Twelve Royal Tigers

Plot

Hit by the fall in the trade in the mid-1930s, the owner of a modest Lancashire cotton firm recruited his bright young nephew to broaden the business. His solution was to build coach bodies. This had hardly started when two key staff members left and set up as rivals.A couple of years later one of that rival's coaches won an award at an international coach rally and one result was an order from one of the country's most prestigious continental coach tour operators for 12 specially-designed luxury coach bodies on Leyland Royal Tiger chassis.Things went wrong. Six were built, there was a dispute and the coachbuilder ran out of money. The order was then taken over by the coachbuilder they had left, bringing that firm close to large orders from the country's major bus and coach operating group.The tour operator went on to invent and develop the air packaged holiday and in doing so founded the United Kingdom's second largest airline. The coachbuilder, too, moved into aerospace. It is still in that industry and the chances are that it made some parts of the Boeing or Airbus that takes you on your packaged holiday air flight.This is not the plot for a new TV series. It is the story of Bellhouse Hartwell, Beccols, Blue Cars and Britannia Airways.