page_title: Birmingham Small Arms Company
section_title: Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Birmingham Small Arms Company / History of the BSA industrial group / Second World War
caption_attribution_description: Photographed at the Nationaal Militair Museum, Soesterberg.
context_page_description: The Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited was a major British industrial combine, a group of businesses manufacturing military and sporting firearms; bicycles; motorcycles; cars; buses and bodies; steel; iron castings; hand, power, and machine tools; coal cleaning and handling plants; sintered metals; and hard chrome process.
  After the Second World War, BSA did not manage its business well, and a government-organised rescue operation in 1973 led to a takeover of such operations as it still owned. Those few that survived this process disappeared into the ownership of other businesses.
context_section_description: By the outbreak of the Second World War, BSA Guns Ltd at Small Heath, was the only factory producing rifles in the UK.  The Royal Ordnance Factories did not begin production until 1941.  BSA Guns Ltd was also producing .303 Browning machine guns for the Air Ministry at the rate of 600 guns per week in March 1939 and Browning production was to peak at 16,390 per month by March 1942.  The armed forces had chosen the 500 cc side-valve BSA M20 motorcycle as their preferred machine. On the outbreak of war the Government requisitioned the 690 machines BSA had in stock as well as placing an order for another 8,000 machines. South Africa, Ireland, India, Sweden and the Netherlands also wanted machines.
  The Government passed the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939 on 24 August allowing the drafting of defence regulations affecting food, travel, requisitioning of land and supplies, manpower and agricultural production. A second Emergency Powers (Defence) Act was passed on 22 May 1940 allowing the conscription of labour. The fall of France had not been anticipated in Government planning and the encirclement of a large part of the British Expeditionary Force into the Dunkirk pocket resulted in a hasty evacuation of that part of the B.E.F following the abandonment of their equipment. The parlous state of affairs "no arms, no transport, no equipment" in the face of the threat of imminent invasion of Britain by  Nazi forces was recorded by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke in his diary entries of the 1/2 July 1940.
  The creation of the Home Guard (initially as the Local Defence Volunteers) following Anthony Eden's broadcast appeal to the Nation on Tuesday 14 May 1940 also created further demand for arms production to equip this new force. BSA, as the only rifle producer in Britain, had to step up to the mark and the workforce voluntarily went onto a seven-day week. Motorcycle production was also stepped up from 500 to 1,000 machines per week which meant a finished machine coming off the production line every 5 minutes. The motorcycle department had been left intact in 1939 due to demand which was doubled following Dunkirk. At the same time BSA staff were providing lectures and demonstrations on motorcycle riding and maintenance to 250,000 officers and men in all parts of the UK.
  The BSA factory at Small Heath was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 26 August 1940 resulting in one high explosive bomb and a shower of incendiaries hitting the main barrel mill which was the only one operating on service rifles in the country, causing the unaffordable loss of 750 machine tools but fortunately no loss of life.  Two further air raids took place on 19 and 22 November 1940.  The air raid of 19 November did the most damage, causing loss of production and trapping hundreds of workers.  Two BSA night-shift electricians, Alf Stevens and Alf Goodwin, helped rescue their fellow workers.  Alf Stevens was awarded the George Medal for his selfless acts of bravery in the rescue and Alf Goodwin was awarded the British Empire Medal.  Workers involved in the works Civil Defence were brought in to help search for and clear bodies to get the plant back into production.  The net effect of the November raids was to destroy machine shops in the four-storey 1915 building, the original 1863 gunsmiths' building and nearby buildings, 1,600 machine tools, kill 53 employees, injure 89, 30 of them seriously and halt rifle production for three months.
  The Government Ministry of Supply and BSA immediately began a process of production dispersal throughout Britain, through the shadow factory scheme. Factories were set up at Tipton, Dudley, Smethwick, Blackheath, Lye, Kidderminster, Stourport, Tyseley, and Bromsgrove to manufacture Browning machine guns, Stoke, Corsham, and Newcastle-under-Lyme produced the Hispano cannon, Leicester and Studley Road produced the Besa machine gun, Ruislip produced the Oerlikon 20mm cannon, Stafford produced rocket projectiles, Tamworth produced two-pounder gun carriages, Mansfield produced 
caption: G14 with sidecar and Lewis gun
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