John Skinner (c.1776-1849) was possibly the son of John (a cutler) and baptised in Sheffield on 27 September 1776.  By the 1820s, he operated from Nursery Street in the Wicker, from where he advertised (1825) fine scissors, ladies’ dress slides and clasps, and polished steel ornaments.  He also claimed the invention of a knife sharpener combined with a fork.  On 7 February 1829, he posted an advertisement in The Sheffield Independent that challenged the rival claims to this device made by Rogers & Co (Skinner probably meant Joseph Rodgers & Sons, qv).   

By 1837, Skinner was listed in the local directory as steel pen manufacturer to His Majesty.   It was said that Skinner once had the ‘best steel pen trade in the country’ (Leader, 1876¹).   He also had claims to be amongst the pioneers of steel pen manufacture, alongside William Levesley, John Mitchell, James Heeley, James Perry, and Joseph Gillott (Bore, 1890²).   Gillott – who was born in Sheffield in 1799 – had once worked with Skinner, before leaving the town to establish a steel pen industry in Birmingham that would one day eclipse Sheffield’s.   According to his descendants, Skinner lived for a time in Birmingham and London (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 2 December 1922).  

Skinner advertised his pens (and fine scissors and sharpeners) in Pigot’s National Commercial Directory of … Scotland (1837), Drake’s Road Book (1840), and a Sheffield directory (1841).  His address was White House, Stanley Street.   He died there on 5 September 1849, aged 73, from ‘decay of nature’ and was buried in the General Cemetery.   John Skinner (a 48-year-old scissors grinder enumerated in the Census, 1851, and listed in Stanley Street and Suffolk Road in 1852) may have been his son.   Ebenezer Skinner was almost certainly his son.   After Ebenezer died, ‘S. H.’ wrote a letter to The Sheffield Independent, 2 October 1861, stating that father and son shared genial dispositions.  He recalled that John Skinner had been a grinder and had been seriously injured in his trade, but that the only long-term effect was a slight upturn to the point of his nose, which ‘very much assisted the effect of his very happy laugh’.  Another John Skinner was probably related to the family: he was a grinder at Shilo Wheel (also known as Chadburn’s Wheel), Nursery Street.  He died in 1852, aged 21, after he suffered an epileptic fit and fell head first onto his grindstone (Sheffield Independent, 18 December 1852).

^1. Leader, Robert E, Reminiscences of Old Sheffield (Sheffield, 2nd edn 1876)

^2. Bore, Henry, The Story of the Invention of Steel Pens (New York, 1890)