This firm made ornamented silverware – such as serving dishes and fish carvers – by laboriously sawing out (piercing) patterns in the metal.  It resulted from a merger in 1933 of two sawpiercing enterprises:  Taylor & Taylor, Button Lane; and Edwin Sawtell & Son, Charles Street.  The first had been founded in about 1910 by Jonathan Cousen Taylor (1860-1914?) and his son, David Robson Taylor (1887-1969).  The other had been launched by Edwin Sawtell (born in Bristol, c. 1820), who by 1861 was living in Brown Street, Sheffield, and working as a saw piercer.  During the 1870s, Edwin’s son, George Henry, joined him.  In 1881, Edwin Sawtell & Son employed four men and a boy.  In 1898, the firm moved to Charles Street, where it remained for sixty years and where Taylor Sawtell was based.  In the early 1960s, Charles Street was redeveloped and Taylor Sawtell Ltd moved to Channing Street.  Billy Thornton (1911-1998), who had worked for the firm since 1925, became the owner (Answer, 1980¹).  It closed in 1996, as the last saw piercing firm.  Its records are held by the Hawley Collection (Cavanagh, 2000²).

^1. Answer, Valerie, Sheffield’s Traditional Craftsmen (Sheffield, 1980) 

^2. Cavanagh, Nigel A, ‘The Thornton Archive and the Production of Sawpierced Silverware in Sheffield’, Industrial Archaeology Review 22 (2000)