Birmingham Small Arms Company

Birmingham Small Arms Company

This article is not about Gamo subsidiary BSA Guns (UK) Limited or 'BSA Company' or its successors.

The Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited (BSA) was a major industrial combine, a group of businesses manufacturing military and sporting firearms; bicycles; motorcycles; cars; buses and bodies; steel; iron castings; hand, power, and machine tools; coal cleaning and handling plants; sintered metals; and hard chrome process.

At its peak, BSA was the largest motorcycle producer in the world. Loss of sales and poor investments in new products in the motorcycle division, which included Triumph Motorcycles, led to problems for the whole group.

A government-organized rescue operation in 1973 led to the takeover of remaining operations by what is now Manganese Bronze Holdings, then owners of Norton-Villiers, and over the following decade further closures and dispersals. The original company, The Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited, remains a subsidiary of Manganese Bronze but its name was changed in 1987.

Manganese Bronze continues to operate former BSA subsidiary Carbodies, now known as LTI Limited, manufacturers of London Taxicabs and the largest wholly British owned car manufacturer.

Read more about Birmingham Small Arms Company:  History of The BSA Industrial Group

Famous quotes containing the words small, arms and/or company:

    The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army—is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
    Second Amendment, U.S. Constitution (1791)

    Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts and grapes.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)