This knife was made in Sheffield for a Leeds jewellery retailer.  The founder was Samuel Nicholson Kilner (1858-1942), who was born in Leeds, the son of Thomas (a joiner) and his wife, Elizabeth.  Samuel worked as an ironmonger and then became a jeweller’s assistant.  In 1883, he married Sarah Inchbold (1859-1932), who was the daughter of a warehouseman.  Samuel and Sarah had a daughter, Mabel, and two sons:  Rowland (1886-1957) and Frederick (1890-1977).  By 1911, Samuel had become a jeweller’s manager.  In the interwar years, he traded in his own right at 11 King Edward Street, Leeds.  In 1939, the business occupied new premises at ‘The Clock House’, 123 Albion Street, Leeds, ’20 yards above The Headrow’.  The move, ‘after 35 years in King Edward Street’, was advertised in the press and by the issue of souvenir postcards (Leeds Mercury, 1 May 1939).  S. N. Kilner & Sons sold clocks, cut glass, silverware, cutlery canteens, fancy novelties, and was a manufacturing opticians.

Sarah Kilner had died suddenly at Chapeltown on 18 April 1932 and was buried at St John’s Church, Moor Allerton.  Samuel died on 9 December 1942, leaving £210 and Rowland (a jeweller) and Frederick (an optician) as his executors. Presumably, they continued the business and registered Kilner’s as a private limited company.