Thread: "Dip-at-toe" stubtails 18th century

Dude! I love the info! I also love that we're taking two different tacks to trace things -- I think that as we compare notes, we'll get closer and closer to cracking this one

I would love if the razor proves to have been made by William Linley and not the Bradshaws -- as you said, the Bradshaws, despite being rather prolific through the area, do not appear to have been pillars of the community. In contrast, the Linleys, despite being a relatively small family in the same area, had both William and his son John serving as Master Cutler within the Cutler Company.

To answer a few of the questions (I don't have too much time right now, but will come back to provide further details): the dart and pipe mark being assigned to "one Bradshaw" comes from the Company's legal proceedings during a contest over the mark in the mid-late 1800s. I believe it's in the same book as the apprenticeship lists.

Regarding the apprenticeship lists, they're a mess to wade through and keep straight...so I transcribed much of the Bradshaw listings into a spreadsheet to allow for some semblance of sorting and lookups. It's a first step...next up will be to make a relational database. A few tidbits that help in sorting things:

1. Freedom was not granted until an individual was 21
2. A master was only supposed to take on one apprentice at a time, until their apprentice was in their 5th year. This rule was often broken, but can be used as a sort of fuzzy logic to help trace things.
3. The apprentice listing contains both the name and location of the father, as well as the name and location of the master that they were apprenticed to. This was used primarily to trace father-son apprenticeships during this particular effort.
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...I stopped typing because Joan Unwin got back to me (she's amazingly fast). Settling things pretty firmly in the William Linley camp, the following is an image from their mark book in 1748:

Originally Posted by srsimon

...I stopped typing because Joan Unwin got back to me (she's amazingly fast). Settling things pretty firmly in the William Linley camp, the following is an image from their mark book in 1748:

Indeed she is!

That is suddenly very clear, now just finding the connection between him and Bradshaw and how this mark ended up with the Linleey's

Originally Posted by srsimon

Dude! I love the info! I also love that we're taking two different tacks to trace things -- I think that as we compare notes, we'll get closer and closer to cracking this one

The difficulty with using just Leader's books is that it's necessarily incomplete. It's just the records of things that happened at the Company, when the whole purpose of the enterprise was so these people would run businesses and presumably not be interacting with the Company except at the annual dinner when everyone got good and liquored up.

The directories can't be relied on either because as you now see, they misprinted marks with regularity, and on top of that businesses paid to be included, leaving out the more hand-to-mouth outfits (which described a LOT of Sheffield in the 18th century).

Newspapers for Sheffield only go back to the 1750's (there were no mentions of any Bradshaws in the news).

That leaves genealogical data, which is ... well... All over the place, sometimes expensive to access (I pay for an annual Ancestry membership with all the bells & whistles), and can require all sorts of interdisciplinary knowledge. I found one document in this search that I just couldn't interpret because it was A) in a stylized hand, B) in legal latin, and C) used shorthand. I spent a lot of time on it only to realize it was referring to the wrong William Bradshaw, since the one we're talking about wasn't in Blackpool....



But I love doing this. It's like puzzle solving! I had put off replying to your first post simply because I didn't expect to be able to pull much together.

So, speaking of pulling together. A nice little summary might be useful here.

William Bradshaw, son of a farmer, earned his freedom to practice as a cutler in 1698. He married Mary Hoole, from a family of cutlers. They had a lot of children.

His eldest son John is most likely to have inherited the first dart & pipe mark when William died in 1733.

The family fortunes likely waned. Perhaps the wheel they were working from in Crookesmoor was substandard or crowded. Perhaps they were trying to run their own outfit. Ether way, by 1748 the mark was not in use and William Linley bought it. The Bradshaws continued to work in Sheffield as outworkers or little mesters -- the dark matter of the old Sheffield work system, but never became name brands.

Also, one of the William Bradshaws was a jerk.

Originally Posted by srsimon

...I stopped typing because Joan Unwin got back to me (she's amazingly fast). Settling things pretty firmly in the William Linley camp, the following is an image from their mark book in 1748:

As usual, Sketchley's misprinted the mark. Gales & Martin was better about that (they were publishing from Sheffield, at least until one of them had to flee the country before he was prosecuted for treason).

Originally Posted by Fikira

Indeed she is!

That is suddenly very clear, now just finding the connection between him and Bradshaw and how this mark ended up with the Linleey's

Also from Joan: Once a cutler stopped paying mark rent, or cancelled his use of his registered mark, the design could be used by anyone else.

Originally Posted by srsimon

Also from Joan: Once a cutler stopped paying mark rent, or cancelled his use of his registered mark, the design could be used by anyone else.

Good stuff! Amazing!

All this information really gives it a boast!

Proud it is collected here, Thank you so much, All of you!

Got the razor in -- it's in fairly good shape. The edge has been left alone for long enough that oxidation has made for some rough spots - nothing major, but enough that it's best to grind it down slightly to get it smooth.

The razor is a _near_ wedge. If it's worn, the wear is _very_ even down the length of the blade - the spine thins just enough towards the heel to keep the angle of the edge consistent at 14 degrees (over a varying width of blade). Current plan is to take it to a true wedge in order to even up the sides...which will unfortunately lose most of the patina from the blade. The blade has more than enough mass to handle the change (4.45mm thick at the toe)

I'm planning on leaving the spine untaped when establishing the final bevel/edge. Worst case, I can always go back and tape -- easier to go that direction than the other.

Will post pics when done...

Originally Posted by srsimon

Got the razor in -- it's in fairly good shape. The edge has been left alone for long enough that oxidation has made for some rough spots - nothing major, but enough that it's best to grind it down slightly to get it smooth.

The razor is a _near_ wedge. If it's worn, the wear is _very_ even down the length of the blade - the spine thins just enough towards the heel to keep the angle of the edge consistent at 14 degrees (over a varying width of blade). Current plan is to take it to a true wedge in order to even up the sides...which will unfortunately lose most of the patina from the blade. The blade has more than enough mass to handle the change (4.45mm thick at the toe)

I'm planning on leaving the spine untaped when establishing the final bevel/edge. Worst case, I can always go back and tape -- easier to go that direction than the other.

Will post pics when done...

If it's close to a perfect wedge it will all be hone wear. These were all actually fairly hollow when first made and a fresh off the line one would have a tiny bevel. Best way to be true to origin would be to get it reground by a professional razor grinder (e.g. Joe Edson) rather than taking it flat. I don't recall offhand the diameter of the grinding stones from this period - Zak do you have a reference for that?

The blade profile couldn't have been "fairly hollow" -- there's just too much wedge to it for it to have been ground down to that.

Originally Posted by srsimon

The blade profile couldn't have been "fairly hollow" -- there's just too much wedge to it for it to have been ground down to that.

By fairly hollow I mean compared to wedge. Something like this or a little less ground. But definitely not a true wedge.