Frederick Sage & Company

Frederick Sage & Company was a British shop fitting company based in London with an extensive practice in Europe, South Africa, and South America. During both world wars it built and designed aircraft, and after the Second World War it executed much of the woodwork for the rebuilt House of Commons.

The founder, Frederick Sage (1830–1898) was born at Freston, a small village near Ipswich in Suffolk, the son of the village carpenter. 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. After working for local firms of builders, his ambition took him to London in 1851 where for three years he continued working for builders, studying in evening schools to rememdy his lack of education. Having married, and finding work hard to come by, he started his own shopfitting business in 1860 in Hatton Garden.

By 1870 Frederick Sage owned buildings in Gray's Inn Road, including show rooms and “steam works” nearby in Portpool street. In 1876 he received an award along with many other British firms at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia for an exhibit of “air-tight showcases &c.” In 1879 he was offering to warehouse showcases from the Paris Exhibition for the forthcoming one in Sydney.

Frederick Sage took three of his nephews, Frederick, Josiah, and Jesse Hawes into the business and eventually they became partners, along with his son. Jesse Hawes was the principal mover in the firm's development after Frederick Sage's death. In 1905 the firm became a public company with a capital of £300,000. That year marked the end of five years when they had devoted almost all their resources to fitting out Harrods in Knightsbridge, London. There was for a time a branch in Manchester which closed in 1910. More large scale work was done in London at other department stores, D. H. Evans in Oxford Street, between 1907 and 1909, and Selfridges. Sage's also worked on hotels, restaurants, even interiors of many of the great liners for Cunard and P&O.

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