Blighty’s railways

The Bristol Omnibus Company can trace its origins to 1875, when Sir George White formed the Bristol Tramways Company. The company operated its first city bus service, a horse-bus to Clifton, in 1887 and first introduced motor buses in 1906. Not satisfied with the vehicles that it had bought, in 1908 the company began to manufacture its own buses and soon began to sell them to other operators as well, Bristol buses being built for use both in Britain and abroad for 75 years. Bristol buses carried a scroll logo adopted from the Bristol Aeroplane Company, also set up by Sir George White, to commemorate the building of Bristol Fighters at Brislington tram works during the First World War. Following the Second World War, the company was nationalised, later to be re-privatised in the 1980s. In this book, Bristol bus expert Mike Walker uses a wide range of images to tell the story of buses in the city of Bristol.