Miniature coaches were a popular attraction before and after the Second World War in many British holiday resorts.

They were made from 1935 by a Brighton engineer called Ernie Johnstone, who provided vehicles able to take between four and six children.

The scale allowed children to sit in reasonable comfort while the driver had his head protruding through a roof hatch so that he could see where he was going.

Ernie’s first model relied on pedal power and to publicise it he pushed one nearly all the way from London to Brighton.

The publicity stunt worked but an exhausted Ernie made sure that many future models were motorised. He made 60 of them over the years, plus three fire engines.

Ernie continued manufacturing the midget buses at the Old Forge in Preston Village from 1935 to 1958, excluding the war years. They could sell for as much as £300, a high sum for those days, but a tremendous amount of labour was used in building them.

The picture above, taken at Madeira Drive in Brighton in 1950, shows Ernie on the left with his son Tony in front of him while other members of the family are in separate coaches.

Peter Pan’s Playground nearby was a favourite site for the coaches, which were generally in the liveries of the Sussex company Southdown.

The coaches were also popular at sites in Hove and Hastings but went much further than that to resorts such as Scarborough and several Scottish seaside towns. They were also attractions at fairgrounds.

Fitted with two-stroke engines, they could run surprisingly quickly but drivers had to be careful about keeping children safe.

Some of them were registered as vehicles and could be seen on other roads in Brighton and Hove. The number plates of these coaches would be worth a small fortune now.

Ernie also supplied Hove-based coach builders Harringtons with miniature chassis so that they would provide publicity for the firm’s full-sized vehicles. He had previously worked for the firm and had also been a Southdown driver.

Why were they so popular? One reason was that they had the authentic feel of full-sized buses despite being scaled down for children.

More people travelled on holiday by coach to resorts than they do now, so it must have been an odd novelty to ride in a model coach on the seafront.

Despite Ernie’s retirement, miniature coaches remained popular until well into the 1960s and many of them survive, mostly in private collections.

There is a Pathé News film of them, which helped the little coaches became famous all over the world.

Tony Johnstone, who lives in Brighton, has inherited his father’s love of transport and has been chairman of Brighton and Hove Motor Club since 1985. He has also spent 30 years as clerk of the course at the annual seafront Speed Trials.

He is justly proud of his father’s work and the pleasure the little coaches gave to thousands of people each year.