Tiger put firmly on the road to recovery

A Tiger from Scarborough will have pride of place at next month’s Lord Mayor’s Show in London which attracts hundreds of thousands of people and is broadcast live on television.

It’s an 82-year-old Leyland Tiger bus which will be having its first run out for half a century thanks to the efforts of three young Scarborough apprentices who have restored a vehicle that was once left to rot.

The apprentices at Bluebird Vehicles have carried out the work with the help of 66-year-old Bernard Moment, an experienced coach-builder who came out of retirement to help them. Bluebird was asked to get involved after the incoming Lord Mayor of London, Bradford-born David Wootton, invited tourism agency Welcome to Yorkshire to enter the parade. Its chief executive Gary Verity, said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to promote our county. The Leyland Tiger will be a proud Yorkshire entry into the Lord Mayor’s Show.”

Remarkably, the apprentices, 21-year-old Robbie Crowe, Michael Casey, 19, and Duncan Hibberton, 17, have managed to carry out the work using only grainy black and white pictures for guidance.

Now after almost two years the team is set to display their craftsmanship to a crowd of half a million people, as well as a television audience of about three million, at the parade on November 12.

Robbie, who is in the third year of his apprenticeship, said: “It’ll be a day I don’t think any of us will forget in a hurry.”

His colleague Michael, who is in his second year, said: “It will be brilliant as we’ve been promised that we’ll all be on the bus for the London parade, so I don’t think any of us can wait.”

Among the 15 passengers on the bus for the three-mile route will be the Scarborough MP Robert Goodwill and the restoration project team including Bernard Moment who worked at the company for 48 years.

He retired last year but shortly afterwards was asked to come back and lend his skills and knowledge of the vehicle to the apprentices.

The team’s final six weeks focused on the paintwork and replicating the vehicle’s original interior ( minus the ashtrays).

John Randerson, engineering manager at Bluebird, says: “Most of these old buses have just been chopped up or left to rot. Once we finish, this will be the only bus of its kind left in the world.”

It has had a long journey to get here. The Tiger was first purchased by East Yorkshire Motor Services from Ransomes of Ipswich in 1929. Sold off in 1946, when there was an acute housing shortage, it was then converted into a home. It was gutted and fittings such as a fireplace and an aerial were installed. The Tiger was then abandoned until the 1970s, when a team from Hull Technical College discovered it in an advanced state of decay. They planned to use it as a tool to train apprentices at the college. That idea had to be abandoned and it wasn’t until the Bluebird team came along that restoration finally got into gear.

Bernard Moment has been assisting the youngsters every Friday and is looking forward to the Tiger embarking on its first working journey in more than 50 years.

“I retired but I never really left,” he says. “When I first saw the bus, I nearly fainted. It’s not a restoration it’s a mammoth. But everybody has worked themselves into the ground getting it done and it came along nicely.”

He praises the camaraderie among the group, even if he has often found himself at the butt of some of the apprentices jokes.

“When somebody said that it was originally built in 1929, one of them asked if I had built it. Still, they’re still a smashing group of lads and this will do them proud.”

The Tiger, which cost tens of thousands of pounds to restore, will make its debut at a trade show in Birmingham this month before heading to London for the show where it could be the only non-London participant in the capital’s cavalcade.