Historian and CovSoc member, Peter James, tells us the story of GEC in the city. Peter writes ….
By the early 1960s Coventry’s largest single employer was not a car manufacturer but GEC which had a workforce of around 17,000 people in the city, some 11,000 of them working at Copsewood. The business had begun in London in 1868 as G.I.Binswanger & Co., an electrical wholesaler. By 1900 it had become a public company known as the General Electric Company Limited.
Association with Coventry
In 1910 GEC set up Peel Connor Ltd. in Salford to manufacture telephones and switchboards. Six years later in 1916, Peel Connor director A. Gill purchased 10 acres of land and a grange at Copsewood. A new factory was built there for Connor Magneto to produce magnetos for aircraft and vehicles. A vital activity during the First World War when supplies had previously come from German firms. In 1921 GEC wound up Peel Connor and consolidated all of its telephone equipment production at Telephone Works in Copsewood. Coventry.
GEC Copsewood
A transmission division was created at Copsewood in 1922 to make equipment for long-distance telephony, marking a further step in the site’s technical development. The following year, 1923 saw the beginning of radio set production there and by the mid 1930s the growth of the business meant that additional space was urgently needed.
Telephone Works – Copsewood 1925
Expansion in the mid 1930s
In 1936/37 GEC began to extend its footprint in Coventry by taking over premises in Whitefriars Street from the Coventry Swaging Company who had been engaged in the manufacture of screws and bolts for the aircraft industry. They later became the Torrington Co. Ltd. with their main works in Torrington Avenue. GEC also acquired a factory in Priory Street that had previously housed the Triumph Motor Co. Ltd. which was struggling at the time before going into receivership in 1939. It also took over the former Lea Francis factory in Ford Street after that firm moved its car production to premises in Much Park Street.
Further expansion in Wartime
The onset of war in 1939 signalled further growth with GEC taking over the Spon Street factory that had belonged to Rudge-Whitworth, a company that been producing 25,000 cycles a year by the late 1890s. In the same year GEC moved into a site in Queen Victoria Road that had been owned by A.C. Wickman who transferred operations to a new factory on Banner Lane. When the war ended in 1945 Rover vacated its Helen Street site which had been damaged in the blitz. Car production was transferred to their “shadow factories” in Solihull and Acocks Green and GEC stepped in using the site for the manufacture of telecommunications equipment.
A Typical Coventry Story
The GEC story mirrors the wider pattern of Coventry’s industrial history, in which businesses continually adapted and the city’s skills were redeployed from one sector to another. Over time Coventry’s industrial economy moved in stages from silk weaving to watchmaking to sewing machines, cycles, motorcycles and cars, while machine tools and telecommunications also became major sources of employment drawing on the craft and technical abilities of the city’s workforce.