The company was set up to further the designs of Juan de la Cierva, a Spanish engineer and pilot, with the financial backing of James George Weir, a Scottish industrialist and aviator.
On 9 December 1936, Cierva was killed in the Croydon KLM airliner accident when the aircraft in which he was a passenger crashed after taking off in fog.
Dr. James Allan Jamieson Bennett was promoted to Chief Technical Officer of the company and remained in the position until leaving in 1939.
Bennett's innovative design, a new type of rotorcraft that combined key features of the autogyro and helicopter, was tendered to the Air Ministry (Specification S.22/38) as the Cierva C.41 Gyrodyne, but preliminary work was abandoned with the outbreak of World War II.
[citation needed] In 1943, the Aircraft Department of G & J Weir Ltd. was reconstituted as the Cierva Autogiro Company to develop helicopter designs for the Air Ministry.