Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

114 THE CUTLERY INDUSTRY. THERE are one or two interesting features about the great cutlery industry of Sheffield which distinguish it from almost every other trade or craft carried on in the British Isles. Its antiquity everybody knows of, but still more singular is the fact that it is even now to a great extent carried on A FORGER AT WORK. {Photo kindly szipplied by Messrs. J. Rodgers & Sons, Ltd., Sheffield.) by methods exactly similar to those in vogue three or four centuries ago. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, which substituted machinery for hand labour, and made the factory system everywhere predominant, scarcely touched the cutlery trade. Only in one or two of the processes involved in the making of a pocket or table knife have mechanical contrivances been successfully or largely introduced. The Sheffield grinder, his clothing smeared with “ wheelswarf,” sitting before his whirring stone, still bestrides his “ horse ” in the same way as did his predecessor in the days of Good Queen Bess, and in holding the blade to the stone he uses just such a rude handle, formed of a cleft twig, as suggested itself to the earliest cutlers who carried on their handicraft by the side of some woodland brook, in the days when machinery was unknown, and when in Roche Abbey or Beauchief Abbey, not so far away, the monks were painfully illuminating their beautiful missals. Nor has the forger changed his methods one iota. Time, of course, has wrought many changes in the accessories of the trade. The grind- stones are now run by steam, and in some cases even by gas, although there are still a few of the old-fashioned water-power shops on the streams which find their way into the Don near Sheffield. The popular tradi- tion that Sheffield is the original home of the cutlery trade is incorrect. Cutlery was first made in London ; but we find it flourish- ing at an early period, before the clays of Chaucer, in the district round about Sheffield, known as Hallamshire. The transference occurred probably when the iron industry left Kent and Sussex, its original home, for the Midlands and the North, so as to be near the coalfields. From Chaucer’s day down to very recent times the forges and grinding “wheels”—as the shops containing grindstones are termed—were scattered about a wide area on the banks of every convenient stream. It was the introduction of railways and the growth of other manufactures which caused the modern city of Sheffield to grow up as the nucleus of the commercial activity of the district. Although the last few years have witnessed some developments in the rapid production of cutlery, it is a fact that the best knives are still made throughout by hand. In Sheffield, “ cutlery ” means any tool having a cutting edge, but for the purpose of this article we shall only speak of pocket and domestic cutlery. In the manufacture of a first-class pocket or table knife the services of a number of workmen, skilled in very different ways, are called into play. In the first place, a good knife must be made from refined steel made of the very purest Swedish iron ore. The forging of