Excelsior Holidays window label (Smoke House Inn, Beck Row) – 10 Jul 1995 (276-15A)

Approx 10 July 1995 – The Smoke House Inn at Beck Row near Mildenhall was rather popular with a number of different tour companies large and small that used it as a base for their five day tours to different East Anglian tourist spots like Cambridge, Constable Country, Norfolk Broads, Suffolk Villages etc. The coaches tended to arrive on Monday afternoons and leave on Friday mornings.

This window label was carried by Excelsior Holidays 508 (A9 EXC) working a five day ‘Historic and Rural England Tour’. The tour departed from the south coast on Mondays returning home on Fridays five days later. During the three days in East Anglia there were trips to Norwich & the Norfolk Broads and to Newmarket & Cambridge. On the remaining day there was an ‘optional’ trip to the villages around ‘Constable Country’.

Excelsior had expanded its catchment area to cover most of the South of England bordered by Exeter, Taunton, Bristol, Swindon, Oxford, London and Brighton.

The company was founded in 1920 by Walter Maitland and latterly managed by his son Vernon Maitland O.B.E. who became a well-known figure in the British coaching industry who sold the business in 1997.

Originally titled Excelsior European Motorways before being re-named, the coaches of Excelsior Holidays had a very distinctive livery which featured the names of different countries along the sides plus a range of cherished registration numbers in the XEL and EXC series.

The company name lives on in the ownership of the Go-Ahead Group’s Go South Coast business.