National Expansion
From 1914, with the LGOC dominant in London, the company looked to the rest of Britain outside of London for growth. Tilling started to seek new markets in the provinces. The company began operating in Folkestone in 1914, Brighton in 1916, and Ipswich in 1919.
BET had entered into a similar agreement with LGOC in London, and was also expanding outside London. Instead of destructive rivalry, the two companies agreed to work in close co-operation. By 1928, the BET subsidiary, British Automobile Traction Company (BAT) had interests in 19 bus companies, with Tilling being a co-owner in 11 of them, and at the same time was partly owned by Tilling itself. To simplify the arrangement, BAT was reconstructed with the new title, Tilling & British Automobile Traction Ltd (TBAT), and Tilling exchanged its shares in the various operating companies for an increased shareholding in the new company...
The railways of Britain had grown significantly and many companies had developed bus services. In 1923, most of these "pre-grouping" companies merged to form four mainline companies; Great Western Railway, Southern Railway, London, Midland and Scottish Railway and London and North Eastern Railway. During the 1920s, the "Big Four" divested itself of much of the operation of their bus network, by transferring their interests to Tilling and BET in exchange for shares.
Richard Tilling died in 1929 and the family association with the company ended. In 1931, Tilling acquired the Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company, along with Eastern Counties Omnibus Company, whose bodybuilding activities were renamed the Eastern Coach Works Ltd (ECW) in 1936
In 1933, the new London Passenger Transport Board compulsorily acquired the 328 buses that made up Tilling's South London services. In 1935, Tilling took over Royal Blue, which was the premier express coach company in the South and West of England with a network of routes stretching from Penzance to Margate and Bournemouth to London, having developed tours and local services around Bournemouth and the New Forest in the horse-drawn era and express coach services after the First World War.
Tilling and TBAT continued to trade successfully, but internal disagreements resulted in TBAT being wound-up in 1942. The companies in TBAT were split between Tilling and BET, and the two groups continued to operate independently, until nationalisation first reared its head in the late 1940s. Tilling Motor Services Ltd was formed from the breakup.
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