Published in Windlesora 34
©2018, WLHG
My father, Reginald Try, born April 5th 1900, enlisted in the RFC six months before the end of the war in 1917 by fudging his age. He registered in Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. He told me that a member of the Royal family was there at the same time. It must have been the Duke of Kent. He was the only Royal that I knew was in the RAF.
My father never got to fly a plane, much to his disappointment, but when he was demobbed in 1919 he was a 2nd Lieutenant with a new suit and 11 pounds demob money and training on Rolls Royce engines. He spent his demob money on an unused ambulance from the ‘dump’ in Slough, now the Slough Trading Estate. With his older brother, he took a lock-up garage behind the White Hart Hotel in Windsor, and they took out the insides of the ambulance and put in bench seats and a removable roof to be a dual-purpose passenger and removal vehicle. They registered it as a company in 1922, and the Windsorian Motor Coach Co was born.
Their first private hire job was to take players or fans to a football match, but misfortune struck. The removable roof became detached and flew off into a field. However, it did not stop my father’s progress to becoming one of the best-known Motor Coach companies in the country with a fleet of 64 luxury coaches by 1939.
At the onset of war, half his fleet was commandeered, and in 1941, with the compensation money, he purchased the remainder of the iconic St Leonard’s Hill estate in Windsor. The remaining coaches were on War work and on standby for the Dunkirk evacuation.
Not bad for a boy who left school at 14 because his journeyman tailor father could not afford to let his son take up the scholarship to the Windsor Grammar School,
Windsor Local History Group 