When Kelham Island Museum opened in 1982, workshops were set aside for a forger, a cutler, and a grinder.  The first occupiers were George Watts, Graham Clayton, and Rowland Swinden.  The latter had been born in Sheffield in 1931.  Rowland’s apprenticeship began in January 1946, when aged 14, he joined the family’s ‘little mester’ business.  His grandfather had been a grinder, whose three sons had followed him into the trade, one of them Rowland's father.  Rowland’s grandfather died in 1939 and by the end of the War his father had left the business, and the two remaining sons had split – one to Boston Street, the other to Western Works of Christopher Johnson in Portobello.  

Rowland began work for his uncle Harry in a small workshop ‘with just the two of us working in it’ (author’s interview, 1992).  They specialised in pen and pocket knife blades.  Johnson’s had about fifty workers and Rowland and his uncle were the only grinders.  (This was at a time when the grinders in Sheffield numbered about a hundred.) However, they also worked for other firms.  Rowland recalled that ‘at lunchtime I never used to play football with the lads, it was always errands to run – ‘Go an’ tek this work to Wostenholm's and bring me some more!’ Rowland's wage was 23s [£1 15p] a week, which even while he was living at home was meagre.  ‘I must be the only person’, he quipped, ‘who when I went into the Forces to do my National Service at eighteen I got an increase in my pay – and I only got 27s then’.

Rowland stayed with his uncle until he was 21.  He then left to work for Joseph Rodgers at Pond Hill Works, where he remained for two years.  Soon Rowland rented what was known in the trade as a ‘trow’ (the trough in which the grinding wheels ran) at Rodgers’ and began grinding a greater variety of blades, including Bowies and pruning knives.  He stayed with the firm until they moved premises in 1969, before renting his own workshop at Granville Works, Sylvester Street.  The decline in the Sheffield trades was now apparent.  Rowland became aware of it at Christopher Johnson in the early 1950s, when the Australian business began to disappear, particularly in trade knives.  Then came the Japanese invasion.  According to Rowland, the problem was that:

Sheffield tried to match them.  Instead of Sheffield firms sticking to what they knew best, which was quality cutlery done by hand, they thought – Oh, Japan’s doing everything by machine, we’ll do the same.  They thought they could just go and drag people off the streets to work a machine, get rid of apprenticeships, and that it would all be easy.   But Japan was gearing up on new machines, with us trying to do it on a shoestring, and Sheffield lost out.  Eventually, they realised they’d better stick to quality, but by then it was too late – the craftsmen had gone.  And it’s been a steady decline since then.

For Rowland, though, the cloud had a silver lining.  ‘We became an attraction’, he recalled.  Visitors came to Sylvester Street to watch him at work.  Then in the mid-1970s the idea was mooted of the remaining ‘little mesters’ working in a museum.  Along with George Watts and Fred James, Rowland expressed an interest.  But not until the early 1980s did the move happen.  Rowland and George were still keen, but Fred James decided against a move, since he was nearing retirement, and his place was taken by Graham Clayton.  Instead of paying up to £30 a week for a workshop, Kelham Island Museum charged a peppercorn rent in return for the trio fraternising with visitors and demonstrating their skills (alongside their other work).

Grinding was no longer so unhealthy or dangerous.  Rowland remembered a few sandstone wheels in Sheffield immediately after the Second World War, but most grinders by then were using artificial wheels.  These had been introduced by George Jowitt & Sons and had revolutionised the grinding trades by removing the primary cause of grinders’ silicosis.  ‘The water-cooling carries away what dust there is’, said Rowland.  He emphasised the manufactured stone’s advantages: it gave a better edge and, while a sandstone wheel might last a month, the artificial stone was serviceable for a year.

The author once asked Rowland how long it took to become a grinder? ‘Seven years’, was the reply.  ‘That’s the apprenticeship, at any rate.  As Rowland emphasised: ‘Anybody can soon learn how to do a bit of grinding and put an edge on a blade, but the trick is getting a quality finish, with no bumps and irregularities on the blade’.  He showed me a number of blades he’d been polishing – the mirror polish on each was flawless, with all the blades perfectly matched for finish and size.  ‘I’ve always said that most people could grind a blade, but could they grind it at a price where you could’ve earned a living?  See, in the old days, they never wanted to pay any money.  If you didn’t do the work somebody else would – a little bit cheaper .  You had to be quick’.  Rowland stressed the problems involved:

I was a couple of years doing roughing out before I was allowed to finish a blade.  And it is difficult.  A blade's forged and on the edge it’s left at about anything from 1/16th  to 1/ 8th  of an inch thick, and that’s got to be taken down so that it’ll take an edge and hold an edge.  So there’s very little difference between getting it too thin (or thick) and having it just right.  Bear in mind that when I grind, I don’t put the final edge on: I take it down to a thin edge, so that it’s got to be glazed, it’s got to be polished (which will take a little bit more off), and you’ve got to have the experience to know that by the time that other work’s been done, it will then go on the whetstone and hold an edge.  And remember that the blades are all different shapes and you can make a mess of one by not putting a flat side on it.  You’ve got to have a nice, flat finish on the grinding for appearance.

Yet grinding is high-volume work.  Explained Rowland: ‘A grinder can get through far more work in a week than a cutler, so I need plenty of orders to keep busy’.  So besides supplying Graham Clayton with Bowie and pocket knife, much of Rowland’s work was for the surviving cutlery firms in Sheffield.  ‘I get work from all of them’, said Rowland.  ‘They all need hand-finishing for quality work.  Machinery can’t do all the jobs on a knife – though machine grinding does help’.  He picked up a small pocket knife blade which was blanked out and glazed (one of the first grinding operations, which leaves fine striations on the blade), but not yet finished.  ‘The firms send them to me like this, so I can do the finishing processes.  In the old days the grinder would do all the work on the blade, which obviously took time.  With the blades half-done like this I can do a thousand a week’.

Which was better: hand forged or machine forged?  Despite the legendary quality of old Sheffield steel, Rowland asserted that the quality of modern steels was so good that he and Graham could do a much better job.  Most of their knives were band-sawed from sheet steel and then ground without prior forging.  ‘In old Sheffield steel’, observed Rowland, ‘there were imperfections, so the forging was necessary to improve the quality.  Those old craftsmen were great.  They took what was potentially an inferior material and made a terrific job.  They could also spend more time on the work than us, because prices were relatively higher’.

Rowland retired in the early 1990s (as did Graham Clayton) and went to live on the south-west coast.  Alongside another grinder (Eric Tingle), he was filmed in 1979 by David Rea and Peter Care (South Yorkshire County Council / Sheffield City Polytechnic).   The film can be viewed on the Ken Hawley Collection Trust YouTube channel, as part of the SYCC Trades & Crafts series.   Photographs (by this author) of Rowland grinding are available on PictureSheffield.