SHERGOLD

Luthier Jack Golder was one of the mainstays of the Burns London company during the early 1960s, and stayed with the company when it was purchased in 1965 by the American Baldwin Organ company. Baldwin also acquired Gretsch in 1967. Baldwin was assembling imported Burns parts in Booneville, Arkansas. In 1970 moved the New York Gretsch operation to this facility as it phased out Burns guitar production.
Norman Holder, the ex-Burns mill foreman, rejoined Jack Golder during production of Hayman guitars (and once again affiliated with Jim Burns, who handled some of the Hayman designs). When Dallas-Arbiter, the distributor of Hayman guitars, went under in 1975 both Golder and Holder decided to continue working together on their own line of guitars. Some of the Hayman refinements carried over into the Shergold line (like the Hayman 4040 bass transforming into the Shergold Marathon bass), but the original design concept can be attributed to this team.
The Shergold company has also supplied a number of UK builders with necks and bodies under contract. These companies include BM, Jim Burn´s Burns UK, Hayman (under Dallas-Arbiter), Peter Cook´s Ned Callan, Pangborn, and Rosetti´s "Triumph" model. Author Tony Bacon, in The Ultimate Guitar Book, notes that Shergold was the last company to make guitars (and parts) in quantity in the United Kingdom.
Possibly one of the easier trademarks to figure out model designations as the pickguard carries both the "Shergold" and model name on it! Shergold models generally feature a double cutaway solid body, and two humbucker pickups. Models include the Activator, Cavalier, Marathon (bass), Masquerador, Meteor, Modulator, and custom-built doublenecks (source: Paul Day, The Burns Book).