Britannia were an English engineering company with roots in Colchester, Essex, where they are known to have had a foundry making nails in the early years of the 19th century. Over the years their product range was extensive and included, amongst many others items, sewing machines, machine tools, industrial oil engines, and electric and conventional passenger car.
Names associated with the company include Tommy Bear who, together with an ironmonger called Bloomfield, began the "Britannia Sewing Machine Company" (does anyone have a 'Britannia' sewing machine ?) with the Bloomfield side of the Business continuing into the 1980s. With the increasing market dominance of the efficiently mass-produced Singer machines, Bear & Bloomfield found their sales shrinking and were forced to diversify; they found a ready market for model-engineering tools kits and simple lathes for the amateur and hobbyist that led, in 1871, to the formation of the "Britannia Lathe and Oil Engine Company Ltd." In 1896 the company formed the "Britannia Electric Carriage Syndicate Ltd.", based in Colchester, and started to build electric passenger cars.
By 1898 the company was known as "The Britannia Motor Carriage Company Ltd." and had moved its production facility to the Britannia Motor Mills, Woodstock Road in Shepherd's Bush, Middlesex. Company advertising of the time showed that the firm was not only able to manufacture over 250 different kinds of metal and wood-working machines, but were also capable of fitting out an entire factory with them - complete with installed line shafting and gas and oil engines to drive them. Specialist departments within the company also undertook more difficult tasks - some beyond the capabilities of other well-known lathe makers - including the production of leadscrews (up to 40 feet in length) change wheels and precision machine-cut gears of all types. Besides these high-value products, the company also diversified into the manufacture of forges and bellows, hoisting grabs, grindstones, stocks, dies and taps, tube cutters and expanders, vices, castings, iron-founders' moulding machines, cupolas, ladles, machine cutting tools, slide-rest tools - and a variety of technical publications issued under their own name.
By 1899, just as the company were experimenting with an "oil-engined" car, control passed into the control of the Nicholson family; sensing the increasing demand for cars, a more conventional design was put into production, powered by a petrol engine with sales in the hands of the Victoria Carriage Works, Ltd. at 24-26 & 122-122 Long Acre. Unfortunately, the cars were not a success and, faced with stiff competition from the emerging motor manufactures in the English midlands - who had ready access to specialist raw materials and a easy supply of skilled labour - production had ceased by 1909. The company then concentrated on machine-tool and other engineering products and  survived until the early 1930s - when they disappeared without trace.
Early Britannia lathes (of which the smaller examples are relatively common) were of very light construction, with little in the way of unusual features or advanced engineering; later machines were much more heavily built but are, strangely, almost unknown today 
Britannia made such a bewildering variety of lathes that today it is unusual to find two exactly the same; unfortunately, very little Britannia sales literature seems to have survived - it appears to have been mainly produced in book form, or as a supplement to a book - and should any reader possess catalogues or sales folders (or has an original lathe they would be willing to photograph) the author would very much like you to hear from you.