The Modern Age of the Coach Timeshift

Britain has had a long love affair with the coach.

In its heyday in the '50s the coach took us on holiday,

the coach helped us meet people, the coach gave us unforgettable experiences.

The coach was our friend.

But round the corner our colourful companion was in for a big shock.

Everything changed in the faster paced 1960s.

The formation of the National Bus Company, later to become

National Express, put an end to the golden age of coaching

and there was no time for nostalgia - the future

of coach travel beckoned - it was to be efficient and functional.

When you got all the little companies being gobbled up by the National Bus Company, all that really eclectic mix

of funny people and funny coaches and funny interiors, all became level and predictable.

In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, a new generation discovered

alternative uses for the coach, as the gaps left behind by the National Bus Company were exploited.

You got a load of football fans drinking a load of beer going to football match.

To describe these coaches, clearly they were road-worthy,

except for the time when they broke down, of course.

And I think that is probably the best you can say about them.

Like minded folk with a common purpose used old coaches as their chariots into battle.

200 miners would go from Durham up to Scotland.

That's like four coach loads.

They would drive us, drop us off, we would have a push and shove with the police,

and they'd pick us up and take us back to where we were.

At the other end of the market, luxury coaches emerged

with pile carpets, toilets and beds.

But not everyone was impressed.

For some unknown reason, the American bands didn't mind at all

being put together in one long tube after a gig,

stinking and smelling, within six inches of the next band.

Others were so taken by the coaches they decided to make them their dream home.

I'm a new age traveller, I have been living in a coach since about 1990.

Absolutely love it. Beats living in a house.

Bedroom, en-suite shower, what more do you want?

All was not lost. In spite of being a little scruffy,

these alternative coaches could still inspire a sense of community and adventure.

The freedom to get away from our crowded island.

Dusty roads, the noises, the smells, huge landscapes...

I can't imagine anything more different to a National Express trip.

MUSIC: "National Express" by The Divine Comedy

# Take the National Express When your life's in a mess

# It'll make you smile... #

-For nearly 40 years the National Express network has been offering

cheap and convenient travel to the long distance traveller in Britain.

When it arrived in the '70s, it shook up the transport industry, ushering in a new era of travel.

'It was the start of a new era.'

Going along at 70mph southbound,

every two minutes, there would be a National Express going the other way.

The old web of coach routes, run by scores of operators around

the country had been brought together under one name -

the National Bus Company - and one colour - white.

It was perfectly placed to take advantage of the new motorway network.

And the inspiration for all this modernisation was drawn from the United States.

Since the 1940s, America had been running a national network

of centrally co-ordinated coaches under one banner - Greyhound.

The Greyhound routes offered the ordinary traveller an inexpensive means

of crossing America's huge landscape in stylish comfortable coaches.

On the way, it captured the hearts of its passengers.

The Greyhounds were are a luxurious form of travel

without all that stupid executive nonsense.

They were like going in a Cadillac.

# I'm going where the sun is shining through the pouring rain... #

You had an upper deck and you would pay a slight premium to go on

the upper deck and watch the Rockies as you strode down these fantastic interstates.

It was great and it was convenient and you could go from, literally, coast to coast.

The USA was peppered with Greyhound coach stations

and by hopping from one line to another, the whole country was accessible from anywhere.

East, west, north south - it would be up to you which way you went.

You could go off and start a new life and nobody would know -

you'd be free.

Somewhere this idea of the romance of the open road was lost in translation.

Even back at its start, Britain's National Bus Company was developing a bit of an image problem.

National's white buses couldn't match either the allure

of the British golden age that had gone before it,

or the gleaming silver of American's greyhound.

The romance of coach travel just wasn't there any more and you would go on your coach down to London

on the M1 and it was just a sterile, bland experience.

Where National sought to standardise the routes, timetable and livery,

it also unwittingly standardised the experience of travel.

There was no longer anything to fall in love with.

You get on National Express, sit on the M25, go nowhere,

have a rotten packet of crisps, lousy service

and get off thinking, "I wish I'd never got on."

While the National Bus Company remained faithful to its grand plan

of direct intercity travel,

niches in the market opened up for those who didn't want

to conform to the standard routes.

There were still plenty of passengers who believed

that the original dream of coach travel was worth pursuing.

The coach was opening up a whole new world of possibilities.

MUSIC: "Magical Mystery Tour" by The Beatles

A few years earlier,

the Beatles had released the film The Magical Mystery Tour.

It played with a version of the golden-age where curious characters

embarked on a traditional British coaching adventure.

If you just looked down the bus at the characters that were there,

that was very much observing people.

This was the hippy era and the idea of taking a coach trip

to discover oneself was hitting the mainstream.

The way that it used the coach as a sense of escape,

as a sense of taking you

from your own mundane world to a better world showed very much

the romantic view of how the coach was seen at the time.

It was somewhere that would take you to strange, exotic and exciting places.

Taking advantage of a glut of cheap coaches being sold off by the industry, unofficial operators

sprung up throughout the '70s offering their own take on the Magical Mystery Tour -

overland coach travel to exotic middle and far eastern destinations.

Everyone was just having fun. The '70s were a brilliant time to be alive.

The '60s were all a bit sort of fuzzy!

And lots of people can't remember them.

But the '70s was a time when you could do stuff,

you could just up sticks and go and travel.

The idea of the open road was particularly attractive

to the hippy generation and the use of coaches was a very important part

of enabling that hippy way of life.

Coaches are ideal vehicles for people that wanted the privacy to do drugs,

they can be easily converted to sleep in them,

to paint the outside to make them look psychedelic and so on.

And they could go anywhere. You could stop anywhere, you could sleep anywhere.

We took a few friends and we got as far as Istanbul and discovered

that there were a lot of people who wished to travel in anything other than the local transport.

Especially in Turkey, where the drivers had a reputation for being a bit crazy.

I just started doing my own little posters,

sticking them in the window, sit around for a couple of days.

Things like 25 to the next capital city

and it just went on from there.

Often in the back of my mind I used to think about the Greyhound bus

across America, because they share these vast landscapes.

And in fact I called my bus the Silver Express

and I wanted to call it der Verchromte Windhund,

which is the Chromium Greyhound.

But it was just too much of a mouthful.

There were people of all nationalities wanted to travel out east.

The French were usually looking for something to smoke.

The British never had enough money to get back home again.

The Americans could always phone home if things were bad, although you'd probably have to sit around

for a whole day trying to make a telephone connection.

Germans were always very well organised, as you'd expect them to be.

And the Swedes and the Danes were just very pleasant.

I suppose there were four or five major organised companies.

And two or three dozen independent operators.

Including a girl called Christine - a one-eyed, one-armed French girl.

Who drove her own bus.

There were several people like myself, who'd just got a bus

and were interested in going backwards and forwards.

Or just taking the bus full of passengers out there,

selling the bus, flying back, buying another bus.

Travelling off the beaten tracks had its draw backs.

The tracks were often badly maintained.

And overland buses were commonly seen broken down on the side of the road or worse.

No such thing as health and safety in those days.

John remembers stopping to help out.

I stopped to ask if I could assist and he said, "Yeah, would you like these passengers?"

And so I kind of bought the passengers off him.

For 10%!

And he's given me a wad of cash and all the people just...

They were happy to be on my bus, because it was so much more reliable.

It was all pretty free really.

We found somewhere that was nice to stop

and just lay around or picnic. We'd do that.

If we found a hotel that we hadn't used before that was nice,

or in a nice location, we'd stay there for an extra day or so.

We used to take about three weeks from England to India.

The important thing is, in my mind anyway, that I got everybody there. And to me,

they'd paid money and I was contracted to take them where they wanted to go.

For those not so adventurous,

there was always the National's intercity routes back in the UK.

Expansion of universities meant more and more students needed to study away from home.

They were becoming a substantial market for coach travel in their own right.

While students could be catered for by standard routes,

other passengers had requirements that were less predictable.

And the national network was predictably not equipped to cater for them.

Newbridge, Basingstoke, Guildford,

Horsham, Worthing.

MUSIC: "Magic Bus" by The Who

You had some national routes gradually emerging,

but beneath that, a very anarchic situation

with lots of small companies still operating as private hire coaches

and serving a very diverse, quite interesting market.

So one had small, private, family-owned coach companies,

some very long-established, who hire vehicles out to whoever wants to go on a trip somewhere.

Weddings, anniversaries, works outings, you name it.

There was a network of coach services serving the Asian community, which followed

routes such as from Leicester to Southall, which were not mainstream for the white population.

One of the most common uses for a privately hired coach

is the school outing.

An experience shared across the generations.

OK, take your seats.

One at a time. Slowly.

No pushing, no pushing.

That was just chaos in a metal tube.

The teachers couldn't keep control and neither could the coach driver.

I got coach sick. If I was sitting across the back, I wasn't sick.

So I always got the back seat.

It was prime position to muck around and be naughty

cos it also meant the teacher, who always sat at the front, had to get up and walk

all the way to the back and go, "Look, I've told you time and time again, if you don't behave yourself,

"you're going to come up the front and sit with me."

"But if we do, Miss, Wakeman will be sick!"

"Well, you'll all come up except for Wakeman."

"But he's the one who is mucking around the most, Miss!"

The 1970s saw the coach confirm its countercultural status,

when the music business embraced it.

# ..With blotched and lagered skin

# Blockheads with food particles in their teeth

# What a horrible state they're in... #

Independent label Stiff Records sent almost their entire roster

of artists on tour in a single coach in order to save money.

It was 1977 when Stiff artists Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Larry Wallis,

Wreckless Eric and Ian Dury were all sent out on the road

in a green and white 57-seater Plaxton Panorama Elite

and what better way to kick-start their careers?

# How would you like one puffing and blowing in your ear hole?

# Or pissing in your swimming pool... #

Bands performed back to back each night showcasing their best few songs in a revue-style line-up.

The bands hadn't really had hit records at this point.

So together they were more of a phenomena than singly.

Taking Stiff's artists on a coach around the country

was clearly the cheapest option for the label.

It made economic sense.

It was consciously or sub-consciously putting

themselves on the level of the people who were going to see them.

It was seen as very authentic, it was very real, it was a kind of back-to-basics manoeuvre.

The coach also had some practical advantages.

Everyone arrives at the same time. Everyone is on time if the coach is on time.

Everyone's together. There is that kind of togetherness that makes a tour work.

And a good tour is where people integrate.

If the bands are turning up in their own little bubble,

they don't - either musically or socially - they don't get on

with everybody else and it doesn't work

as well as it should.

# Nice girl's not one with a defect

# Cellophane shrink-wrapped, so correct

# Red dogs under illegal legs

# She looks so good that he gets down and begs

# She is watching the detectives... #

There were a lot of little camps who set up and lots of people who felt they were slightly different

to other people. so you'd have a group in the back playing and elbowing out another group slightly.

Then you'd have the people in the front talking about drug experiences, or booze.

Elvis wrote at least four or five songs a day.

So he was totally intense about writing and being professional.

Ian Dury was kind of pie-in-the-sky musical, "We are musicians, we are

"more musical than the other guys, we think music all the time."

A lot of this kind of competitive stuff.

I mean, all human kind were there.

A keyboard player of one of the bands, a very nice girl,

but it turned out that she actually had three or four boyfriends in the ensemble, but she wasn't...

nobody had twigged this until one day on the coach when some expression

that somebody said about something and somebody says, "What?"

And she was completely blushing and it turned out that she was having it

away with three guys at the same time but arranging it so that they didn't know about it, obviously.

That's what happens on coaches!

The historical context at the time was kicking against the excesses of metal and of prog rock.

And bringing their artists on a coach together, it attracted an awful lot of publicity.

It was a great tour. It broke Ian Dury and Elvis Costello, I think, and the coach was memorable.

Stiff fully exploited the coach as a cheap way of getting its artists around but they weren't the first.

Ever since the great swing tours of Duke Ellington,

the coach had been used to bus around large numbers of musicians.

Even the mighty Cliff Richard employed the coach as a tour bus,

but the coach seemed to be especially suited to the needs of the Motown Revue Tour of the 1960s

as they travelled the down to the Deep South.

Though the experience changed somewhat when they repeated the performance in the UK.

The great Motown revues traversed America in a coach.

You hear these tales of Stevie Wonder and the Four Tops being on a coach together,

kind of finger-clicking, humming songs and generally growing up

through that experience together.

Now, it's a little bit less glamorous if you're going from Preston to Cleethorpes.

From humble beginnings, the tour bus has evolved over the years.

Used initially as just a form of transport for bands,

it started to be seen as a money saving alternative to expensive hotels.

Bands often travel by coach.

Not always, because at the very top level they will fly the few hundred yards from hotel to venue.

However, for most bands, coach is still the way.

There's this industry built around the luxury coach.

These coaches have developed beyond imagination.

They are full of kitchens, there are places to record,

there are luxury seating arrangements.

And people sleep on them and drive from city to city.

But in the '70s when Yes were on tour, some band members weren't so keen on the new sleeper coaches.

I can remember being called in by the management,

the whole band and they said, right we're doing a tour, now...

We think it would be a great idea if it was a bus tour.

And we just sat there, because they use all these arguments,

"It will be great, because at the end of the gig you just get on the bus and pleasantly go to sleep

"and you wake up in the town where you're playing the next day.

"How wonderful is that?"

And then you point out to them, OK, yes, we'll all tour,

with the exception of Jon - 6'3". The bunks are not 6'3".

It's like being on a submarine.

You're still in a glorified bunk bed.

It's incredibly claustrophobic, it's incredibly sweaty.

It's difficult, it's not the luxury that it appears.

There is one loo and the sort of things that bands do, you do not

need one loo - you need your own separate coach with eight loos on it following you.

There is of course the legendary "no number two" rule.

And it's usually

faithfully adhered to.

Partially because it's pretty obvious who the culprit might be,

should nature take its inevitable course.

You cannot have your own space and if there's one thing I think musicians need, it's your own space.

Because you spend your life with them - on stage, eating, talking, rehearsing.

Why the hell do you want to go to bed with them?

So we went, "No!"

And the management were quite taken aback because they can

make a lot more money if they stick you on a bus.

Because it's a damn sight cheaper than putting you in hotels.

Where a tall band like Yes struggled with

the small living space that a coach offered,

other artists travelling solo had a lot more room to stretch out.

# A long and restless journey

# Living on a strong and hungry dream

# Somewhere down the road

# A warm light, shining gold

# Some day soon it's bound to shine on me... #

Regarded as one of the most successful female country artists ever,

Tammy Wynette sold over 30 million records during her career.

This made her one of the highest earners in the business

and so, unsurprisingly, she demanded a coach to match.

# Somewhere in the future ain't so crazy... #

But however luxurious, one thing Tammy Wynette's tour bus missed out on

was the communal joys of travelling with large numbers of people,

crammed together in common purpose.

Nowhere was this more true than on the football fan coaches.

As the football league grew in the early '70s,

so did the number of fans willing to travel to away matches.

And for those who couldn't afford the train, the coach was the only way.

THEY CHANT

'A lot of football travel was by coach,'

up and down the motorways, and they caused a bit of trouble for some

of the motorway service stations when drinking was allowed on the coaches.

-THEY CHANT:

-..The best team of all

Everybody knows us, we're called Millwall!

Here we come, here we come, here we come...

'There is nothing to beat travelling with a lot of the fans

'of the same club on a coach going to a football match.

'I loved doing that, that was always great fun.'

I think if there's a group of you, who, in a strange way, have a connection,

then there's no doubt about it, it works.

In the best part of my formative years I would travel

every other Saturday to a football match on a coach.

I would see Sheffield Wednesday,

and we would basically drink our way from Sheffield to our destination.

We had a fantastic time.

These days, of course, if you travel on a coach

to football matches you are legally barred from taking alcohol, and the police enforce this quite strictly.

Back then, beer was not only allowed, it was compulsory.

It meant a kind of stop-start journey because,

as we know, men's bladders do not operate in sync.

Poor, innocent families travelling in their saloon cars

to their suburban destinations

would invariably pass rows of men

relieving themselves on the side of the road.

All we are going for is a good game of football,

a good punch-up and a good piss-up.

The potent mix of alcohol and a passionate devotion to football

saw a rise in violence in and around football matches.

The visiting coaches seemed to be a magnet for aggression

from some home fans.

Depending on how many coaches came down, you could have anything

up to 20 or 30 coaches

of away supporters.

You've got to park them somewhere, then you've got to take

all the occupants, 50 to 100 at a time, to the ground for their own protection.

Then some police have to guard all these coaches in case the home supporters wreck the things.

They've got to be escorted out of the city on the way out.

In extreme situations, and you've got to stress that this didn't happen all the time,

they'd throw bricks at the coaches, they would throw stones,

they would throw pint pots, if you were passing a pub.

The more experienced travellers amongst us

were very much able to recognise the three sounds of brick on coach.

Sound number one was the brick hitting the metal work beneath the windows.

That was a good sound - you were kind of reassured.

The second sound was brick hitting the window

and the window not shattering.

That was sort of reassuring and sort of little bit scary.

And then there was the third sound of a brick shattering window.

That was quite scary.

It was an occupational hazard.

The worst thing would be travelling back with a broken window on the coach.

That was cold, that was horrible.

And the fact that the retreat had been caused

by the locals meant there was a certain dampening of morale.

During the '70s, football had become one of the largest areas of the private hire market.

National recognised this and started to poach some of this business.

National's army of buses were gaining territory all the time,

and the shiny new white coach company seemed unstoppable.

But the name National didn't quite capture the essence

of speedy intercity travel, so it was rebranded

as National Express, and jobs there were much sought after.

I was a bus driver in Nottingham

on local services, and a vacancy came up on the notice board,

they wanted a driver to operate their contract with National Express.

This was a very special opportunity for me.

It was a prestige job.

It was suggested that if I was snapped in half like a stick of rock,

it would say National Express all the way through me.

The services were faster,

drivers were driving more to the speed limits than they had done in the past.

This particular vehicle was re-engined

with a more powerful engine

to cope with the additional speeds and tight timings needed.

The ease with which the National Express network grew

showed how badly the country needed the network.

It even started to take away passengers from the railways.

Train fares were skyrocketing.

The car was unreliable, there wasn't mass car ownership.

It was seen as not necessarily something to take long journeys in.

So the coach, which was affordable, mildly pleasant and very reliable,

was seen as the way for ordinary people to get from city to city.

By the end of the '70s National Express dominated the coach market.

But had it got too big for its own good?

There wasn't a lot of space for a smaller company to come in

because the nationalised bus companies had really got it sewn up.

They knew what the customer wanted and they provided it.

That spelled trouble.

Monopolies were not popular with the new Conservative Government.

Their mission was to create more competitive markets,

and National Express was about to be put in the firing line.

The Tories would start a long process of de-regulating Britain's nationalised industries.

First for the treatment was the bus and coach network in the 1980 Transport Act.

OK, well done.

-REPORTER:

-'Transport Minister Norman Fowler opened the way to what he sees

'as a better deal for the travelling public.

'He says the new Transport Act is the first major reform of bus licensing for half a century.

'10 major private operators have banded together

'to form British Coachways, offering a nationwide network of cheap services.

'With the Government's blessing, independent bus companies

'are set to challenge the near monopoly of National Express.

'And there will be few complaints from passengers, with an immediate cut-price war on many routes.'

The fares were dropped, and there was an instance, between Exeter and London,

the fares overnight went down from £8.50 to £3.50.

There were pluses and minuses to this.

Yes, it opened up transport to people who before would probably have hitch-hiked.

But I think we lost the very respectable, well-dressed clientele.

In spite of the fanfare that British Coachways received,

they lasted a year before National Express saw them off.

But other private companies with cut prices were catching on.

One of the most successful of these was Stagecoach,

which was started by Brian Souter and his sister, Ann Gloag.

On their early routes he would drive while she would make the sandwiches.

Today it's the second largest transport company in the country.

MUSIC: "If The Kids Are United" by Sham 69

While the deregulation of the coach networks was seen as a success, the Government's approach

to the coal industry was not looked upon so favourably.

The closing of pits threatened the livelihoods of many in the mining communities.

The reactions of the miners is well documented, but less well known is the role of the humble coach.

# If the kids are united... #

I worked at Westoe Colliery in South Shields on the Durham coalfield.

I was a flying picket. If you don't know what a flying picket is,

it's someone who's fighting for their job who goes to try and spread a strike

around places which should be joining the strike but aren't,

and tries to peacefully persuade those people the error of their ways.

# If the kids are united

# They will never be divided... #

People don't realise but it was a massive exercise moving all these miners around the country.

We turned up at the Union Hall in the morning and then some knackered, banged-up old banger of a coach

would come spluttering up to the door to take us.

They weren't luxury, luxury didn't come into it.

And the smell!

If you can imagine 50 blokes on a bus,

they've all been in the pub because they want to get to sleep on the bus.

So we had a bucket

in the middle of the bus.

But some idiot would kick it over

and the smell... And people's feet, they were lifting their feet up...

But there was still a great sense of humour about the whole thing.

# ..If the kids are united... #

As the conflict escalated, the Government took a hard line

to clamp down on the pickets who were now turning up in their hundreds.

Even the police started using coaches.

They were coordinated by an emergency centre

set up on the 13th floor of Scotland Yard,

and could be deployed around the country at a moment's notice.

Leicestershire are certainly in the same position.

Derbyshire have got the same result.

And it would appear from what I see that most of you are going to be in the same position on Monday morning.

Just about every force in the country took part somewhere along the line.

One of the pits would be hit en masse by flying pickets.

Pack a bag, you're going to Nottingham.

Pack a bag, you're going to Kent. Pack a bag, you're going to North Wales.

We would get bussed up and have to go, hot-foot it across the county

to wherever that particular trouble-spot was.

There was lots of competition with the police in trying to outwit them.

Especially going into Nottingham.

They didn't want us to go into Nottingham and we wanted to go.

A new concept was devised called intercept duty, devised purely and simply to disrupt their activities

before they got to whichever pit they were going to hit.

-REPORTER:

-'There will be police checkpoints at motorway exits,

'searches for offensive weapons, and flying pickets will be turned back.

'Coach drivers bringing in any pickets are being warned they are liable to arrest and prosecution.'

We were starting to see all these motorway bridges with police vehicles covering them.

Every single one, police vehicles, there were police cars going up the side roads

with their lights flashing. Thinking, "Oh, my God, what are we getting ourselves into?"

They were easy to spot, to be fair, because they'd all be wearing donkey jackets.

Lots of flat caps with "Coal Not Dole" stickers all over the place.

None of them could give us an address in Nottingham where they supposedly lived.

The cops said, "Where do you think you lot are going?"

We said, "We're going to a wedding, officer."

"Oh, yeah? It's a Tuesday."

"Yeah, well, he's got strange tastes, my cousin."

"Yeah, well, I think you're going illegal picketing."

Driver, on his own admission he's not holding us, so let's go.

Back on the bus, boys, come on.

And they were ordered, with police escort,

to drive back the way we bloody well came and never be seen in Nottingham again for the duration of the strike.

And we headed off up the motorway, back to where we came from.

Except we didn't, we turned off at Barnsley and went back to strike headquarters and said,

"Right, we couldn't get in that way, how can we get in?"

They started splitting up and going in different directions, coming cross-country.

So we would have to cover every single road coming into and out of Nottinghamshire.

The whole basis of the police operation was to facilitate those that wanted to work, to work.

So, if that actually meant escorting them into the pit...

Sometimes in some pits it was just one or two.

They literally walked in with a police escort.

Very brave of them.

Divisions among miners meant that the protests became more intense

and the police responded in larger numbers,

but there were still those who wanted to go back to work.

Anybody that assisted the working miners, without doubt the local coach companies were attacked.

Graffiti on the walls, some of the vehicles were damaged.

As the violence mounted, normal buses and coaches

were no longer deemed safe to carry workers across the picket line.

Coaches started to be specially adapted to withstand the attacks.

This thing turns up, I've never seen anything like it apart from in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Great big coach with steel mesh all the way up the sides,

bullhorn things on the front, mirrored windows so you couldn't see anybody inside at all.

At the same time as the coaches became safer, more and more miners went back to work.

There would be one coach, and then a couple of days later

there'd be two coaches, but you could never see who was on the coach.

They would just put figures out and say 100 men have gone back today, trying to panic everybody.

By March 1985 the strike was over.

But even though miners were returning to work by the coach load,

the pit closures left many communities struggling with unemployment and debt.

The coaches' role, however, was not forgotten.

After the strike, the coach companies who hadn't supported us,

who had refused to come and pick us up, who had taken police or had taken scabs into the pit...

..we boycotted them. You might think, what's a few miners?

But miners - they go to galas,

they go to clubs, they go on trips away to Blackpool and so on.

But those companies, miners and their supporters would never use again.

And if they are still in existence they probably still won't now, if they are anything like me.

I do bear a grudge.

Back on the motorways of commercial coach travel,

National Express was under growing pressure from competitors.

Some of the new private operators were offering cheaper fares,

and others a higher standard of service.

In 1985 they responded by launching

the upmarket-sounding Rapide service.

The Rapide - a new dawn of luxurious coach travel beckoned.

The Rapide commanded a slightly higher fare.

The ordinary services would cater for the day-to-day passenger.

The Rapide services would cater for a slightly more upmarket passenger.

# We've got coffee, we've got tea We've got toilets if need be

# We've got films and videos So there's lots for you to see

# We've got seats so you can lay back just like you do on planes

# And best of all Rapide's got Elaine

# You've just got to meet Elaine She's a real swell girl

# You would have to be insane

# To choose anyone but Rapide's Elaine. #

Rapide's got Elaine, and Jane and Kate...

Another thing that was introduced at the time was the video film.

Not liked by everybody, and very often the hostess or the driver

would in fact be asked by an intending passenger,

"Are they repeating the film that I saw last time?"

Refreshments were provided on board, hence toilet facilities were needed as well.

They were quite basic but adequate for the use they had.

However basic the facilities, the toilet had a key role

in helping the Rapide be, well, Rapide.

The service could run for much longer distances without having to stop for convenience breaks.

For those who weren't in quite such a rush, coaches proved adaptable in other ways, too.

Some even set about converting coaches into travelling homes.

And with this transformation came a new way of life for what became known as New Age Travellers.

You can pay upwards of a couple of hundred pounds to a few thousand

and still be able to get a reasonable service

out of the vehicle before it finally gives up the ghost.

You don't have to do much to one.

You can just put down a bed base or a mattress

and you can put a couple of shelves below the windows,

and that's fitted, isn't it?

But that's probably not going to be very comfortable.

It seemed the freedom of the hippy buses of '60s was alive and well, but there were still the regulations

of the road to contend with and the police were not always sympathetic to their ways.

The vehicles that they used, without putting too fine a point on it,

most of them were complete wrecks and were completely unroadworthy.

Police concerns would come to a head as the travellers planned to meet

for the summer solstice at Stonehenge in 1985.

A court injunction was issued, and roadblocks set up to prevent the festival going ahead.

And, as during the miners' strikes, coach loads of extra police were drafted in.

The steps that had to be taken to prevent it were really a response

to the declaration by the spokesman for those who come to the festival

that they were determined to ignore the injunctions.

I must stress that the National Trust will continue to say

that we can't have the festival on this land.

The policing of Stonehenge, which was originally Wiltshire Constabulary's responsibility,

again they called on neighbouring forces to supply mutual aid

because the New Age Travellers

were becoming so large in numbers that Wiltshire couldn't cope.

So they called on forces from Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, Sussex,

the Met and one or two other forces,

to come and assist them in policing the hippies attending Stonehenge for the summer solstice.

When these people decided to move - and they moved en masse - it was very difficult

to put your hand up and say you can go no further, because they are not going to take any notice of you.

A full-scale plan, probably something almost as big as the miners' strike, policing-wise,

was put into operation,

to exercise some kind of control over Stonehenge

and the policing of the whole hippy convoy.

Because of the police opposition to such things in the past,

we were aware that there might be legal consequences.

There might be a court case where you'd be asked to move when you'd arrived,

but none of us had any idea of the kind of military intervention that was about to take place.

They were pushed into a field to basically corral them

to start off with, so we could exercise some kind of control.

Prior to that, they'd been driving through farmyards, through people's gardens.

This was just another occasion where I thought the vehicle up ahead had just broken down.

I got out of my vehicle, taking the opportunity to photograph the convoy.

When I heard screams and glass breaking and people running about...

With some alarm I saw a phalanx of something like 40 or 50 policemen with shields and sticks

running down the vehicles ahead of me, breaking the windscreens

and side windows and generally assaulting people.

A bus ahead of me drove through a hole in the hedge, making that hole bigger.

I saw my opportunity and took my vehicle and my family into the field to get away from the initial assault.

The peace convoy was prevented from moving and it was only a matter of time before violence erupted.

One of the police carriers was T-boned by a single-decker coach,

virtually broken in half, and the two officers inside it were quite badly injured.

It was as a direct result of that,

that what has now become known as the Battle of Beanfield then kicked off.

-Get out!

-Open the door!

I'm coming!

On the deck.

It wasn't just the coaches that were attacked by the police.

There were many casualties.

I was really very frightened, both for myself, my family and those that I care about around me.

Only when the initial conflict died down was the full scale of the damage clear.

It was simply to damage the vehicle beyond economic repair, such that when it got rained on after that day,

that people wouldn't be able to maintain the vehicle, decommissioning the convoy.

Those who were arrested had their coaches impounded by the police.

Once released they were allowed to recover their vehicles.

Few were left roadworthy.

LOUD SQUEAKING

This is my baby's bed that he was asleep in

when the police broke the window.

The front of the bus - mine was probably the best on the circuit -

and it's been totally wrecked.

Such a violent encounter left many of the travellers' homes in pieces.

Things would never be the same again for the peace convoy.

It did have a huge impact,

although it didn't cure the problem completely.

The year after, every vehicle that came into the county

was literally taken to one side

and inspected by the traffic department.

If it was deemed to be unroadworthy, then the driver, the owner,

would be given a notice to get it fixed within three days or he lost it.

-Get out!

-Open the door!

The Battle of Beanfield all but wiped out the old coaches that were used as travelling homes.

But today a few of the hardcore travellers have managed to cling on

to the coach as home, and reinvented the traveller's way of life.

Hello, my name is Buzz.

This is my lovely Volvo bus.

It's a right old clanger but I absolutely love it.

I'll show you inside.

It might be a clanger but Buzz has converted this old holiday touring coach entirely himself.

These seats are for the crew. This is the kitchen.

Office area. TV.

Seating area.

Bedroom, en suite shower.

What more do you want? Luxury!

Absolutely love it.

I've been living in coaches and trucks

for about 20 years, since 1990.

My mum just wanted to take us and show us new things

and take us travelling, just wanted us to be free

and not be cooped up in a shoebox in town, basically.

The first coach we moved into was...

a Bedford Chinese Six.

We moved from a Bender and a tepee into that.

It was like a palace, it was lovely.

It was the whole of my family - my mum, me, my little brother, Louis, Fawn and Hanna, my younger sister.

It was like Noah's ark with all the chickens and goats.

When we moved site we had to put all the chickens in cages and get the goat on there and off we went.

It was literally like Noah's ark!

I learned loads of things that have helped me a lot through my life that you wouldn't ever learn in school.

I learned a lot about mechanics. People treated me with a lot of respect when I was younger,

the same as any kids got treated. You don't get talked down to,

people teach you things and treat you like their own kid.

Yeah, it really gives you that confidence when you are older to do things.

I've travelled all round England, all over Ireland, been all over Europe.

Everybody looks after each other, it's just like a massive family.

That's why everyone does it, that's the attraction.

It's like a massive family. Everyone trusts each other.

Everyone knows each other for years, it's just the way it is.

You just can't beat it.

Several times, tried thinking about a house.

I only have to go and visit my friend who lives in a house and it reminds me why I can't do it.

You've got your neighbours that hate you, you can't park anywhere.

I just couldn't do it.

You are crammed in there, it's just like prison as far as I'm concerned.

I could see myself living in a coach for the rest of my life, definitely.

You can move, you can choose your neighbours.

It's your own home, you own your own home.

It's just freedom in my opinion.

It's the only way I know, really.

And I love it.

In the mainstream world of coach travel, National Express was privatised in 1991.

And the Rapide, its last initiative as a nationalised bus company, became the first casualty

of the Easyjet generation of businesses offering no-frills travel.

It wasn't that there was a diminishing appetite for the coach, far from it.

Coaches were diversifying, appealing to an even wider market.

Now, we've already heard about no-frills airlines.

How about no-frills buses?

MUSIC: "Do The Bus A Bus" by Busta Rhymes

# ..The bus a bus Rockin' to the beat... #

In 2003 Stagecoach came up with a £1 fare aimed specifically

at students and young people, using only online booking. They branded it Megabus

and reconditioned old double-decker buses for motorway travel.

Journey times may have been longer, the seats a little less comfortable, but who could argue with the price?

I think it's good. If it's cheap,

you'd get more people using it then, wouldn't you?

It sounds very cheap.

I do think that perhaps this is underlining that downmarket image

of coach travel by emphasising the £1 trip,

when in fact I think people are more interested in better quality service.

But that's the beauty of the coach - it never has to make up its mind.

It's the most adaptable of all forms of travel.

The coach can be all things to all people.

At one end of the market it can be about value for money

and at the other about aspiring to sophistication.

# The golden coach

# Has a heart of gold

# Driving through old London town... #

You can see very posh people with their big hats arriving at Ascot, very happily moving around

using the coaches, being seen getting in and out of a coach,

even though it's a very upmarket day and they are probably paying hundreds of pounds to be there.

Events like these have always been catered to by smaller, specialist firms.

But now the idea of appealing to an upmarket class of passenger

is once again filtering through to the mass market.

It comes to us as a familiar name, one that originally inspired

our first unified coach network 40 years ago.

First Group are now beginning to roll out the Greyhound identity in Britain,

because they think, presumably, that it will sell well

in the British market because of its American associations

with the open road and romanticism, and with a tradition for safety and high quality.

So in that sense things have come full circle.

Yet in other ways the coach industry may be at a new beginning.

Concerns over spending and pollution show a massive demand for a cheap and green form of transport.

One that doesn't need an expensive infrastructure to support it.

Might that be our old friend the coach?

In theory there are no barriers to entry for the coach revolution.

They're here, they're fast, they're plush, they're reasonably convenient. The coach is

a hugely green alternative. What do you get on a coach, 50 people or so?

Stack them all on there, that takes 50 cars off the road, the emissions won't be anything like that.

There's a lot of talk at the moment about building new high-speed rail links.

Some people think that this is too expensive for a small country such as Britain,

that we would actually be much better off using the motorway network to develop a really fast,

high-speed coach network, perhaps by allowing dedicated lanes for the coach services and instigating

shuttle services at the motorway service stations

so that journey times could be really fast and predictable.

The golden age of the coach might be long gone but perhaps we're entering a new, green age for coaching.

A moment for yet another re-invention of the coach industry.

Can everyone make sure they have their belts on for me, please?

It is a legal requirement and it is for your own safety.

Whatever the future of coach travel, we will always remember our journeys on a coach for better or for worse.

Whether we be musicians, students, hippies, miners, football fans

or businessmen, on some level we've all got a soft spot for the coach.

Even if it's sometimes for complicated reasons.

# Take the National Express when your life's in a mess

# It'll make you smile... #

The coach is the way young people can make their first travelling adventures.

It's a refuge for people whose financial situation is not all they might hope it could be.

And it's a refuge for people who are getting away from things, who are escaping to things.

That bitter sweetness, it reminds people of less stable times

in their own lives, but which they can now look back and think,

"That was all right, actually, travelling down the M1 on a National coach. It was really quite good."

-# ..Everybody sings

-Ba, ba, ba-da, ba, ba, ba-da

# Ba, ba, ba-da, ba, ba, ba-da

# Ba, ba, ba-da, ba, ba, ba-da

# Ba, ba, ba-da, ba, ba, ba-da

# We're going where

# The air is free. #