lasted just 3 days. We very generously stepped in and chartered NYTA 6 appropriately configured Bristol F.L.F.'s. Now wasn't that generous of us!! (I won't mention the rental).
Eventually Bristol Bus Co closed down, so we bought a couple of containers of new spares, and stopped shipping. In total we sent out 102 buses and 22 black London cabs.

The technical work on the buses was undertaken by 3 young Foremen from a bus depot in Bristol who came on weekends when we had need of them. But I had 3 regular guys who would put their hands to anything mechanical. One was an ex RR test driver, and one Donald Fergusson from Nailsworth, a skilled coachbuilder who learnt his skills building Halifaxes as a teenager in the war before he was called up. "Cycle wings £5 per pair" every month in Motor Sport Magazine from 1950 to 1977.

I needed to keep the other 3 guys in employ, so prototyped a 1930's style sports car based on the post war Bentley mk. 6,chassis which in those days could be bought for not too much money. Eventually I built a handful of these and called them the Bentley Prescott.

In the second paragraph of this monologue, I blithely mentioned my Tiger Moth Biplane. I had found this in a barn opposite the Police H.Q building at Middlemoor on the outskirts od Exeter. The same barn also contained two B.A. Swallow monoplanes, one of which was missing most of its tail curtesy of some pigs! In a loft area there were some 10,000 Superfortress spark plugs, but that's another story!
It took me about a year to release the plane, which incidentally seemed to be in good order. It had been purchased in 1943 at RAF Kemble, flown to Exeter and stored in the said barn, dismantled, ever since. The "purchase price" eventually settled on was a good length of 2' (narrow gauge) railway track and 2 Atcost barns, to be dismantled and removed by the Tiger Vendor. (I had wondered how I was going to get rid of the latter anyway.)

The fabric on the surfaces passed the "ping test", and as I have said, the engine was a goer, so I naively thought that assembly was all that was needed. No. The CAA had different ideas The fabric all had to come off, there were certain mandatory mods to control boxes and the engine had to be disassembled for full inspection. Actually, the only bit that they did not require to be tested was the 40+ year old wooden prop.

It must have been at about this stage that John Hart wandered over to see what was going on. He was extremely helpful, and found me a retired De Havilland engineer who had all the necessary airframe licences. It took awhile, but eventually the airframe was completely restored and fabricked, as were the 4 wings and empennage.