A MULTI-BLADE PENKNIFE FOR EXHIBITION

A MULTI-BLADE PENKNIFE FOR EXHIBITION with over one hundred folding blades and accessories including awls, borers, saws, corkscrews, tweezers, scissors, pincers, scribes, bodkins, needles, nail files, bradawls, and spanners, fitted at each side with mother-of-pearl scales (small cracks) retained by five minute screws and with elaborately writhen German silver borders at the top and bottom, 12.0 cm (closed) Provenance The directors of Lockwoods, Sheffield. Literature David Hayden-Wright, The Heritage of English Knives, Atglen, Pennsylvania, 2008, p. 73. The apparent founder of Lockwood Brother Ltd was John Lockwood of Ecclesfield, who was apprenticed to file maker John Burgin and became a Freeman in 1767, when he was assigned the mark ‘CX’. His two sons were John Lockwood Jun. (1769-1856) and William Lockwood (1775-1829). The latter moved to Sheffield in the 1790s and, in 1803, married Ann Sorby, linking his family to the local tool making dynasty. They had four sons, William (1806-1873), John (1813-1876), Joseph (1815-1902), and Charles (1822-1872). In 1817, Lockwood & Sorby are recorded as factors in Arundel Street and merchants and file manufacturers in 1822. William died in 1829 and his four sons who became the ‘Lockwood brothers’ ultimately continued the business, first recorded 1837. In 1861 Lockwoods employed 500 staff and in 1865 they expanded their premises at Arundel Street. The enterprise became more closely involved in cutlery and trade catalogues show a wide range of knives and pocket cutlery with an emphasis on complicated sportsman’s patterns, hunting and skinning knives. By 1862 German counterfeiting had forced the company to adopt another mark: a Pampas rhea with the words ‘REAL KNIFE’ and ‘PAMPA’. The firm’s main trade mark was ‘C:X’. Lockwood’s also acquired a Maltese cross ‘L’ mark. Three of the Lockwood brothers died in the early 1870s: Charles (1872), William (1873), and John (1876). Joseph continued the business and around 1891 they became a limited company. By the First World War, Lockwood’s was in decline and losing money, in 1919 it became part of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers Ltd and were acquired by Elliott in 1927. Part proceeds to benefit the Acquisition Fund of the Arms and Armor department, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.