The
Sopwith Aviation Company
was a British aircraft company that
designed and manufactured aeroplanes
mainly for the British Royal Naval
Air Service, Royal Flying Corps and
later Royal Air Force in the First
World War, most famously the Sopwith
Camel. Sopwith aircraft were also
used in varying numbers by the
French, Belgian, and American air
services during the War.
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
license. 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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