The Yorkshire Film Archive collects, preserves, and shows film made in, or about Yorkshire. Our collections are non-fiction, dating from the 1890s to the present day, and providing a rich and visually compelling record of all aspects of lives, cultures, landscape, industries, major events and everyday activities, many of which are available to watch, free of charge, on our website.
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C J & Co Cutlery
This atmospheric film perfectly captures the character of a 1920’s cutlery workshop, exhibiting the pride the men and women took in their work of making specialised knives.
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Overview
Back to the days when small cutlery works gave workers a sense of satisfaction in the hand crafted products they made, with the women lovingly grinding, polishing and packing. Here in Sheffield the camaraderie of the buffer girls alleviates any looming tedium. And, before regulation work-wear, the men wore the common clothes of the time: white shirt with rolled up sleeves, waistcoat, cloth cap and cravat; with the women in headscarves or sporting lookalike hair styles.
Before the coming of mass production and automation, Sheffield teemed with small cutlery workshops, stretching back to the thirteenth century, which were still employing some 30,000 workers by the 1950s. By the mid nineteenth century these were producing 90% of all knives in the world. Here we see the workshop of Christie and Hodgson Ltd of West Street, using their own, uncredited, filmmaker. There were other cutlers with the name of Hodgson with workshops on Pond Street and Norfolk Street. The 1920s was a period when making cutlery was at least partly handmade, requiring enough skill to give some real job satisfaction, while using enough machinery to enable sufficient production to meet demand.
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