Thread: hives stubtail

A little bit of a necro-post here, but since this old thread is one of the ones that turned up when I was doing an image search on Hives razors, I thought this would be a good place to stick this.

So I now have two of these razors, and ScienceGuy has one, and I’ve found images of an unmodified 4th, so I can say, definitively, that there was a very particular style of scales used on them!



Sadly, my newest one is in pretty bad shape, but the scales are good.



This one is ScienceGuy’s, and his picture.



This one I found on the web.


Also, for fun, when I was cleaning up my newest Hives razor, I drilled out the pins and accomplished something I’ve never done before...



I drilled entirely through the pin, but it still held the razor together!



Needless to say, those pins are an odd size and a good deal larger than 1/16th (or 5/64th for that matter).

But that’s beside the point. The point is Joseph Hives made his razors with, seemingly, a single style of scales.

And also I now know it was Joseph Hives who made them.

He was born 1774 in Ecclesfield (a bit north of Sheffield).

In 1790 he apprenticed to Joseph Roberts, a cutler in Sheffield for the customary 7 years but ended up buying his freedom in 1803, just before marrying Jane Powell.

So that apprenticeship is a little unusual in that he started late at age 16. It was also a little irregular the he bought his freedom years after his apprenticeship should have ended, but that sort of thing happened here and there. Time has just swallowed up the reason why it happened. Maybe he was a slow learner, or he liked working for Joseph Roberts, or he spent a lot of time sick... There’s no way to know at this distance without finding direct records of it, and that’s pretty unlikely for such a minor figure.

1803 is a very reasonable year to assume for the earliest razors he made.

He died in July, 1808, which put a bit of a damper on his production.

So that’s a very, very short career.