Thread: J. Beal & Sons identification help please

I don't have any info on that particular but I do have a Wade & Butcher with that same style blade and it has "Gentlemans Razor No 2" in the same style script on the blade. Interesting, wonder what the connection is?

As for the identifiable similarities between the two designs, it has long been my understanding that late 19th-century Britain was plagued with industrial espionage, especially in the Sheffield region, where the majority of steel manufacturing for export took place. It was not uncommon for the disgraced daughters of local tycoons to loiter about the pubs and alleyways in search of lonely design engineers in need of whisky and companionship. They would seduce these lads and steal their secrets, reporting back to daddy through third parties, like a second cousin or neighbour, so as to keep their identities private.

Many, if not all of the beheadings performed in Sheffield between 1860-1892 were a direct result of corporate spying. Firmly imbedded in the academic literature is the notion that it was precisely this dynamic that allowed the Sheffield tooling industry to flourish, as the more foolish, and likely less-skilled workers were culled from the flock, allowing for the ascension of tight-lipped artisans and the overall fine quality of razor production.

A Marxist critique of this period would easily locate a separation of classes between the more-skilled worker and the less-skilled worker within the social dynamic of cheap whisky and dirty pubs. The more skilled worker could afford his own whisky and normally had a stable of loose women employed throughout the grounds as chambermaids. Given their heightened class, there was no need to place their livelihood, and their life for that matter, into the dangerous and loosely moraled environment of a pub and its equally disastrous combination of darts, booze, wool, body-odor, and fast woman.

This might explain the similarities between the two blades, but often times I don’t know what I’m talking about.