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
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“the small town big shot who, although very short,
who although with a cigarette-stained mustache,
who although famous for lobster on the rocks,
left me here, nubkin, sucking in my vodka
and emphysema cigarettes, unable to walk
your walks, unable to write your writes.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, “the sweet seriousness of sixteen,” the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,—we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)