Leonard Meredith - Business Career

Business Career

In 1912 Meredith acquired the rights to a patent for a racing tyre. It was unusual that whereas other racing tyres were tubular and sewn together at the base, Meredith's tyre was sewn with diagonal threads that made the inner tube accessible at the base of the tyre.

Meredith enjoyed skating and found that one of his teachers, a man called Bain, was brother of Joseph Bain who ran the Constrictor Tyre Company, in Nursery Lane, Forest Gate, a suburb of London. Meredith was asked for financial advice and invested £100. He soon replaced the managing director, who had invented the Constrictor tyre. He began importing more cycling parts and buying Bastide bicycles from France and hubs from BSA. He branded them all Constrictor. By then he owned a roller-skating rink in the Porchester Hall, off Queensway, London, and advertised it by breaking the national one-mile record at Holland Park rink and the five-mile record on the Maida Vale rink. He then opened another in the Broadway, Cricklewood, north London, He ran it with Bill Skuse, one of his pacers on the track. Encouraged by that, he bought a dance hall. He later planned a sporting club beside the Thames at Twickenham.

Constrictor was a pioneer in alloy cycle equipment and made a novel alloy rim called the Conloy. The firm outlasted Meredith's death but foundered at the end of the 1960s in a national decline of the cycle trade and in face of rising imports.