DEATH ANNOUNCEMENT
MOHAMMED ASLAM HUSSAIN
“Chacha Aslam”
21 March 1940 – 14 August 2022
Bus driver on the number 42, mosque treasurer and patriarch of a family of eighteen
Every morning at a quarter to five, before the first bus left Hyde Road garage, Aslam Hussain stood in his kitchen in Longsight and made tea for a wife who was still asleep. It was a small act of devotion repeated for fifty-six years, and the family believe it was the secret of the marriage.
He was born in 1940 in the village of Dina, in the Jhelum district of Punjab, one of six children of a farmer who wanted his eldest to be a clerk. Aslam wanted to see the world, and in 1962 he flew to Britain with a suitcase, an address in Rusholme and a cousin who had promised him a bed. He spent six years on the machines at Ferranti in Moston before the buses found him. From 1968 until 2001 he drove for Manchester Corporation and later GM Buses, most of it on the number 42 down Oxford Road, past the University of Manchester, past Whitworth Park, past a thousand students who never learned his name and a few hundred who did.
He had a rule that nobody ran for a bus alone. If he saw an old woman coming, or a child with a school bag, he waited, and the timetable could manage. In thirty-three years he never had an accident, and he kept the long-service award in a drawer. After retiring he gave his mornings to Manchester Central Mosque in Victoria Park, serving as treasurer and, more often, as the man who fixed the heating and found the missing keys.
He brought his wife Bilqis over in 1966 and together they raised four children and welcomed fourteen grandchildren, each of whom received the same speech about the dignity of honest work. He was a lifelong Manchester City supporter who stood on the Kippax at Maine Road through the bad years and announced in May 2012 that Allah had been testing him all along.
He died peacefully at home in Longsight on 14 August 2022, surrounded by his family. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un: from God we come, and to God we return. His granddaughter Sana, a doctor, said he was her first patient and her hardest, because he kept trying to make the tea.
“Nobody should have to run for a bus alone.”