Memories from 70 years of Wilfreda Beehive coach travel

As our coach forges south from Yorkshire, passers-by stop and stare at the name emblazoned along the side: Wilfreda Beehive. Some look puzzled, many break into a smile. As Peter Scholey says: “We get a lot of comments about the name. It’s a strength. Once you’ve heard it, you remember it.”

Peter is a director of Wilfreda Beehive, a long-established coach company based at Adwick-le-Street near Doncaster. As it approaches its 70th anniversary in 2019, my wife and I are joining its five-day tour to Eastbourne and Brighton to discover what’s in a name.

It’s an undemanding, gently nostalgic seaside break and a glimpse of an under-sung sector of the British travel industry. In a world of car ownership and cheap flights, coach holidays can be overlooked, but they still attract a wide range of regular customers, particularly more elderly ones. Elderly? One of our fellow passengers is going back to Eastbourne for the first time since his Army days in 1948.

But first, that name. It originates with Wilfred Graham, a 1940s taxi operator in the Doncaster area.

“His wife was having a baby and he was told it was a boy, so he was going to call him Wilfred,” says Peter Scholey. “When he got to the hospital, he found it was a girl, so he called her Wilfreda, and he named a coach after her.”

Peter’s grandfather subsequently bought the coach, kept the novel name and adopted it for the company he set up in 1949. Nearly 40 years later, the Scholeys bought another company – called Beehive – and tagged that on too.

Passengers are on first name terms with Wilfreda, as though she’s an old friend. Which the company is to many regulars. “We have customers who book 12 holidays as soon as they receive our brochure,” says Peter. “They go with us every month.”

There are plenty of regulars among the three dozen passengers on our trip. Ann Lawrence and her friend Ethel Mitchell, for instance do four “Wilfredas” a year together. “It’s the only way we’d get out and about now,” says Ann.

“There aren’t many places we’ve not been in England. My husband was a car driver and when I first suggested a coach holiday, he said: ‘You’re never getting me on a coach.’ But I said: ‘Let’s just try one.’ And now I’ve been coming for 20 years.”

The appeal is obvious. As Ann says: “You’re high up in a coach so you can see a lot more than in a car, and there isn’t the hassle of parking.”

Tours manager Matthew Barron agrees: “A lot of people don’t drive or don’t like driving. They like coach holidays because everything’s organised; they just like to be looked after.”

And they – we – are. Wilfreda does door-to-door tours, picking up customers from home. Our only responsibility is to be ready at our front gate in Sheffield at 8.55am prompt for the taxi to take us to a minibus.

That in turn takes us to the trip’s departure point, a farm shop and cafe near Newark. It’s all very seamless. And very sociable. Conversation on the minibus ranges over the relative merits of Brassed Off and The Full Monty, how well Barnsley FC is doing, and the curious allure of motorway service stations.

The Wilfreda coach is waiting in the farm shop car park – big (59-seater), black and sporting a busy-bees logo. And the passengers? Most, it’s fair to say, are on the mature side.

“The profile of customers has changed a lot,” says Scholey. “It used to be over-50s; now it’s generally over-60s, people who’ve retired and like to go away regularly. And this is an affordable way to do it.”

“The weather’s going to be on our side this week,” says Craig Buxton, our ebullient (and impressively skillful) driver, and off we go, with a vintage soundtrack of Bobby’s Girl, Downtown and Lipstick on Your Collar. It’s still mid-morning, but as we head down the A1, the couple across the aisle get to work on the boiled ham baps they made before setting off.

“You can look at people as they get on the coach on the first day and judge how much walking they’ll be able to do, and you have to think how many places have benches for them to sit on,” says Craig during a ‘comfort break’. “Some people want to be sociable, some want to be chatty, and some want to be left pretty much to themselves.”

The coach gives us a high vantage point, higher than the roadside hedges so, as we approach Eastbourne, we can take in the spruce, prosperous villages of Sussex.

“We came here for that Turkey and Tinsel trip, didn’t we?” says one neatly permed lady to another as we arrive at the Haddon Hall Hotel in Eastbourne. “No, that was Bournemouth,” says the other.

Turkey and Tinsel breaks are a coaching staple. “Hotels discovered that people really like having Christmas in October and November,” says Scholey. “You’ll get some people who will have had four Christmases by December 25.”

Eastbourne is understandably popular with older visitors and coach tours. It’s flat and smart, with elegant pastel-painted hotels. Back in the late Seventies, the Shell Guide reckoned it was “the most aristocratic” of the East Sussex resorts. “Its parades along the sea front can vie with Nice as an example of Victorian and Edwardian opulence and grandeur,” the guide said. Well, up to a point.

Long reckoned a retirement town, Eastbourne has the reputation of being select and sedate, a place to doze in sun loungers and while away afternoons with extended games of Scrabble.

Not so when a Fifties tribute band takes to the seafront bandstand and dozens of people bop along (or discreetly sway). Many were teenagers when Teenager in Love first hit the hit parade in 1959. Buddy Holly, The Supremes, Bob Marley, Lionel Ritchie and Johnny Cash tributes stretch ahead through the summer season.

Two other coach tours are also staying at the Haddon Hall, a friendly traditional seaside hotel just off the prom. After dinner (served 6.30 to 7.30) it’s “Eyes Down at 8pm followed by Music to Dance to with Melody.”

On our first morning we drive up to Beachy Head. “That’s where we camped in 1948,” says 87-year-old Raymond Holland from Upton near Pontefract, raising his stick and pointing towards the lighthouse as he recalls his days in the Royal Engineers. He goes quiet and gazes wistfully across the English Channel.

We visit Lewes, a town of immense charm, full of inviting bookshops and cookshops. Next day, it’s Brighton. I doze off on the coach journey (one kipper too many for breakfast) and wake with a jolt as we pass a café called Coffee Haven at Peacehaven near Newhaven. There’s a little town that proclaims “Twinned with Appen” – which is in Germany, but should be in Yorkshire, like as not.

Brighton is predictably busy, youthful and alternative. The highlight is, equally predictably, the Royal Pavilion, George IV’s riotously camp Oriental-inspired monument to either his sense of humour or his bad taste. We have a wonderful final day in Eastbourne – the bright, stylish Towner Art Gallery, followed by a stroll past beach huts to the Holywell Tea Chalet, here since Edwardian days.

We pass a bench with a plaque screwed to its backrest. “The Robbie Seat,” it says. “Fyfe Robertson – TV reporter and journalist, 1902 – 87”.

Do you remember him from the Tonight programme in the sixties, I ask. My wife gives me a meaningful look. “Way before my time,” she says.

See you at the next Turkey and Tinsel.