Following his father's profession, he showed great ingenuity when young, for instance designing a velocipede to make it easier to sell small items of joinery he had made around the neighbourhood.

By 1870 Frederick Sage owned buildings in Gray's Inn Road, including show rooms and "steam works" nearby in Portpool street.

From the Berlin branch contracts were secured in Finland and around the old Austro-Hungarian Empire which was to break up at the end of the Great War – in Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade.

The Peterborough factory which had been acquired in 1910, conveniently by the Great Northern main line railway, with sidings,[3] also used its woodworking skills to build cabins for non-rigid airships.

[2] With the end of the war and the availability of surplus former-military aircraft the company closed the design department and returned to wood working and shop fitting.

When the contract for wings for the Albemarle was secured, needing expensive jigs for assembly, it was decided that Central London was becoming too risky, the Blitz having started.

On the morning of 17 April 1941 Sage's main factory and office premises in Gray's Inn Road were bombed and entirely destroyed by fire just before the employees arrived for work.

There was even a factory at Mountain Ash in the Cynon Valley of South Wales for manufacturing sheet metal and architectural metalwork.

In 1968, "unobtrusively" as The Times put it, Sage's became a subsidiary of British Electric Traction, remained in name for a while longer but eventually disappeared.

Frederick Sage continued to operate from its Haringay base until 1989 whereupon it merged with Brent Metal and moved to Wembley where it struggled on for a few more years as part of Courtney Pope Holdings, until the Group's eventual demise.