Retired Naval Officer now Head of £100,000 Company Fortune has come to Commander Francis T. Hare, retired Naval Officer and head of a £100,000 Bus Company, through what was originally, his hobby! Tired of having nothing to do after leaving the Service, he bought four old motor lorries, intending to fill his leisure running a tiny transport company.
The project failed, but, out of the ruins, Commander Hare has nursed into vigorous life a rapidly expanding series of bus services.
In Nairobi today you'll see his buses carrying gaily-garbed natives through the streets; in Mombasa, dark citizens pack the Hare Line vehicles.
In fact, Commander Hare is making a fortune out of taking natives for a ride.
At his Victoria-st, London, offices recently, he told a correspondent of "The People" the romance of the hobby "that has made him rich.
After being on active service in China during the war, civil seemed flat, he said, I was bored with nothing to occupy my time, so I picked up four military lorries from a dump in France and started a transport company.
At first business was bad. I had a hard struggle to keep my head above water. Then I had a brain-wave. I fixed wooden planks in the lorries and started the first bus services in Devon and Cornwall.
That was less than twenty years ago, but in those days most of the country folk had never heard of or seen a bus You can tell how strange those vehicles seemed by the fact that one farmer tried to- book a seat for one of his pigs.
The business, Started as a hobby, prospered. In time it branched out into the Devon Motor Transport Company and the Cornwall Motor Transport Company, operating 200 vehicles and employing 1,000 men.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.