Almost a century ago, one of the best ways to turn a profit was to invest your money into the bus industry, a means of transport that outlived other mass systems by far.

After World War II, many parents feared their children might be lured to leave Malta in search of the ‘American Dream’ and so proceeded with helping get them a licence and a bus to persuade them to remain on the island.

The licence did not come cheap – at times it was even more expensive than the vehicle itself, Richard Stedall, the bus archive coordinator at the National Archives of Malta told Times of Malta.

Luckily for them, this same licence could be inherited. Bus licences in Malta have been passed down even up to four generations until the complete overhaul of the bus service in July 2011.

For nearly 100 years, Maltese buses transported hundreds of commuters every day, the service’s quirkiness and ‘family-affair’ culture making it one of the most interesting mass transportation systems for international enthusiasts and tourists.

“When the unique, locally built vehicles, were replaced by the uniform fleet in 2011, several were concerned we had thrown away our culture and heritage. None of the hundreds of buses were the same. The way they were craftily designed, built and decorated was very unique,” Stedall said.

“After 2011, some were scrapped, some bought by the state, others converted into a sightseeing bus or a souvenir shop. And the people who built them, decorated them and drove them – whole generations of Maltese families – are sadly dying. My job is to make sure that their memories and recollections of the service itself, survive generations.”

With very little research on the buses in Malta, Stedall launched the Malta Bus Archive some five years ago. The archive was adopted by the National Archives and features in the online depository aptly called Memorja.

When did it all start?

The story of the Maltese bus dates to a 1905 attempt to start a Valletta-Sliema route. However, the roads were bumpy, numerous ferries already operated between the two localities and horse-drawn taxis were still very popular. The service lasted just one year.

Fifteen years later, the Cottonera Motorcar company launched a bus route service making use of the military vehicles and motor ambulances that had been left here by the British after World War I.

Local craftsmen set about stripping these vehicles of their body and building wooden frame bus bodies on their chassis to accommodate between 12 and 16 seated passengers.

The idea caught like wildfire and several other small operators, including owner-drivers launched their own service.

By the late 1920s, chassis started being mass imported from the US. Along with the chassis, Maltese emigrants also started returning to their home country richer than they left it and started investing in the local buses industry.

By the beginning of the 1930s, there were some 600 buses on Maltese roads, and the government had to freeze the issuing of new licences. For the next 70 years, new buses could only be launched on the streets to replace old ones.

Along the years, the train and tram could in no way compete with the cheap and convenient bus service and, eventually, even the horse-drawn taxis gave up the fight.

By 1931, the authorities realised that buses were here to stay and a traffic control board was set up to formalise routes, stops, fares and the colourful liveries.

Striking drivers

Despite complaints about the service throughout the buses’ 100-year existence, the drivers were well aware the country relied heavily on this mass transportation and always stood their ground when it came to work conditions.

When in the early 1920s, a dispute led to the dismissal of all drivers, the owners had to rehire them all over again as they could not run the business.

The biggest strikes took place towards the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, with the events marked by reports of gunshots at replacement buses provided by the government.

And in the 2000s, days-long strikes often brought the island to a halt. Some still remember a convoy of buses driving along the Sliema promenade, blaring horns just a couple of years before the takeover of Arriva in 2011.

The colourful stories of the people behind the bus service

Several bus conductors started off very young – and quite often illegally – at the age of 12.

Many worked their way up as a driver, and eventually bus owner.

Among them, Michael ‘Zinnu’ Cutajar, who by the end of his career ended up on the bus association’s committee, started off as a bus conductor in his teens, working on the bus driven and owned by his brother. He later drove that same bus, bought it and sold it in the early 1980s to get a newer one, which ran until 2011.

Since most drivers were bus owners, the more tickets they sold, the more money they earned. They were, therefore, in competition with each other, even when driving separate routes and needed to think of innovative ways of profiting.

Among others, the Żurrieq and Mqabba routes would at one point meet at an interchange in Luqa.

Police officers stationed at bus termini to make sure buses did not leave before their stipulated time would base their observations on church tower clock tolling. Drivers would go as far as bribing the sacristan to bring forward the clock by just a minute or two so that they would get to the Luqa interchange before their counterpart and load all the passengers waiting there before the other one even arrived on site.

But bus drivers tell only one part of the bus story in Malta.

Stedall is in search of anything that could shed light on the people who designed the buses, put together the shrines adorning the drivers’ cabinets, decorated the bus with tberfil (the art and craft of lettering or signwriting in Maltese style) or did all the chrome work.

Several bus body builders started off as carpenters, with one of the most popular ones being Francis Aquilina of Paola, who built 300 bus bodies between 1930 and 1970.

Another bus builder of note was Michael Debono, who eventually started importing Toyota cars when the bus industry started to decline.

€1,500: the price tag of a new bus body in the 1960s

One of the last bus builders – Frans Brincat – has just died, aged around 91.

Together with his surviving brother and late father, Frans built dozens of buses in their Paola garage on Dockyard Street.

In a 2019 interview with Stedall, Frans recalled it took around two-and-a-half months to build a new bus, with the average cost in the 1960s being around Lm650 (over €1,500).

The last full-size route bus that Frans and his brother Joseph built was number 733 in the mid to late 1980s. Construction took some time as the owner apparently changed his mind several times: it was constructed to a highly luxurious specification including air-conditioning, reclining seats and television screens. Sadly, the owner never used it as a route bus, and other than very occasional appearances on the road to attend matters like the annual VRT, it remained in its garage right up the 2011 changeover.

This was not the last bus body to be built by the family: in 1991 the Brincat brothers were approached by a tourist consortium to recreate three late 1920s-style ‘tal-gallarija’ buses on old chassis from the 1920s and 1930s.

In all, apart from all the refurbishing and repair work, the Brincat family built some 100 new buses, and Stedall is hoping to be able to document every single one of them.

If you have any information – including photos – of buses built by the Brincat family, get in touch with Stedall on richard-derek.stedall@gov.mt.

This article is being published as part of a series called Malta’s hidden treasures, a collaboration between the National Archives of Malta and Times of Malta. The project, forming part forms part of the European Digital Treasures co-funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme, allows readers to gain an insight into Maltese history, society through our archives.

You can discover more at the National Archives of Malta headquartered at the historical building of Santo Spirito in Rabat and other archives. If you are unable to visit the archives in person, you can access an online oral and visual archive on www.memorja.com

The website is the main repository of recent Maltese national and public memory and hosts hundreds of recollections dating back to the 1920s.

More information about the national archives on 2145 9863 or customercare.archives@gov.mt

More from the series:

When a widow and a police officer plotted a murder

The murder that changed the Malta Police Force

Glorious 10th of May: 80 years ago, an air battle changed Malta's war fortunes

Of hooded penitents, evil eye and other Easter traditions

When a Royal Opera House competition divided the country

When Maltese patriots, intellectuals were kicked out of their own country

The women raped and murdered by men in Malta 300 years ago

When 2,000 children celebrated Christmas on a British aircraft carrier

When Malta Railway steamed from Mdina to Valletta in 25 minutes

The tin ring and bloody parchment at the archives

When the British Empire waged war on the Maltese goat