This family business, spanning six generations, was nurtured in the blade forging trade that once flourished around Solly Street / Broad Lane / St Philip’s Road.  In an interview in the 1980s, George Adams provided a fascinating account of this old industry (Jenkins and McClarence, 1989¹).   Aged 84, George told his interviewers of the days when the cutlery trade was ‘no place for a man who wasn’t quick’.  He forged butchers’ blades for several well-known firms, such as Petty, until he established his own business after the Second World War in Headford Street.  He closed that in the late 1950s and retired, aged 54.  However, his son Jack had followed him into the trade and eventually the father returned to work for the son.  George died in about 1997.    

When the author interviewed Jack in 2008, he recalled how he had started in the cutlery trade some 66 years ago.  Initially, he worked at Nowill in Scotland Street, where his father rented a workshop.  It was so long ago that Jack had difficulty remembering his first job, but he eventually told me that it was drilling tangs in trade knives.   An enormous trade was conducted at that time in painters’ scrapers.   

In 1955, Jack started his own business, first in Solly Street and then in Roscoe Road.   He bought in blanks and networked with other craftsmen and distributors.   According to Iles (1993²), Jack had a fool proof recipe for success: ‘sheer unrelenting graft [hard work] from eight in the morning till nine at night and one o’clock on Saturdays, year after year.  I have never seen anyone in my life work like Jack Adams’.  Jack was more modest, simply stating that he had to put in ‘a lot of hours’.   Later he moved to Alma Street, Kelham Island.  His business was incorporated in 1988.  Adams’ was one of the few factories left that conducted all the knife processes from drop-forging to dispatch to the customer.  When the lease on the Alma Street works terminated, Jack had to relocate to Scotland Street (though that proved timely, because of the Sheffield Flood in 2007).   Jack died on 28 December 2016, aged 89 (Sheffield Star, 14 January 2017).   At his death, the company employed about twenty workers producing Bowies, Fairbairn Sykes Commando knives, sailors’, kitchen, butchers’, trade, and folding knives.   Adams’s marks included Nowill, F. E. & J. R. Hopkinson, and Austin McGillivray (an old steel and tool maker).  In 2022, J. Adams Ltd (Sheffield Knives) continued to trade at Endeavour Works, 124 Scotland Street, under Jack’s son, John.

¹. Jenkins, C, and McClarence, S, On the Knife Edge (Sheffield, 1989)

2. Iles, Ashley, Memories of a Sheffield Tool Maker (Mendham, NJ, 1993)