Portsmouth enrols 23,000 students and is ranked among the world's best modern universities. Portsmouth is also the birthplace of author Charles Dickens and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Romans built Portus Adurni, a fort, at nearby Portchester in the late third century. The city's Old English name "Portesmuða" is derived from "port", meaning a haven, and "muða", the mouth of a large river or estuary. The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" has a warrior called Port and his two sons killing a noble Briton in Portsmouth in 501. Winston Churchill, in his "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples", says that Port was a pirate
Buses in Portsmouth and black colour scheme. However, Citybus still faced strong competition from Southdown and People's Provincial, two former NBC subsidiaries which were now independent, and its finances were never entirely secure during its year of operation in this form. In October 1989, the Stagecoach Group bought Portsmouth Citybus. The group already owned Southdown, which it had bought earlier in the same year, and merged the Portsmouth-area operations of that company with its new acquisition to form Southdown Portsmouth, operating from the former council depot in Eastney. Southdown's depot in Hilsea was closed and its operations transferred to Eastney. As part of