Birmingham Small Arms Company

The Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA) was founded in 1861 in Birmingham’s Gun Quarter by a group of gunmakers, including Thomas Turner, pooling their trades to fill a British government small-arms contract. It went on to build military and sporting rifles, bicycles, motorcycles and other vehicles under the BSA name across more than a century, including some of the Welrod suppressed pistols built during the Second World War, delivered deliberately unmarked so that no maker’s mark could identify their origin. The firearms business survives today as BSA Guns; the wider industrial group was wound up in 1973, its remainder acquired by Manganese Bronze Holdings.