East Kent Road Car Company
1967
AEC Regent V 3D3RA
Park Royal H40/32F

This photograph, copyright of the ‘M & D and East Kent Bus Club’, shows East Kent Road Car Company MFN 946F in the guise of one of the holiday exhibition buses which toured northern towns in the 1960s to publicise the holiday resorts in Kent and Sussex.
In the early 1960s, as a school boy in Rochdale, I recall seeing a similar type of touring exhibition double decker of Maidstone & District. This was a rear entrance model probably one of the then latest intake of buses to M&D. (Some time ago John Stringer made mention on the OBP site of his sightings of same in Halifax).
From memory the lower deck rear longitudinal seats remained in place although the area forward of these (normally occupying the transverse seating) was fitted out with poster panels/tables with publicity material on display. The upper deck might have been set up to show films but I am not sure on this.
I wonder if anyone has any recollections or maybe photographs of these buses ‘on tour’?
The destination blind service number aperture shows ‘IN 1968’. I have no idea where this shot, in thawing snow, was taken but the ornamental sign seems to say ‘Barley Mow’.

My interest in buses was in its formative stage at this time and anything outside Lancashire and Yorkshire was truly alien so these visitors were quite ‘mysterious’. They also inspired me to cut thin strips of paper and insert them between the ‘windows’ of Matchbox Routemasters to crudely replicate the real thing!

Photograph and Copy contributed by David Slater

23/03/14 – 17:52

Further to my old friend David Slater’s picture of the East Kent ‘Publicity Bus’.

Here is a picture of the same bus parked outside Oldham Town Hall fulfilling the same duty, but this time praising the holiday virtues of Folkestone.
I wonder if it was enough to entice Oldhamers from the charms of Blackpool and the Lancashire coast for their ‘Wakes Holiday’. After all it was a long way to travel, when you could hop on a Yelloway Coach at Mumps and be there in a couple of hours.

Stephen Howarth

13/09/18 – 06:55

This vehicle is still going, and in excellent condition. Last seen in Chichester, on loan to Stagecoach, on the shuttle service from the Station to the Goodwood Motor Racing Circuit for the Goodwood Revival.

J Lynch