Peter Hooker
English business
Peter Hooker Limited was an engineering business originally established in 1827 and carried on under the name Messrs Peter Hooker as printers' engineers at 12 Pump Row, Old Street Road, St Luke's, later at Pear Tree Court, Farringdon Road, London EC. The limited liability company was formed to own it in 1900. Operations were moved to Blackhorse Lane Walthamstow, Essex (now in London), in 1901.
There being insufficient business the Walthamstow site (for sale since 1921) was sold in early 1928 and the company was voluntarily wound up by its then shareholders at the end of the same year.
Walthamstow
The Walthamstow site was very big. Twenty years earlier the business had employed around 20 people. Peter Hooker's youngest son, Benjamin (1857–1932), sat on the board of some public listed companies. George Holt Thomas made a fortune from two popular magazines then began to manufacture aircraft. Perhaps there had been a prior link between Thomas and Benjamin Hooker through printing machinery and they decided the skills needed to make printing machinery might be turned to the new petrol engines then to aero engines.
A summary of a recorded interview of Hugh Burroughes (22 December 1883 – 3 October 1985) archived by The Imperial War Museum (catalogue number 7255, production date 1983) during the period he was Holt Thomas's general manager of Aircraft Manufacturing Company at Hendon (1914–1919) refers to the establishment of a factory to manufacture Gnome engines in Walthamstow, London, 1914. Burroughes remained a significant force active in the aviation industry until he retired from the board of Hawker-Siddeley in 1966 aged 82.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter Hooker” 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.