History
The company was founded in Kingston upon Thames by Thomas Octave Murdoch (Tommy, later Sir Thomas) Sopwith, a well-to-do gentleman sportsman interested in aviation, yachting and motor-racing, in June 1912, when Sopwith was only 24 years old. The company's first factory premises opened that December in a recently closed roller skating rink in Canbury Park Road near Kingston Railway Station in South West London. An early collaboration with the S. E. Saunders boatyard of East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, in 1913, produced the Sopwith "Bat Boat", an early flying boat with a Consuta laminated hull which could operate on sea or land. A small factory subsequently opened in Woolston, Hampshire in 1914.
During the First World War, the company made more than 16,000 aircraft and employed 5,000 people. Many more of the company's aircraft were made by subcontractors rather than by Sopwiths themselves. These included Fairey, Clayton and Shuttleworth, William Beardmore and Company and Ruston Proctor.
After the war, the company attempted to produce aircraft for the civil market based on their wartime types, such as the Dove derivative of the Pup and the Swallow, a single-winged Camel, but the wide availability of war-surplus aircraft at knock-down prices meant this was never economic. In 1919 the company worked with ABC motorcycles and produced 400cc flat twin motorcycles under licence. They also purchased ABC Motors in an attempt to diversify, but this venture also failed. The Sopwith company was wound up in 1920 after the business collapsed, and in the face of a potential large demand from the government for Excess War Profits Duty.
Upon the liquidation of the Sopwith company, Tom Sopwith himself, together with Harry Hawker, Fred Sigrist and Bill Eyre, immediately formed H.G. Hawker Engineering, forerunner of the Hawker Aircraft and Hawker Siddeley lineage. Sopwith was Chairman of Hawker Siddeley until his retirement. Hawker and its successors produced many more famous military aircraft, including the inter-war Hart, and Demon; World War II's Hurricane, Typhoon, and Tempest; and the post-war Sea Fury, Hunter and Harrier. These later jet types were manufactured in the same factory buildings used to produce Sopwith Snipes in 1918.
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