Dear Peter, I beg to differ on your point that Sturmey hubs were a Raleigh thing.
The same cursory glance at the copy of cycling which you took should have revealed one of the many ads for Sturmey sporting or racing hubs as standalone products, i.e. intended for a different market than Raleigh "OEM" hubs.
My guess as to why British cyclists often bought gear hubs is that they
were accustomed to them, after all they had had them for about thirty years in the nineteen-thirties as Michael Butler explained in an earlier post. Sturmey / Raleigh had used their considerable PR power to
propagate the hubs. What I have not been able to do is find out is if gear hubs were not simply cheaper to buy and/or to run than derailleurs.
In Germany, people were accustomed to using single-speed coaster brake
Torpedo hubs so much that you frequently hear old cyclists speak of the
fifties as the decade when the first three-speeds appeared. Many German
racers actually used them right through the thirties, sometimes equipped with additional derailleurs. Imagine that, a coaster brake with a derailleur. Again, advertising and sponsoring power played a major role in this.
In the immediate after-WWII years there also was the factor of British
autarchy in that politicians decided to export as much of Britain´s industrial production as possible, and to reduce imports as much as possible, in order to reduce Britain´s huge amount of debt incrued during the war. I think it is Hadland who writes that i.e. all ASCs were exported until late 1948. So what was left for Bitish cyclists most probably was Sturmey hubs and Cyclo derailleurs, but hardly any imported derailleurs. This way of course the percentage of gear hubs must have been increased artificially.
Regards, Toni Theilmeier, Belm, Germany.