Amalgamated Power Engineering
Open-knowledge reference entry
Amalgamated Power Engineering (APE) was a British engineering holding company, created through the 1968 merger of W.H. Allen, Sons and Co and Belliss and Morcom. It was acquired in 1981 by Northern Engineering Industries
History
The company was created in 1968 through the merger of W. H. Allen, Sons & Company Ltd. (which had absorbed William Foster & Co. in 1960) and Belliss and Morcom.
In 1966, the receiver of Crossley Brothers of Manchester, sold the Crossley-Premier Engines and Furnival and Co businesses to Belliss and Morcom (B&M) of Birmingham, West Midlands. In 1968 B&M agreed to a merger with W.H. Allen, Sons and Co of Bedford, to form Amalgamated Power Engineering (APE), 60% owned by Allen's shareholders (which included William Foster & Co.) and 40% by Belliss and Morcom; which instantly became a leading manufacturer of engines. In 1968, APE reached agreement with Cooper-Bessemer to allow C-B to sell APE's gas treatment plant worldwide. In 1969, APE's Allen Gwynnes Pumps subsidiary acquired the industrial pumps business of Vickers plc based in Barrow in Furness.
After a difficult period in the 1970s, when due to ongoing losses APE sold a number of subsidiaries, in 1981 APE was acquired by Northern Engineering Industries plc, based in Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne. NEI shut most of the old central-Birmingham factories, consolidated the products around compressors, and moved B&M to Redditch.
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This entry incorporates text from “Amalgamated Power Engineering” 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.