ABC Motors

has L B ritish (Engine) C ompany was founded in 1912 with Byfleet, Surrey, by Ronald Charteris. Become ABC Motors Ltd in 1914, with for chief engineer Granville Bradshaw, it settled with Walton-one-Thames and will produce during the flamewar of plane and motor cycles for the British army. In 1919 the firm Sopwith, which sought to diversify its activities, bought ABC Motors . It is thus within Sopwith Aviation & Engineering Company Ltd, with Kingston-upon-Thames, which was developed the famous motor cycle Sopwith-ABC, which was produced under license in France between 1920 and 1924 by Gnome and the Rhone.

Sopwith Aviation Company encountered then large difficulties, the sales of civil aircrafts not coming to compensate for the loss of the military markets. Moreover the British government with the industrialists refunding claimed on the one hand exceptional benefit which they had accumulated during the war. Tom Sopwith preferred to put in liquidation Sopwith Aviation and to constitute with Harry G Hawker a new business. It thus resold ABC Motors Ltd in 1921 with the group Harper Bean.

After removal for Hersham, Surrey, the English motor mechanic will continue his aeronautical activities with a certain success until his absorption by Vickers in 1951. ABC Motors also built in the Twenties of the light cars, the motor cycles and a plane, the ABC Robin.

ABC Motors is very known in the aeronautical medium for its engines:

ABC Dragonfly: 9 star cylinders of 300/350 ch, not very reliable but very widespread
ABC Gnat: 2 cylinders flat of 45 ch
ABC Scorpion: 2 cylinders flat of 40 ch
ABC Wasp: 7 star cylinders of 170 ch

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