The Origin of the company name Suncombe
Suncombe was incorporated in 1961 and throughout our history, people have often enquired about the origin of our company’s unusual name, Suncombe (pronounced Sun kuːm).
So I thought I would recount the story of the advent of this name, as told to me by our company founder.
The history of this name began when David Overton, our company’s founder, started to develop the first instances of Cleaning In Place (CIP) in the United Kingdom in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, he very quickly recognised the immense potential of this ground breaking technology and decided to incorporate a new company to harness this new exciting knowledge.
He recognised that, as the technology of CIP had such a massive future potential, he needed to find a name that was so unique, it couldn’t possibly be copied or emulated by any possible competitors and that the name would always be associated with the quality company he planned to build.
During David and his wife’s travels, they came across a hamlet in Oxfordshire in England called Swyncombe. The signpost announcing the village name was in Olde English Script and he misread it as Suncombe, confusing the ‘WY’ with a ‘U’. The name Swyncombe has Old English roots: “Swin” for wild boar and “combe” for valley or hollow. So by misreading the name it would become “Sun” and “combe” for valley or hollow. So the Old English roots of the name Suncombe would be Sun Valley.
That was his first introduction to the name Suncombe and he realized he had found a name that fulfilled all of his requirements. So, in 1961 David Overton incorporated Suncombe Ltd as a private Limited Company to develop the new technologies of Cleaning In Place and the advances in automation that accompanied this change of philosophy.
Now nearly 70 years later, it is apparent that he succeeded in his aim of choosing a name that would be unique, that would not be copied or emulated by any competitors and has always been associated with the quality equipment and the company values that the Suncombe name delivers.
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