History
Crane's parents bought the Petros Cycle Company which was subsequently managed by Edmund's mother, Edith. Their children, Harry and Ted, left school at 14 and helped their parents with the business. In 1906 Jack Crane was declared bankrupt and the family moved to Lightwoods Hill. There they sold bikes at auctions. The bankruptcy finding meant they were bought in the mother's name and sold to the sons even though she had also been made bankrupt.
In 1911, Harry and Ted rented a derelict house in Coventry Street, using a name they had already registered in 1910, the Hercules Cycle and Motor Company. Harry assembled bicycles and Ted cycled around Birmingham for parts. Ted had problems selling because of fierce competition but soon made progress, trading on low price and high quality. Production outgrew the site and bikes were packed on the pavement. The brothers went from 25 to 70 bicycles a week within six months. They moved to a house with a yard in Conybere Street. It had 10 workers. Within a few months, production had doubled and the company moved to larger premises in Conybere Street, Highgate.
Read more about this topic: Hercules Cycle And Motor Company
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)