Thread: Robert Wade and the challenge of sorting history.

I got this off of eBay because I felt certain, based on the grind of the blade, that it was an late 1820's model and thus made under Robert Wade's name by his widow, Jane.

However Neil Miller wasn't too sure about that dating when I showed it him, and now that I have it in hand, neither am I.



There's absolutely no doubt that it's old. I've seen numerous razors dated to the late 1700's with this basic style and it's a style that clearly continued into the 1810's. Supposedly, Robert Wade began making razors in 1816, but the man is surrounded by mystery and there's very little solid information about him. He died in 1825.



The other Wade stamped razor I have was purchased from Robert Doyle who dated it to roughly 1815. When you see both razors together it really looks like a slam dunk that Doyle was wrong and my new Wade razor is actually the older one. The straight scales, the small shoulderless blade (it's about 4/8), the simplistic stamp, all scream 'old' far louder than the design features of the R. Wade / Warranted blade.



Compare it to this very early Thomas Scargill blade. Note that the scales are very similar (though the Wade razor has a lead wedge and the Scargill does not).

So where's the challenge here? Clearly this Wade razor is from the beginning of Robert Wade's known production, right?



Except, the grind of the blade, with that pronounced lip along the spine, is quite similar to this Hiram Gilbert stamped razor (probably made by Joseph Elliot) in the 1830's. To the best of my knowledge, no one was grinding razors like that in the 1810's.



But the lip isn't that pronounced compared to the Hiram Gilbert. Plus, razors were regularly reground by street vendors who set up foot-powered wheels and offered to clean and fix old razors. Maybe it was reground into the 1830's style?

Or maybe Jane Wade made it herself, desperate for income after the death of her husband, and with only the skills she'd acquired by watching her father or brothers or spouse at work. She continued to produce razors with his stamp for four years before the inevitable caught up to her.

I seriously doubt I'll ever know. But there are some questions that MIGHT help.

Are there other very early razors with a pronounced spine bulge?

Is the lack of a first initial on the stamp any kind of indicator?

Those are things we might be able to find out.

Good questions and I've no good answers for you.

Fascinating old razor either way.
W

According to my findings Mrs Wade was listed as a razor maker for about a year before she passed.
"The partnership with Butcher ended. In 1828, only Mrs. Robert Wade was listed as a razor manufacturer in Arundel Street (in one directory, the listed name was Jane Wade). Finally, the local press reported that Mrs. Robert Wade, the relict of Mr. Wade of Arundel Street, had died near Sheffield on 14 July 1829 "(Sheffield Independent, 18 July 1829).
That said perhaps your razor is from her business, would be interesting to find out for sure.

I do tend to shy away from high collector interest items... but darn if W&B's keep catching my fancy and I can't shake em off

My Clark N Hall has that slight spine grind as well. After seeing a few other CnH's I'm thinking mine is an early one as well (1798 start up), the later pieces looked more post 1810...

Neat thread! I really like this old history!

I got a John Barber with a grind very similar.
I am not certain about the logos they used, but they did use at least 2 different ones.
JB operated 1810 - 1834.

Take a look.

Interesting read for sure

I've been digging into the records of the Cutlers' Company of Hallamshire and it's shaking the pillars of heaven a bit.

So, as I mentioned when I started this thread, I assumed this razor was made in the late 1820's when I bought it. I assumed (as most folks do) that R. WADE razors were made by Robert Wade, partner with William and Samuel Butcher.

The thing is, it's real hard for me to accept that the razor I posted pictures of in this thread is as 'late' as the 1816 start date listed for him. So I started questioning everything and digging through records.

The real problem is that there were a lot of guys named Wade, including a merchant named Richard Wade. It's not horribly difficult to believe that the R. WADE stamped blade was made for Richard Wade and not by Robert Wade.

Then there's the matter of this one, stamped simply WADE. I started really scrutinizing it today after honing up a recently acquired Rhodes & Champion. The Rhodes & Champion was made before 1814, probably pretty shortly before. This Wade razor looks distinctly older to me. The scales are straight as an arrow, the silver pin collars are thick with oxidation and the blade just feels old in that unexplainable way some older razors do. Then I noticed that it had initials scratched in. They're in the pictures I posted here, but not really visible. They were scratched in long before the age damage set in. I turned the blade over, looking at it in bright sunlight and saw what looked an awful lot like a blood stain running the length of the pile side of the scales. Then I saw '1777' scratched at the far wedge end. Under UV light the stain looks a LOT like a blood stain -- it's got sharp boundaries and varying density of darkening -- and it pools into the '1777' inscription.

I have no explanation for the possible blood stain. Still thinking this was a razor made by Robert Wade, I assumed that it had been in a collector's pile for a long time and someone in the late 1800's decided to mock up a revolutionary war item for a bit of extra cash.

All the same, I hit the books and discovered that one Thomas Wade was apprenticed to Abraham Ibberson in the mid-1700's and freed in 1765, making that 1777 date suddenly way more plausible than I'd originally thought.

Mind you, I still think it's unlikely, but I can't really dismiss it out of hand now.

The Cutlers' Company does not list any apprentices with the first initial of R.

Now I'm wondering if the whole assumption that the Butcher's partner Wade had made razors under his own name isn't based on the R. WADE stamped razors which may have been made for a completely separate Wade.

Plus, as I'm fond of pointing out, basing the age of a razor on its morphology is a dangerous business and should only be done as a last resort when no other information exists. All the same, I am now going "hmmmmmm" about all these Wades.

If R. Wade was Richard Wade, Merchant, then a great many of the Wade mysteries are simplified. The identity of Robert Wade would continue to be tantalizingly unknown, especially with his wife listed as a Razor Manufacturer. But that by itself does not necessarily imply that there was a Wade stamp associated with that family.

A little bit of thread zombie here.

Another pertinent bit of history, regarding the Cutler's Company.

For all of the 18th century (that is, the 1700's -- it's amazing how often I see folks unsurprisingly confuse that) the Cutler's Company of Hallamshire had complete legal control of the cutlery trade in Sheffield, they were a proper guild and they had guild laws for things like who could be a Master, how many apprentices a Master could have and what marks a Master could stamp on his wares.

There's a whole lot of inside baseball and labor relations minutia that happens toward the end of the 1700's, right around 1780. Basically, the Journeymen were upset that the officers of the company weren't looking out for their interests because they were just wealthy dudes with no actual connection to the work they were putting their collective thumb on. They complained to Parliament and Parliament leaned on the Cutler's Company until they agreed to elect new officers out of the body of Journeymen. The Journeymen were happy and time marched ever onwards.

But the officers very quickly figured out how to game that system and they just elected Journeymen who would tow the party line. So by the early 1800's, the same old stifling was going on and the actual workmen were back to Parliament. There was some back-and-forth and finally, in 1814, Parliament revoked the monopoly of the Cutler's Company. The institution stuck around (in fact, it remains to this day!), but it pretty quickly became a records-keeping industry and an excuse for fancy parties -- later on, toward the end of the 1800's, they would become very useful again by helping Sheffield cutlers litigate foreign businesses who stole their marks, but for a long time they were really just the Party-Party.

What that meant from a practical standpoint is that prior to 1814, anyone making cutlery in Sheffield had to go through an apprenticeship in order to register their mark with the Cutler's Company. Some of the marks were really, really old -- Joseph Rodgers had been using that same Star and Cross, under their family name, back to the early 1700's. There were about a billion variations of crowns, crosses, stars and pipes. Then it became place names, then random words and finally the Company just started handing out sequential numbers (which might be where the Joseph Smith '3415' number came from). Heiffor's squiggly thing was good and old too.

But come 1814, the floodgates opened and anyone could put down some coins at the registrar and have their own mark (provided it didn't conflict with a previous one -- my guess is a certain I. BARBER paid a bit extra to allow a tiny measure of confusion).

So Robert Wade would not have needed to complete an apprenticeship to be granted his freedom and use of a mark. He just needed some capital. Cutlers then -- even employees -- rented their workspace from one of the big shops. Enough coin to buy steel and a saddle in front of the grindstone and anyone could make razors.

Just as long as they survived. Sometimes those wheels exploded.

Then you'd just hire a couple of 8 year olds to polish them and you're good to go! And the kids'll work for moldy bread!

[QUOTE= Heiffor's squiggly thing was good and old too.

QUOTE]

What about that? I think is was fake Hindi, Like the fake Chinese. Thoughts?
Sorry!
Just interested!

[QUOTE=sharptonn;1112370]

Originally Posted by Heiffor's squiggly thing was good and old too.

QUOTE

What about that? I think is was fake Hindi, Like the fake Chinese. Thoughts?
Sorry!
Just interested!

It's a very good hijacking though, considering what a mystery that mark's been, and me sounding all definitive about it and all!

I'm utterly failing at the moment to remember where I was reading about it recently. This is a problem I run into when I come across information for one thing while I'm looking for something else.

This much I can tell you: wherever I saw it described it as a distinctive series of loops and commas. I can't argue with that! I thought it might have been in Tweedale's Directory, but I just double checked and it's not.

Some things I can tell you about Heiffor:

• His business advertisements state 1793 as the start date of the company.
• He's listed in the rolls of apprentices as having apprenticed twice, only the second time to a cutler. His father. Also named John.
• The earliest directory listings for him in the 1820's list him as both a razor maker and a hairdresser and perfumer.
• Whoever made the squiggle mark stamps didn't bother much with consistency. They very quite a bit over the years!

As for what the hell the mark is... I have no idea. Early cutler's marks are just weird. Go back far enough and they look like alchemical symbols:



But in the late 1700's they were something closer to recognizable symbols (though at this point most were recognizable symbols or names, I've picked out just some of the oddities from Gales & Martin's directory).


(apparently William, John and Robert Wright decided their mark would just be everything)
(also, these marks are culled from files, tableware, knives and razors -- not just razors)

And it's worth noting that Heiffor's squiggles can be rendered with 6's, 9's, commas, quotes and semi-colons -- that is, it's made purely from type dies, just arranged with ... eccentricity.