Rejuvenated Beatles coach comes home
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The Magical Mystery Tour coach that appeared in a Beatles film of that name has been saved for posterity. The beaten-up 17year-old Bedford VAL twinsteered coach, restored by Imperial Coachbuilders and Garlick, Burrell and Edwards, is now an object of idolatory in the Beatles Exhibition Centre in Liverpool.
It is in operation between Beatle City and the Liverpool International Garden Festival site and takes fans on tours of places associated with the Beatles.
Phil Roberts, co-managing director of Imperial Coachbuilders, has a special interest in the restoration. As a youth he played in a Liverpool group called Cryin' Shames, who performed in the Cavern in the city two years after the Beatles. The six musicians shared £10 a night and reached the Top Twenty with a record, Please Stay. Fortunately, Phil didn't.
His partner, Vic Billing, was for 10 years a coach operator under the style, Ashways of Knotty Ash. This puzzled southerners who not unreasonably believed that Knotty Ash was an invention of Ken Dodd and the home of jam butty mines. I have still to be convinced that it is not.