Frederick Sage & Company
business
Frederick Sage & Company was a British shop fitting company based in London with an extensive practice in Europe, South Africa, and South America. During both world wars it built and designed aircraft, and after the Second World War it executed much of the woodwork for the rebuilt House of Commons.
Origins
The founder, Frederick Sage (1830–1898) was born at Freston, a small village near Ipswich in Suffolk, the son of the village carpenter. Following his father's profession, he showed great ingenuity when young, for instance designing a velocipede to make it easier to sell small items of joinery he had made around the neighbourhood. After working for local firms of builders, his ambition took him to London in 1851 where for three years he continued working for builders, studying in evening schools to remedy his lack of education. Having married, and finding work hard to come by, he started his own shopfitting business in 1860 in Hatton Garden.
By 1870 Frederick Sage owned buildings in Gray's Inn Road, including show rooms and "steam works" nearby in Portpool Street. In 1876 he received an award along with many other British firms at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia for an exhibit of "air-tight showcases &c". In 1879 he was offering to warehouse showcases from the Paris Exhibition for the forthcoming one in Sydney.
Development
Frederick Sage took three of his nephews, Frederick, Josiah, and Jesse Hawes, into the business and eventually they became partners, along with his son.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frederick Sage & Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.