Peter Hooker Limited owned an engineering business originally established in 1827 and carried on under the name Messrs Peter Hooker[note 1] as printers' engineers at 12 Pump Row, Old Street Road, St Luke's,[1] later at Pear Tree Court, Farringdon Road, London EC.
There being insufficient business the Walthamstow site (for sale since 1921) was sold in early 1928 and the company was voluntarily wound up by its then shareholders at the end of the same year.
A summary of a recorded interview of Hugh Burroughes (22 December 1883 – 3 October 1985) archived by The Imperial War Museum (catalogue number 7255, production date 1983) during the period he was Holt Thomas's general manager of Aircraft Manufacturing Company at Hendon (1914–1919) refers to the establishment of a factory to manufacture Gnome engines in Walthamstow, London, 1914.
It was a pioneer in introducing gauges to the engineering trade which enabled the manufacture of interchangeable component parts by a standard limit system.
A new general manager had been appointed R J Bray previously director of the Machine Tool Section, Aircraft Production Department.
[5] Peter Hooker Limited used this name on the rotary aero engines it manufactured under licence from the French company, known from the beginning of 1915 as Société des Moteurs Gnome et Rhône.
[7][8] At that time numbers employed were workpersons 1,500 and staff 250, a total of 1,750 and the owners were Airco Limited and George Holt Thomas.
Newspapers reported that the clerk of the Tottenham Council had asked the Air Ministry to arrange further testing of the giant new engine known as Stromboli for daytime or away from London.
[14] Not enough business was found in the 1920s to support the retention of their 40-acre site at Walthamstow with its more than 400,000 square feet of workshops built little more than two decades earlier.
[15] On 21 January 1928 Messrs Achille Serre, dyers and cleaners, announced they had purchased the premises and they would shortly be employing more than 2,000 people there[18] The works manager, Wallace Charles Devereux, and some staff took some of the plant to Slough and began High Duty Alloys Limited.