George Burn

1925

‎‎

1951

of City Tube and Conduit Mills, Smethwick, Birmingham

• One of several tube-making firms which had come to the town since the 1880s.

• In 1889 the newly formed Credenda Seamless Tube Co bought the Bridge Street factory of the former Birmingham Plate Glass Co and converted it into a tube mill, the Credenda Works.

• The business was bought in 1896 by a Birmingham firm, the Star Tube Co which in 1897 became part of the combine known as Weldless Tubes (later Tubes Limited).

• The works was closed in 1906.

• Allen Everitt and Sons a firm which specialized in the manufacture of condenser tubes, moved in stages from Birmingham to the Kingston Works in Bridge Street between the early 1890s and 1902. It was acquired in 1929 by ICI and remained in business until 1958.

• Another I.C.I. subsidiary, Yorkshire Imperial Metals was then formed to take in the Yorkshire Copper Works of Leeds and the plate, tube, and fittings interests of I.C.I.; it was making non-ferrous tubes, fittings, and plates at the Kingston Works (renamed the Allen Everitt Works) in 1971.

• The Smethwick Tube Co was set up in Rolfe Street in 1920 and became part of George Burn Ltd., a Birmingham tube-making concern, in 1921. During the twenties and thirties Burns acquired a number of other premises in Rolfe Street, including the soap works of William Cliff & Sons, and replaced them by tube mills. Finally in 1937 the firm opened the City Tube and Conduit Mills in Rabone Lane on the site of Muntz's 'Old Side Works'. It became Burns's headquarters and main works; the Birmingham works was sold and the company concentrated all its activities in Smethwick. It remained there until 1971, when it moved to Shirley (Warws.).

• In 1908 the Birmingham firm of J. A. Phillips and Co, manufacturer of bicycles and bicycle components, bought the Credenda Works and gave up its Birmingham premises. In 1949 the firm, by then a subsidiary of Tube Investments, employed some 2,000 people at the greatly enlarged Credenda Works, producing and distributing bicycle components. It was still at the works in 1971.

• 1937 Tube manufacturers. "B" Products.

• Another cycle firm, the Coventry-Eagle Cycle and Motor Co moved from Coventry to the Grove Lane Works in Wills Street in 1959 and remained in business in the town until 1968, when it moved to Barton-upon-Humber (Lincs.).

Sources of Information

• From: 'Smethwick: Economic history', A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 17: Offlow hundred (part) (1976), pp. 107-118. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=36177.