The founder of a well-known Oxfordshire coach company has died aged 93.

James Thomas Smith, known as Jim, founded Heyfordian Travel in the 1940s after the Second World War and led its expansion over the next three decades.

Born on October 14, 1921, in Morden, Cambridgeshire, he grew up in Cranleigh, Surrey, where his father owned a haulage firm E&J Smith.

The family had been involved in the industry since the 1890s and at the outbreak of the Second World War the government commandeered their fleet of lorries and sent the family to Oxfordshire.

At Upper Heyford Mr Smith and his father helped to construct aircraft dispersal areas for the expansion of the aerodrome.

He married Kathleen Edmunds in 1941, in Upper Heyford, and the couple had five children, Roland, Graham, Jeremy, Andrew and Linda.

Mr Smith, who had tried to join the RAF but was placed in its reserves, spent the first years of the war working on construction projects.

They included building the underground fuel network which eventually linked up refineries to southern coast ports in preparation for operation Pluto, the undersea fuel supply for the Normandy landings.

He was later called up by the RAF and found himself back at Upper Heyford as the war drew to a close.

It was then that, while waiting to be discharged, he reassembled a number of engines from components left in the corner of a warehouse.

One belonged to a bus and he purchased it from the station commander, with a promise to take other servicemen to the railway station for weekend leave.

It was that bus which formed the beginnings of what became Heyfordian Travel.

The firm’s trade was boosted in the 1950s with the arrival of American forces at the Oxfordshire aerodrome and it then expanded to offer daily services to Oxford and Northampton.

Mr Smith’s four sons joined the business in the 1960s and 1970s when further expansion through acquisitions took place.

He retired in 1975, after the death of his wife, and took up the renovations of cottages and barns in Upper Heyford, later marrying his second wife, Grace.

Their marriage lasted more than 20 years, until her death in 2008.

Mr Smith died in the Horton General Hospital on April 18, due to kidney and pulmonary disease.

He is survived by his five children, as well as 12 grandchildren.

His funeral is due to take place on May 1 at St Mary’s Church, in Upper Heyford, at 11am.