British Sperry
Sperry in Britain started with a factory in Pimlico, London in 1913, manufacturing gyroscopic compasses for the Royal Navy, and becoming the Sperry Gyroscope Co Ltd in 1915. In 1923 Lawrence Sperry was killed in an air crash near Rye, Sussex. The company subsequently expanded to the Golden Mile, Brentford in 1931, Stonehouse, Gloucestershire in 1938 and Bracknell in 1957. By 1963 these sites employed some 3,500 people. The Brentford site closed in 1967 with the expansion of Bracknell. Stonehouse closed around 1969. By 1969 the Sperry Gyroscope division of Sperry Rand Corporation employed around 2,500.
The site of the Bracknell factory and development centre (later sold to British Aerospace) is commemorated by a 4.5 metre aluminium sculpture by Philip Bentham, Sperry’s New Symbolic Gyroscope (1967).
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