Our heritage

Gillies Coaches was officially formed as A.Gillie & Sons in November 1932 by the Gillie family including David's great-grandparents and grandfather.

They started with three buses: a Morris 1930, a Manchester 1930 and a Willeys 1932, and a lorry!  

The Gillies all came to Aylesham from Northumberland in the early 1900s when the Kent coalfield pits first went into operation and the village was built.

These Gillie buses transported local men from Aylesham and the surrounding villages to the Snowdown Colliery in the Kent Coalfield and continued to do so until the collieries in this area closed in the late 1980s.

In 1969 Stewart Gillie, David's father, became a partner and in 1987 David joined the business.

Present day at Gillie's Coaches

Stewart retired at the end of 2006.  Since then David and wife Lyn have continued to run the business; now working with a huge variety of groups with different requirements.  

On any one day we could have a coach taking a local primary school swimming in Canterbury; a coach meeting a German group at the docks; a coach visiting war graves at the Somme; a coach taking a group to the theatre in London  and a coach touring in North Wales! Things have come a long way from a bus picking up miners and taking them to work.

Gillies Coaches has developed over the years from these humble beginnings as a local bus service to the high quality coach hire provider we see today.  

But our roots are still firmly established in the local community and its history and we are proud of this long heritage.