The Gillingham bus disaster occurred outside Chatham Dockyard, Kent on the evening of 4 December 1951. A double-decker bus ploughed into a company of fifty-two young members of the Royal Marines Volunteer Cadet Corps, aged between nine and thirteen. Twenty-four of the cadets were killed and eighteen injured; at the time it was the highest loss of life in any road accident in British history, until it was surpassed by the 1975 Dibbles Bridge coach crash which killed 33.