Air Camelot also
owned a Ford Transit minibus and a
Bedford YNT coach with which in 1986 they registered six
commercial minibus
shopping services centred on Wincanton, most of which
appeared to be based on routes abandoned as unremunerative by Wakes in
the sixties. In July 1986 Chris Knubley, proprietor of Brutonian, approached Tony Tucker with a
view to selling his operation to him; negotiations were
successfully concluded and a limited company, Brutonian Bus Company
Ltd, was set up to take over the business. Tony Tucker also kept
the Air Camelot licence in
his own name for a while, but the two businesses were managed as one,
and the Air Camelot licence was later surrendered.
The
Wincanton based routes were given letters A to F, and most had gone
within a
year, only one survived more than two, and some only lasted three
months.
The communities they served had had many years to get used to not
having a bus service, and anyway Wincanton had been in decline as a
shopping centre for some years ever since the building of the A303
bypass had taken away all the passing trade. Indeed, the only routes to
survive were those which went elsewhere: the A, later 15, to Shepton
Mallet, which lasted until September 1988; and the D, later 18, which
served the villages of Buckhorn Weston and Kington Magna. Although
originally running to Wincanton, it was quickly changed to go to
Gillingham as a replacement for a service of Ray
Cuff’s which had had
its registration withdrawn at the last minute.
In addition, a
number of services were successfully tendered for (see route list
below), some of which formed an interesting assortment. For
one thing, only the 14 to Frome started from Bruton or anywhere near
it. Most were shopping journeys running one or two days a week, but the
14 featured Monday to Friday peak journeys, the 6 was the former Bere
Regis and District regular six days a week service between Sherborne
and Dorchester,
and route 1 was the Yeovil inter-station service linking the Junction
and Pen Mill stations with the town centre. Of particular interest was
route 7 from Belchalwell to Sturminster Newton which ran on Mondays
during school holidays only, as Bere Regis
& District continued to
run it commercially during school terms. So in practice this route
only ran about ten times
a year.
Further
expansion in 1987 under Tony Tucker's enthusiastic traffic manager Ian
Trotter saw
new commercial service 20 on Saturdays from Yeovil to Bristol, and
service 16 from Frome serving the tourist attractions of Longleat House
and Stourhead Gardens which utilised the vehicle off the 14; both
lasted four months. Route 21 consisted entirely of positioning and
fill-in journeys between Bruton, Sherborne, and Yeovil for the vehicles
on the tendered services, and disappeared when the relevant tenders
were lost.
Under the new ownership, with its connection with Mr
Tuckers’s travel agency business, there was a move into coaching
activities and this became an important part of the business. As a
result an increasing number of coaches was purchased. There was also a
change in vehicle policy, Bedfords and other lightweights now being
favoured. A number of small capacity vehicles, suitable for the
tendered services, was also acquired, including two Ford Transits and
three Bedford J2s, one of which had Caetano bodywork. The new vehicle
policy was not to Chris Knubley’s liking, and he left the firm that he
had created. This deprived Brutonian of his engineering expertise just
at the time when its operations were expanding, which led to
operational and maintenance difficulties.
The year 1988 was to prove a bad one
for Brutonian. Route 1 was surrendered in March as a result of
the
difficulties and cost of outstationing a vehicle at Yeovil, and was
retendered to Southern National. Staffing difficulties at the
Dorchester outstation led to Route 6 being surrendered in June,
although it is reported that Brutonian’s operation had been causing
some great concern to Dorset County Council for some time. It had been
usually operated by the
Accrington REs, whose paintwork was apparently not all that good and by
now had largely disappeared. Their truly awful external condition might
not have mattered had the route not run past Dorset County Council’s
offices! The
Council arranged for the route to be taken over by Pearce
Darch &
Willcox (Comfy-Lux) of Cattistock. The peak hour journeys on the 14
were replaced by Badgerline’s new 166 in July, and all the remaining
tendered routes were lost on retendering by the end of the year.
With
the reduced number of bus services, Driver / Assistant Traffic Manager
Mike Smallbone left Brutonian to set up Stirling Travel which took over
the remaining schoolday services on route 2. Brutonian ran route 14
commercially after losing the tender to Wakes in August, but passed it
to Stirling Travel after a few weeks; and the Saturday service on the
10 was withdrawn in August. Then in September Southern National
returned to the Wincanton - Mere - Shaftesbury road with minibus
service 59, competing head-on with Brutonian’s 11/12, on which the
Saturday service was as a consequence lost on retender in
November.
At
the end of 1988, Brutonian’s route network was reduced to service 8 to
Salisbury on Tuesdays and Saturdays, 9 to Dorchester on Wednesdays, 10
to Yeovil on Fridays, 11/12 to Shaftesbury Mondays to Fridays, and 18
to Gillingham on Thursdays. Concern about reliability and missed
journeys led Wakes to divert their Salisbury service 28 via Wincanton
over the route of Brutonian service 8 from December, and to register
services to Dorchester and Yeovil on the same timings as routes 9 and
10.
But before the registrations could take effect Tony Tucker sold
Brutonian to the
Cawlett Group in January 1989. It was that group’s first outside
acquisition since it
had been set up in 1987 to purchase North Devon (Red Bus) and Southern
National from the National Bus Company, although it was soon joined by Pearce Darch
& Willcox (Comfy-Lux), Taylor’s of Tintinhull, Smith’s of Portland,
and Dorchester Coachways (the latter the western part of the once extensive Bere Regis business). The sale did not include the company’s
vehicles which were sold separately, many of them to neraby Marsh’s Coaches of
Wincanton. It is believed that the airline operations of Air
Camelot ceased at the end of the summer season 1986 - the parent company Avon Aviation Services filed for insolvency in 1988.
|