Berni Inns

I cae across this advertisement for Berni Inns

and it certainly brought a few memories back. I knew that the Norton was a Whitbread pub prior to being a Berni Inn, and so  check on wikipedia revealed that after it was sold by Grand Metropolitan in 1990, it reverted back to Whitbread's ownership under their Beefeater brand

But what I did not know was that by 1970 Berni Inns was the largest food chain outside the USA. It had taken them just 15 years to achieve this