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BERE REGIS Toopy's
buses - the 'brown bombers' of Dorset |
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A story that could fill
many
pages |
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From humble beginnings on 29th October 1929 - when a 22 year old bus driver called Reg Toop decided to leave his employer George Vacher and set up in business on his own in competition against him with a Ford Model T 14-seater - this organisation grew to be the largest independent operator in the county of Dorset in post-war years. Whether by coincidence or as consequence, Vacher sold his business to the expanding Hants & Dorset Motor Services in August 1930, and remained in their employ as the local inspector for many years afterwards. He died in 1958 at the age of 71. Vacher had originally traded as Bere Regis Motor Services - the name that Toop then acquired almost by default when it became available, changing it to Bere Regis & District, having previously traded as Pioneer. Vacher had operated from his home village of Bere Regis since horse drawn days and acquired his first motor bus in 1919. This was used on routes to Dorchester on Wednesdays and Saturdays and to Poole on Mondays and Thursdays. By 1927 there were two motor vehicles and additional routes were being run to Blandford, Bournemouth, Wimborne and Wareham. With regards to the latter destination, Harry Farr was running a motor bus to Wareham from Bere Regis on Thursdays and Saturdays too, since at least 1920. |
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A
picture of George
Vacher's Bere Regis Motor Service from the late 1920's. The charabanc
was carrying 27 people, plus the driver. The driver, in the peaked cap
is Reg Toop, who in 1929 went on to establish Bere Regis Motor
Services, which rapidly built into a large enterprise across Dorset. |
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Toop drove for Vacher from the age of 14. To start his own business and buy his first bus, he borrowed money from several people in Bere Regis, including Doctor Liss and Applin the butcher. The initial routes operated by Toop were: · Bere Regis - Kingston - Zelstone Lytchett Matravers Poole (once on Monday and Friday, four times on Saturday and Sunday) · Bere Regis Bere Heath Wareham (Thursday and Saturday) · Bere Regis Bere Heath - Bloxworth Morden - Wimborne (Tuesday) · Bere Regis Kingston Zelstone Sturminster Marshall Wimborne (Tuesday) · Zelstone Kingston -Bere Regis Dorchester (Wednesday) · Bere Regis Kingston - Lytchett Matravers Wareham (presumed Thursday for market but discontinued by 1933). One might wonder if there were enough passengers in the area to warrant a competitive operation, but this was good bus operating territory. Bere Regis is a substantial village surrounded by a circle of market towns within a ten to twelve mile radius, and there was a long previous history of horse drawn carrier operations stretching back over the years. In 1930 two Chevrolets joined the fleet to supplement the Model T. In the same year the market day routes of James (Jim) Ironside of Winfrith were acquired by Toop: · Winfrith East Knighton East Burton Wool Wareham (Thursday) · Winfrith East Knighton Broadmayne Dorchester (Wednesday and Saturday) · Winfrith East Knighton Poxwell Weymouth (Saturday evening service added by Toop to existing Tuesday and Friday service) From reports in the local press at the time, Toop's operations were alleged to sometimes run with a scant regard for such niceties as the route specified in his road service licence! In March 1936 the daily route between Poole, Morden, Bloxworth, Bere Regis and Dorchester, established in 1926, was brought into the growing business when Davis of Bloxworth joined the partnership. These were the routes run by Israel Davis: · Morden Bloxworth - Bere Regis Kingston Almer Lytchett Matravers Wimborne (Tuesday) · Bloxworth Morden Wareham (Thursday) · Morden Bloxworth - Bere Regis Kingston Almer Spetisbury Blandford (Thursday) · Poole Lytchett Matravers Morden Bloxworth Bere Regis Dorchester (weekdays Poole Bere Regis; Wednesday and Saturday only from Bere Regis to Dorchester) Hants & Dorset had considered
purchasing the Davis
business, but the purchase did not proceed because the revenue on the
main Poole - Dorchester route was below cost and unsustainable.
After the negotiations failed the frequency of the service was
reduced.
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A picture from
1936, shortly after Mr Ironside
joined with Mr Toop, beside their Wycombe-bodied Gilford 176S Hera bus
YG7085 while out on a
coach trip. At the left is Bill Ironside and on the right Fred Hann,
the driver, who was later manager of Bere Regis in Wimborne and
Ferndown for many years before becoming publican of the Rising Sun in
Wimborne. Dolphin Coaches
took over their later Wimborne premises
in Stone Lane in 1996 and are still there (with the modern derivative
of their old telephone
number which was Wimborne 32). The Dolphin Coaches
business was started and run by Fred Hann's nephew Terry Hann. photo courtesy of John Pitfield, from the History of Bere Regis in Pictures |
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A few months
later Bill Ironside
(whose father's routes from
Winfrith had been acquired by Toop six years earlier) also joined the
business as a partner.
Bill had driven for his father Jim since the age of 15, and was to
become the
driving force in developing and running the Bere Regis &
District business. With
the setting up of
the partnership there was some rationalisation of the routes, which
were intertwined to some degree. These are the 1936 routes,
together with the road service licence numbers allocated to them by the
Western Traffic Area office:
· Bere Regis Bere Heath - Bloxworth Morden Lytchett Matravers -Wimborne (Tuesday) H4174 · Winfrith East Knighton East Burton Wool Wareham (Thursday) H4175 · Bere Regis - Kingston - Zelstone Worlds End Morden Poole (once Monday and Friday, three Saturday, four Sunday) H4176 · Winfrith East Knighton Broadmayne Dorchester (Wednesday and Saturday) H4177 · Winfrith East Knighton Poxwell Weymouth (Saturday and Public Holidays) H4178 · Zelstone Kingston -Bere Regis Dorchester (Wednesday) H4179 · Bere Regis Bere Heath Wareham (Thursday and Saturday) H4204 · Poole Lytchett Matravers Morden Bloxworth Bere Regis (four times each weekday) H4205 · Bere Regis Affpuddle - Dorchester (Wednesday and Saturday) H4205 Between
them the
three
partners, Reg Toop, Percy (son of Israel) Davis and Bill
(son of James) Ironside, expanded
the
fledgling enterprise - largely by acquisition of other businesses,
especially during
the Second World War - from pre-war market day services to an extensive
post-war
rural and interurban network with regular daily routes serving
Dorchester, Sherborne, Yeovil, Sturminster Newton, Shaftesbury,
Blandford and
Poole. A photo from 1938 shows six drivers: Johnny
Bowring,
Fred Hann, Percy Davis, Bill Ironside, Arthur Ironside and Charlie
Ironside. The firm's first wartime acquisition was
the business
of W J
Laws in June 1940, and his route from Briantspuddle, Tolpuddle and
Puddletown to
Dorchester was added to the growing network. During the war
smaller operators faced many difficulties; extra
passengers had to be carried, a scarcity of fuel and resources, and
time expired
vehicles in need of replacement. Bere Regis and
District
Motor
Services were ever
ready to buy up routes to expand their network. (A full list
of
operators
taken over is here).
After the war the medley
of radial village services was melded into a comprehensive network of
interurban
services across mid-Dorset.
From a one vehicle operation in
1929, by 1945
the fleet size had reached 40 vehicles. So with the end of the
war it
was now necessary to turn attention to renewing the vehicle
fleet. This started in 1946 with the delivery of ten new
Bedford OB's to the business, as well as a varied mix of second hand
vehicles - including two
ex-Chester Leyland Titan TD4s, AFM518/519, which were the firm's very
first
double-deckers. These were usually employed on the Bere Regis
- Poole, Bere Regis - Dorchester and Dorchester - Sherborne
routes (services 1, 1a, 2 and 4 in the 1949 list of routes reproduced
below). A further Titan TD2 YG710 followed in 1948,
and it is thought three ex-London STLs were acquired in 1954.
The only other double deckers operated by the company were two more
modern looking low bridge 1947 Leyland PD1s that were acquired in 1949 from Hants
& Sussex (FCG526/527) and were in the fleet until 1960.
The
vehicles were painted in a livery of mid and dark brown,
from
which came
the 'brown bombers' nickname we used as children in Dorset.
The
livery
came from the three partners, the dark brown from Toop, the other brown
from
Ironside and the red around the windows from Davis (whose own buses had
been
red). The halcyon
years for bus operations were post-war in the late 1940s and early
1950s. At this time Ironside ran the Dorchester depot and
office, with Toop at Bere Regis and Davis at Sturminster Newton.
These were times of rising costs though - before the war the tax on
fuel was 9d a gallon; in 1950 it was doubled to 1/6d and in 1952 it
reached 2/6d a gallon. Inevitably this impacted on bus fares, although
those of Bere Regis were comparatively modest when compared to Hants
& Dorset and Southern National.
As well as a wide range of private hire work there were also substantial numbers of school and works contracts run by the firm alongside wide-ranging forces leave express services from Portland Dockyard; Bovington, Blandford, Piddlehinton and Lulworth Camps to destinations including Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Doncaster and Liverpool. The abolition of national service in the early 1960s impacted on this work. As the years went by the various coaching types of operation would become progressively more and more important than the bus services. |
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In July 1959 the daily
trunk services from Bere Regis to Poole (routes
1 and 2) and Dorchester (routes 1a and 3) were sold to Hants &
Dorset, who had also operated over the 1 and 2 routes for many years
with their
services 91 and 90 respectively (inherited from the George Vacher
takeover in
1930). The Poole routes warranted double deck operation
and
were sufficiently busy in the 1950s that the 5.30pm from Poole on route
1 often had to be duplicated, usually by a Bedford OB coach.
Tickets of the two companies were not interavailable
and the
Bere Regis fares were generally a penny cheaper. H&D
had kept
a bus outstationed in Bere Regis ever since 1930. Whereas
Bere
Regis & District had provided the majority of
the
timings on the route to Poole via Bloxworth (1 / 91), the opposite was
true on
the route via Kingston and Zelstone (2 / 90).
H&D
increased the
frequency of their timings to compensate for the loss of the Bere Regis
services, and also introduced new route 11a from Bere Regis to
Dorchester to
replace the old 1a and 3. By now the focus of Bere
Regis
operations
had moved away from the village in which it had been founded, westwards
towards
the county town of Dorchester - a town which had always been at the
centre of
independent bus operation in Dorset.
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The office at 7
Bridport Road, Dorchester, showing the model coach which adorned the
front of the premises for many years. Always a favourite with the children! photo courtesy of Henry Frier |
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By 1961 the fleet size had grown to 92 vehicles including AEC Regal (plus a solitary Reliance); Bedford OB and SB (also two OWB's); Commer, Daimler, Dennis and Maudslay; and Leyland Tigers, Tiger Cubs and Royal Tigers - but still with a preponderance of second hand vehicles. This grand total of 92 included 5 minibus 11-seaters (two Bedford CAV / Martin Walker and three Morris J2), all the other vehicles in the fleet at this time were coaches except for one solitary bus, LWR377, a 1951 36-seater Duple bodied Daimler Freeline, which had come to Bere Regis from Ledgards of Yorkshire in 1960. Twelve of the fourteen Bedford SB's had Plaxton bodies and were new to the firm in 1959 and 1960. A new central depot and
workshop were established in 1964 on
the Poundbury Industrial
Estate in Dorchester, as successor to the original Bridport Road base
in the
county town (which had been acquired when Whitty's business was taken
over in 1942). By 1966 there were 89 vehicles in the by now
exclusively single deck fleet - of which 58 were
Bedfords. Still
over sixty per cent
were second hand purchases and the policy at the time was to run
vehicles into
the ground. During
the 1960s and 1970s some of the long established bus routes were
withdrawn and operations handed
over to other operators on the same road, eg Ironside's original
service Dorchester - Winfrith - East Knighton was sold
to Dorset Queen in
1965 and Dorchester - Frampton passed to Pearce
in
1975. Both were incorporated into the respective existing services of
the new operators.
Percy
Davis was the first of the
three partners to
die, on 19th May 1964 aged
56, and he is buried in St Andrews churchyard in Bloxworth.
Next
to go to
the big bus garage in the sky in 1970 was the firm's Managing Partner
for many
years, Bill Ironside. This left the firm in the hands of the
original founder Reg Toop,
who as last of the three partners died in 1973. Reg
was
remembered by the late Mervyn House of Mid-Dorset Coaches as 'someone
who would
help anybody'. Following Reg's death, during the 1970s and
1980s, whilst the trading name
remained Bere Regis & District, the operating licences were
held in
the name of 'the
trustees of R W Toop deceased'. Reg's widow Ethel left the
day-to-day management of
the business in the capable hands of Traffic Manager Maurice Crocker
(who died
in 1982) and General
Manager Ray Roper, both of whom had worked for the firm for many many
years. Henry Frier joined the firm as Traffic Manager in 1983.
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Bere
Regis celebrated the 50th anniversary of the firm's founding in
1979, and the
remaining core network of
bus routes was to continue largely unchanged until the deregulation of
buses in
1986. By then the overall
fleet size was 83 vehicles, garaged at Dorchester (which had been the
head
office for many years), and also at Bere Regis,
Blandford, Hazelbury Bryan, Sherborne, Wimborne and Weymouth.
A daily express coach service
from Dorset to London was started in June
1983. Private
hire, contract work, holidays and tours had become more important than
bus operation over
the years and at the time of bus deregulation in 1986 only a few
of the services were
registered to run commercially without benefit of council subsidy
(Bovington - Crossways - Dorchester and
Duntish - Piddle Valley -
Dorchester). Thus several of Bere Regis' traditional routes
were lost
to other operators as part of the county council's competitive
tendering
process. The Dorchester - Cerne Abbas - Sherborne trunk
route
passed to a very
unlikely named operator, Air Camelot of Wincanton, whilst another
important
route Blandford - Sturminster
Newton - Okeford Fitzpaine went to Oakfield
Travel of Blandford. The depots at Sherborne and Blandford were closed at this time.
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In 1989, Bere Regis
introduced a town service in
Dorchester. Although
based in the town, their bus operations had always been on village and
interurban routes, and they had not previously operated locally within
the
county town. The town services had been operated initially by private
operators
who succumbed to Southern National in the 1930s; in the 1980s the
town
services were operated for several years by Interbus, an operating arm
of Barrys
Coaches of Weymouth, before reverting to Western National (as Southern
National
had by then become). Other successful Bere Regis operations
at this time included considerable works contract
operations for BP to and from the Wytch oilfield in Purbeck, involving
up to 25
vehicles at the peak, and the daily express coach service to London
started by Henry Frier in
1983. The express continued under
the First Dorset Transit banner, then operation passed to Bluebird of
Weymouth from November 2003, but only for a few more years. Now there
is only National Express on the route.
Ray Roper retired in 1993 and
Henry Frier
succeeded him as General Manager. The Bere Regis firm
survived as a complete entity until 1994 when most of the operations
and the
Dorchester base were
sold to Dorchester Coachways / West Dorset Coaches - a new firm which
was part of the Cawlett group
who also controlled Southern National.
A small nucleus of
private hire
vehicles remained under the Bere Regis Coaches name, operated by Reg
Toop's daughter Sandra Wylie and her husband Alex.
These were garaged in Wimborne and controlled from an office in
Blandford.
Whilst the operations disposed
of in Dorchester and west Dorset prospered - and passed with the
Cawlett group
to the First Group in 1999, operating from the year 2000 under the
trading
name First Dorchester - those at Blandford did not, and regrettably the
proud name of Bere Regis Coaches faded away on 30th September 1995
after 66 years traveling the
highways and byways of rural Dorset.
From April 2001, the headquarters of the Bere Regis firm - which had been in Dorchester for many years past, firstly at Bridport Road and then in the old barracks on The Grove trading estate - were closed. The premises in The Grove had passed to Dorchester Coachways in 1994 and then in 1999 to their successors First Dorchester. The link was finally broken on 22nd April with the closure of First Dorchester and the transfer of the vehicles and drivers to operate from First Southern National's Weymouth depot. Long time Bere Regis general manager Ray Roper died in retirement in May 2001 at the age of 81. And then in January 2006 sadly we also had to record the death of Maurice Norman, one of the old Bere Regis drivers, and a great friend of the present writer for many years. |
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The route
map below shows the network of Bere Regis bus routes
in 1956. Many
of the routes on the map are market-day type services only running on
one or two days a
week. The daily routes were 1 Poole - Bere Regis, 1A Bere
Regis - Dorchester, 4
Dorchester - Sherborne, 5 Dorchester - Yeovil, 6 Dorchester -
Sturminster
Newton, 16 Blandford - Okeford Fitzpaine, 17 Shaftesbury - Woolland and
18
Yeovil - Sturminster Newton. (NB Some of the services have
been renumbered from those given in the
list of routes from the 1949 timetable above, as by 1956
routes
7 20 22
24 28
29 33 34
and 35 had been withdrawn
(using their 1949 numbers!)). Note also that Wimborne is no
longer served (although there was still a garage there at the
time).
The motif illustrated was used by Bere Regis for many years.
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THE BEGINNING - a pre-war timetable, thought to date from 1936 and to be the first timetable issued by the newly formed partnership. |
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![]() Bill Ironside in 1936 |
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Percy
Davis in 1938 |
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The development of the Bere Regis & District bus service network from 1949 to 1979 is outlined here in a chart listing the routes. A list of the operators acquired by Bere Regis & District over the years is here. Henry Frier remembers A Day at The Grove (the Bere Regis office in Dorchester in the 1980s). Colin Hallett remembers his days at the Sherborne depot in the 1980s - Coached the Bere Regis way. Colin Miller's reminiscences of a bygone age when his father was a driver for Bere Regis are here. Some further pictures of their coaches can be found here. Another selection of pictures (by Malcolm Knight) can be found here. If (unlike me) you look at Facebook then here is the Bere Regis Coaches online group. WHOTT DORCHESTER RUNNING DAY 2018
======== with thanks to Henry Frier and Roger Grimley for so much valued help and assistance over many years ========
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Please note - this is a site of historical record and does not contain current service information |