SNAPSHOTS reader Alexander Bentley, 91, from Throop, Bournemouth, sent us this picture of himself at work on the restoration of an old B Type London bus.

The picture was taken in the early 1980s, not long after Mr Bentley had retired as superintendent of the body shop at Yellow Buses.

He said: "A couple of years after my retirement, in 1978, I was called up to ask if I would like to help restore this old bus.

"Apparently some chap had been living in it for nearly 30 years at Lyndhurst in the New Forest.

"It was completely rotten, so I basically had to start from scratch. It was made of wood, ash to be precise, and I spent two years working on it, two days a week, six hours a day.

"After I'd finished we eventually managed to find a chassis, in Swindon, where the bus is now housed in a commercial vehicles museum."

Mr Bentley worked for London Transport before moving to Bournemouth, where he spent nearly 30 years at Yellow Buses' depot in Mallard Road.

"And when I was much younger, I was a private coach builder - I even worked on Sir Malcolm Campbell's Railton Bluebird car."

That was the vehicle that broke through the land speed 300mph barrier in Utah in 1935.