Sir Christopher Lewington, chairman of TI Group for 14 years, sold Raleigh when he first joined TI. He turned a maker of commodity steel tubes for the domestic market into an international engineering group.
Founded in 1919 in Birmingham, TI grew into one of the UK’s 30 largest companies over the next 60 years before going into decline. Post-war competition from outside the UK was exacerbated by the 1980s recession.