Thomas Harrington Ltd - Mini Coaches and Minibuses

Mini Coaches and Minibuses

From the early 1930s until the mid-1950s Harrington employee and former Southdown driver Ernie Johnstone constructed 63 quarter-scale road-legal coaches to give novelty rides to young children. Many of these were powered by Villiers 125cc two-stroke petrol engines. Bodies on 12 of these working models were constructed by Harrington, the rest he did himself with two friends in his spare time.

During the 1950s Harrington, like Plaxton and Readings offered small party coaches on Karrier and Commer delivery van chassis, whilst from the late 1950s until the factory's closure, Harrington was responsible for producing the Rootes Group's in-house PSV conversion of the Commer 1500 minbus. After Harrington's demise the minibus work went to the former Tilling-Stevens works in Maidstone.

Customers of the minibus included Crosville, the first time the state sector had been served by Harrington since 1949, when United Automobile Services took a batch of Bristol coaches bodied in Hove for their prestigious Newcastle-London service.

The state-owned bus firms' lack of interest in outside suppliers had one over-riding reason: In 1948 ECW and Bristol were served with a statutory ban on selling bodies to other than wholly government-owned organisations and thus ECW took care of almost all of the Tilling Group's bus & coach body needs, produced London Transport's first genuine coaches, and supplied some bodies to the Sheffield Transport C fleet and the Scottish Bus Group.