Title: Two Scottish Coachbuilders
Authors: Michael Eyre, Richard Gadsby, Peter Tulloch
Publisher: Best Impressions
ISBN: 978-0-9565740-6-0
Specification: 285mm x 240mm, 72pp, softback
Price: £21
Few of the companies that diversified into bus and coach bodybuilding in the brief postwar boom provide as many contrasts as the west of Scotland subjects of this book. One was an over-stretched dealership unable to realise its ambitious dreams, the other a large aeronautical engineering company with well-designed products that it could not sell in economic quantities.
The Scottish Commercial Motor Company, a dealership with fingers in several pies, built two dozen bodies in Glasgow between 1946 and 1950. Scottish Aviation, a big employer based at Prestwick Airport in Ayrshire, produced 133 between 1948 and 1951, before retreating to what it knew best.
In this thoroughly researched and fascinating account, the authors relate these parallel tales, setting them in the context of what other manufacturers were doing, their text complemented by excellent photographs and presented to the high standard of design that is a hallmark of Ray Stenning’s Best Impressions.
Scottish Commercial perhaps imagined it struck gold…
