Birmingham Small Arms: Processing the Tony Meade Collection

 The first drawer of the Tony Meade Collection on their date of donation.
From left to right: Thomas Poole (Archivist, BMIHT), Dave Daniels, Tony Meade

The BMIHT Archive service has recently completed work on the Tony Meade Collection of technical drawings created by the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA). Donated to the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust by the BSA Front Wheel Drive Club in 2025, our volunteers have worked hard to catalogue and repackage this large collection of technical drawings to make them more discoverable and ensure their future survival. Here, we briefly cover a little about the history of these drawings, and a recent project to integrate them into the BMIHT Archive collections.

'Even with Tony’s work to clean and care for these drawings, a striking aspect of these illustrations was their smell. Oil, grease, and grime: the smell of the factory floor rarely leaves a manuscript once it has soaked in.'

 Now mostly the reserve of computer-aided design, 20th century technical drawings were often hand-drawn.

The Donation

‘During the early 1970s’, Dave Daniel, treasurer of the BSA Front Wheel Drive Club, recalls, ‘quite a few young students acquired BSA’s and joined the [club], as a BSA offered a cheap way of owning a vintage car.’

With the BSA plant in Small Heath closing down in 1973 with little fanfare, the material heritage of the place was at risk. Someone involved in the company’s insolvency contacted a member of the BSA FWD Club, Ian Pinkney, having come across thousands of legacy papers in the factory drawing office.

Ian Pinkney remembers that the drawings ‘were all going to be chucked away in skips unless we could save them. I said, “yes we could do that, what are the next steps?” His contact said if we could get to the factory on the following Sunday, he would guard them until then.’

In the world of museums and archives there are many such cases of fate playing a hand in what material survives and what does not. Gems are often found in unlikely locations, including bins, skips and among debris of old buildings, offices, factories and so on. Often wise it is the passion and enthusiasm of individuals or groups of people that are responsible for saving documents, records and objects otherwise at risk. While collections saved in this way provide invaluable insights into our diverse histories, we might also imagine what records and artefacts have not survived, what has been lost to us and how this effects our interpretations of and the stories we tell about our pasts.

While many drawings have survived well, some materials are in poor condition. Repairs like these would have been made in the BSA Drawing Office itself - without a view to the deleterious effect of sticky tape over time.

Small and large, well-known and obscure: every individual component of a car has at least one corresponding drawing.

As Ian also recalled, ‘It was agreed that we would meet outside gate No. 4 (I think it was) and flash our headlamps and he would let us in (just like in spy movies)… It must have only taken 15 minutes and after offering our thanks we drove off with our booty.’

The club members drove away with around five and half thousand drawings that night. ‘The problem was we had all these drawings, but what could we do with them? The answer was provided by Tony Meade.’

Tony - a member of the BSA Front Wheel Drive Club and lifelong enthusiast - offered to store the drawings in his home, where they remained for several decades. At some stage, he procured a large wooden plan chest to store the materials. Over the years, the drawings were listed, digitised and shared for historical research, admiration and enjoyment. Several initiatives were undertaken to restore the drawings where needed.

‘Tony continued to work on the drawings… By this time, he had become an authority on the drawings and could often cite a drawing number from memory.’ Tony also digitised the collection himself. A herculean task over seven years, he took to scanning images of the drawings, in many instances effectively ‘stitching’ together and ‘cleaning’ materials electronically.

The acquisition of these drawings was also fundamental in enabling the BSA FWD Club to set up a parts manufacturing service, which over the years has provided thousands of newly manufactured parts to original specifications to keep these cars running.

This sizable collection was handed over to BMIHT Archive late last year, with BSA FWD Club members hauling them into the archive drawer by drawer.

Sadly, as we discovered when we reached out to return the drawers within which the collection arrived, Tony passed away only a few weeks after the donation was made. It was our pleasure and privilege to have met him, and to be able to satisfy his wish to deposit these drawings within the BMIHT Archive.

The Drawings

Even with Tony’s work to clean and care for these drawings, a striking aspect of these illustrations was their smell. Oil, grease, and grime: the smell of the factory floor rarely leaves a manuscript once it has soaked in.

Even when showing simple components, it is evident the detail and craft which went into materials like these.

Obscure vehicle components might not typically be described as containing beauty, but these drawings are, nonetheless, fascinating to gaze upon. Many, produced almost a century ago, are simple, others are incredibly complex and elicit a sense of awe at the craft required to create these intricate, precise, and plentiful technical illustrations.

Vehicle design remains a crucial element of the vehicle design and manufacturing process today, but there is a big difference - digital technologies are employed to undertake work in way the drafters of the BSA drawings could hardly have imagined. Yet these drawings still resonate and have purpose in our digital world, and something to teach today’s automotive designers.

The Project

The BMIHT Archive recruited teams of volunteers and, working in twos and threes - set to work repackaging and describing the entire collection over several months. More than ten volunteers have been involved in this project. Some created bespoke folders designed for the storage of these records, while others carefully removed the drawings from the drawers they were delivered in and placed them into their new archival housing.

Thanks to the dedication and skills of our volunteers, the BSA collection of technical drawings has been saved from further degradation due to environmental conditions, dirt and dust, and the collection is accessible in a way previously impossible – both to staff and the public.

One group of drawings, now repackaged for the longterm.

Fortunately, Tony had already done much work describing the drawings, which meant that cataloguing the collection was not as challenging a task as it could have been. But still, at times, it was demanding work. Two volunteers were dedicated to the tricky work of identifying those few drawings without obvious drawing numbers - perhaps where one was not included on the original drawing or the damage of time had made it illegible. However, on a good day, our teams could get through several hundred drawings!

With the drawings now safely packaged, shelved, and with a complete archival standard-compliant catalogue to accompany it, we can now upload this data to our Collections Management System, which will eventually mean that the drawings can be searched for and accessed online.

Peter Cook, chairman of the BSA Front Wheel Drive Club said:

“Our Club was formed in 1959 to support the owners and to sustain the memory of the three and four-wheeled cars built by BSA in the 1920s and 1930s; these cars reflected the highest engineering standards of the time and were among the first in the world with front-wheel-drive. When the remaining elements of the BSA group of companies were liquidated in the 1970s, the Club was extremely fortunate to acquire over 5500 original design drawings. Thanks to the remarkable efforts of one club member, Tony Meade, over many years, these drawings have been carefully curated and digitised. We are now delighted to entrust the long-term care of this unique collection of original material to the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust for the benefit of future researchers”.

Many thanks to Dave Daniel, Ian Pinkney, and Peter Cook for providing information and comments for this blog entry, and many thanks to all the volunteers who so generously gave their time and effort to this project.