Like the railway industry in the nineteenth century, Britain was a major
player in supplying the world with buses, particularly double-deckers.
The principal contributors in the mid-twentieth century were AEC,
Daimler and Leyland Motors. Buses were exported throughout the world
either as complete vehicles or as a chassis with locally assembled
bodywork completing the bus. As early as 1911, Leyland Motors sold five
single-deck charabancs to Lisbon Tramways and three to Cape Town
Electric Tramways. It says something for the endurance of the
British-built chassis when examples of the Daimler CVG in Hong Kong and
the AEC Regent III in Lisbon both managed to attain well over
twenty-five years of service for their respective operators. As London
Transport found itself with a surfeit of serviceable buses in the 1960s,
hundreds of redundant RTs, RTLs and RTWs were snapped up by the Ceylon
Transport Board. Redundant Atlanteans and Daimler Fleetlines found
favour with both KMB and CMB while sixty AEC Swifts saw further service
with the Public Transport Association (PTA) and the Education Department
on the island of Malta. This book features previously unpublished
photographs of British buses in China, India, South Africa, Portugal and
Hong Kong.
