 The company was founded by Charles Davis, an Englishman who had been transported to the Tasmanian penal colony as a convict.He established a hardware, ironmongery and tinsmithing business which grew to become one of Tasmania's major business enterprises including moving it to Hobart's Cat and Fiddle Alley where it remained into the 1970s.Davis fully owned the company until in 1911, at age 87, when he limited himself to a chairman, and his family continued to operate the company until the 1970s.