Stagecoach

The setter (or setters) of these questions clearly has (or have) a keen interest in transport, in all its many forms. In particular, they seem to have a serious bone to pick with the Stagecoach Group – and they seem to have gone slightly over the top here.

It should never be necessary to use 70+ words in a pub quiz question. This is not University Challenge; people don't want to listen to an essay before they find out what the question's about. There must in any case be lots of questions about this company that could be asked much more succinctly. The name Ann Gloag is well enough known, I would suggest, that the question could simply have asked which public transport business was founded by husband and wife Robin and Ann Gloag, or run by Ann Gloag and her brother Brian Souter.

The question doesn't even tell the whole of the story that it refers to. Stagecoach began as Gloagtrotter, set up by Ann and Robin Gloag in 1976 to hire out motor homes and other "recreational vehicles". Brian Souter joined not long afterwards; crucially, the Gloags' marriage was in difficulties and Robin (by his own admission the 'soft' partner in both the marriage and the business) was forced out. He then started Highwayman Coaches, but found himself a victim of Stagecoach's well–documented predatory practices (as described in the question). Forced out of running scheduled services, he handed his routes over to Stagecoach and retreated to a coach hire business, run from a garage in Errol.

Robin Gloag died in 2007, in a road accident – driving one of his coaches, as a stand–in for a driver who was sick. His Grauniad obituary tells the whole story from his point of view.