ABC Motors in Hersham: The Story of the Hersham Works

Hersham’s reputation is mostly residential (a green, a pond, a station), but for over half a century it was also home to a genuine British engineering pioneer. ABC Motors designed aero engines, motorcycles and light cars from a works on Molesey Road between 1914 and 1971, working through two world wars and a roll-call of British aviation history along the way.

Origins, before Hersham

ABC’s story starts nowhere near Surrey. In 1909, engine maker Walter Lawson Adams, working at Redbridge near Southampton, took on financial backing from Ronald Louis Charteris, a keen early aviator and grandson of the 7th Earl of Wemyss and March. Their venture, first called the Aeroplane Engine Company, took on its most important figure in late 1910: Granville Bradshaw, a designer previously with Star of Wolverhampton, who became chief designer and stayed with the company for the rest of its independent life. Around 1911-12 the firm moved to the Brooklands area, and, reportedly at Bradshaw’s suggestion, cashing in on wartime incentives for all-British aircraft manufacture, took the name that stuck: the All-British Engine Company, generally known simply as ABC.

The move to Hersham, 1914

When Brooklands was requisitioned as a military flying ground on the outbreak of the First World War, ABC had to move fast. The company took over the old Faulkner’s Foundry site in Hersham, converting the property and installing new machinery in a matter of weeks. That site, known in company minutes simply as the Hersham Works, and to the people who worked there as the Old Esher Road factory, became ABC’s home for the rest of its life in the village.

Two factory sites, not one

Popular summaries of ABC’s history tend to describe “the Hersham factory” as though there were only one site. There were two, on opposite sides of Molesey Road, and keeping them apart matters for understanding the company’s local footprint.

The original Hersham Works (the former foundry occupied in 1914) had its later main entrance on Molesey Road, with a rear access road running to Mole Road and on to the old Esher Road (a route prone to flooding, later bypassed by the New Esher Road in the 1960s). This was ABC’s permanent base.

The second site was Hersham Lodge, a mid-19th-century mansion with around seven acres of grounds, acquired in August 1918 by ABC subsidiary Walton Motors Ltd. The Lodge was converted into offices, with the possibility, soon realised, of building a substantial new factory in the grounds, directly opposite the original works. For a few years either side of 1920, as ABC pursued an ambitious and ultimately troubled expansion into car manufacturing, this second site carried much of the load. It didn’t last: as the company was reorganised in the early 1920s, the Hersham Lodge site was sold and the work reverted to the original Old Esher Road works across the way. The Lodge site went on to a separate industrial life of its own, later associated with the electrical engineers Hackbridge & Hewittic, and today forms part of the Hersham Place Technology Park.

Design here, built elsewhere

Granville Bradshaw’s engineering was inventive (light, air-cooled, often mechanically unconventional), but ABC itself was a small company with limited manufacturing capacity. Design and assembly happened at Hersham; a great deal of actual production was subcontracted out, a pattern that runs through nearly every ABC product line.

During the First World War, ABC’s Hersham operation concentrated on government aero-engine contracts, developing the Firefly, Gnat and Dragonfly engines, alongside small auxiliary engines for military equipment. The nine-cylinder Dragonfly was the most ambitious of these: large government orders were placed, with licensed production spread across Sheffield-Simplex, Guy Motors and Clyno Engineering. The engine suffered serious overheating and vibration problems that were never fully resolved, and government orders were cancelled after the Armistice: a costly lesson in the gap between an ABC design and an ABC-built product.

The same pattern held after the war. ABC’s post-war motorcycle was manufactured in quantity not at Hersham but by the Sopwith Aviation and Engineering Company, using spare capacity at its Kingston works; Sopwith board records from 1920 show serious volume, with production plans for around 200 machines a week and export orders for as many as 1,500 units. ABC’s own motor-scooter design, the Skootamota, was built under arrangement by Gilbert Campling rather than at Hersham. Hersham was where ABC thought; Kingston, Sheffield and elsewhere were often where ABC’s products were actually made.

The light car

The one product line that genuinely was built at Hersham, in volume, was the ABC light car, a small, air-cooled car developed after the war. Even here ABC leaned on outside suppliers and a complex web of financing arrangements, eventually drawing in the Harper Bean group. The company’s own historian estimates production of somewhere around 1,500 cars between 1920 and 1927, though no independently verified production register survives to confirm the figure precisely.

The light car business was not a smooth ride. Technical problems, delays and financing pressure forced repeated corporate reorganisation: the original company was wound up in 1920 in favour of ABC Motors (1920) Ltd, and a further ABC Motors Ltd was registered in 1923 to take on the remaining business once the Hersham Lodge factory was sold and production consolidated back at the original works.

The ABC Robin

ABC’s one documented venture into building a complete aircraft came in 1929, when the single-seat ABC Robin, registration G-AAID and designed by A. A. Fletcher, first flew at Brooklands. It stands as one of the clearest direct links between Hersham and a finished British aeroplane, even though so much of ABC’s other aviation work stayed at the design and licensing stage.

Later years, Vickers, and closure

By the end of the Second World War, ABC’s Hersham works had shifted focus again, building generators, auxiliary power plants and pumping equipment: less celebrated than the motorcycles and cars, but the work that kept the company going as a specialist engineering business. Vickers Ltd acquired ABC Motors in September 1951. The ABC name lasted longer than many assume: the company kept a separate identity within Vickers until 1964, and it wasn’t until 1971 that Vickers finally closed the Hersham works for good, bringing to an end a Hersham institution that had outlasted two world wars.

What’s there today

The original Hersham Works site is now part of the Riverdene Business Park on Molesey Road. Elmbridge Borough Council granted planning permission in 2015 to demolish the existing buildings and redevelop the site with a food store and 38 residential units above; a Lidl now trades there, at KT12 4RG. No ABC factory building, plaque or public memorial is known to survive, and the exact footprint of the historic works beneath the modern development hasn’t been established. The company’s own records fared better than its buildings: scrapbooks, photographs and manuals covering 1911 to 1971 are held at Brooklands Museum, with balance-sheet material from the early 1920s at Coventry Archives: a fuller picture than any summary, including this one, can give.