>From the Brooks web site http://www.brookssaddles.com
=========================================== 1865 - Legend has it that a young man of 19 years old called John Boultbee Brooks bought himself one of those new fangled velocipedes. He would have cut quite a figure but that was not all he cut; the wooden saddle was excruciatingly uncomfortable. Now his father made leather saddles for horses - and indeed he and his contemporaries, normally came to work on a horse. So the young Brooks set about designing and developing a comfortable saddle from leather in his father's works. The rest, as they say, is history.
1866 - John Boultbee Brooks (1846-1921) established a works in Great Charles Street, Birmingham, for the manufacture of leather strapping for horse harnesses and general leather goods.
1870 - Noting that more and more people were indulging in the new pastime of cycling, John Boultbee Brooks went over to the manufacture of bicycle saddles.
1880 - The first safety bicycle came on the scene and with it the need for more comfortable saddles.
1882 - Brooks filed his first patent for a sprung bicycle saddle, the first of its kind. After which he went on to file a number of patents for bicycle saddles, motor cycle saddles and other leather goods.
1900 - In the early 1900's Brooks Ltd., was offering an astonishingly broad range of bicycle saddles and other accessories such as saddle bags, tool bags, saddle back rests, inner tube cases, motorcycle belt cases, pannier bags, luggage bags, hat cases and cigar trays.
1920s - Brooks took over the Lycett Saddle Company and Brooks saddles became the first choice of cycling champions.
1926 - The B66, the big Brooks best-seller was introduced.
1930s - Brooks took over the Leatheries Cycle Saddle concern and even purchased a motorcycle company named coincidentally the Brookes Company.
1935 - A history of industry in Birmingham, the centre of bicycle saddle manufacturing in Britain, mentions that in 1935 of the 2,733,000 cycle saddles manufactured in Britain, no fewer that 60 per cent were manufactured by J.B. Brooks & Company.
1939 - War broke out and Brooks's skills and plant were rapidly harnessed to the war effort.
1942 - The war over, Brooks entered a period of expansion unlike anything ever it had experienced before.
1955 - A boom time for Brooks, with a workforce of 15,000, was selling some 55,000 leather saddles and 25,000 mattress saddles a week.
1958 - The saddle division of Brooks Industries Limited, as it was now called was taken over by the Raleigh Cycle Company.
1960 - Raleigh was bought by British Tube Investments Group, which then transferred Brooks and Sturmey-Archer first to its automotive and then to its bicycle division.
1962 - Brooks moved to the Downing Street Works, Smethwick, Birmingham, to be combined with the Wright Saddle Company, then part of T.I., to form the Raleigh Saddle Division.
1969 - In July of this year the Brooks facility was ravaged by fire and gutted. Nothing daunted, Brooks staff salvaged what was left of the plant and stock and continued production.
1987 - Brooks as part of the T.I. Bicycle Division was taken over by the American Derby International Group.
Today - Brooks sells in over 100 countries and now a special range has been re-developed for Japan where it is held in high repute as the connoisseurs choice. In Scandinavia there is a resurgence in the late 1990s for Brooks, which had disappeared for over 2 decades. ===========================================
The 1942 entry is interesting to say the least! VE Day (Victory in Europe) was May 8, 1945.
Chuck Schmidt L.A. http://www.velo-retro.com (Brooks repro catalogs)
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