Motor Radiator Manufacturing Co
of Coventry
of Warwick Road, Greet, Birmingham
1907 Company formed in Bermondsey by Peter Oscar Serck
1909 Company moved to Coventry
1910 Sydney Nelson Purchase was appointed works manager. Also working here were John Millward, Arthur J. G. Golder, Edwin James Bowman and Ernst Tiator. [1]
1914 Acquired the rights to the Zimmerman Radiator (a round tube honeycomb design), which was the basis for the later success of the company[2]
1914 Company moved to Birmingham
1914 Manufacturers of radiators for motor cars. [3]
1917 The demand for radiators for aircraft became acute, and the existing industry was strangled by union resistance to dilution and mass production.
1918 On 1 January, the Motor Radiator Manufacturing Co. in Greet in Birmingham was taken over by the Ministry of Munitions. Following this the branch factory at Sudbury was also taken over and run as a subsidiary of the Greet plant.
1918 Became a government National Aeroplane Radiator Factory
1919 After the Armistice, the factory at Greet was offered back to Serck and he formed Serck Radiators, as a public company with £200,000 capital of which he personally held more than half the shares, and was the Managing Director; more than 30 car and aeroplane makers were listed as customers in the prospectus.
See Also
Sources of Information
- ↑ * Coventry’s Motorcar Heritage by Damien Kimberley. 2012. ISBN 978 0 7524 5448 1
- ↑ The Times, Jul 28, 1919
- ↑ 1914 Whitakers Red Book
- Birmingham’s Industrial Heritage by Ray Shill. Published by Sutton Publishing 2002. ISBN 0-7509-2593-0
- First World War National Factories; English Heritage