Paul Lees (c.1790-1871) was listed in 1833 as a hardware dealer in Broad Lane.  His next appearance was in 1852 as Paul Lees & Son, table knife manufacturers, Lee Croft, with a house in Scotland Street.  By 1856, when an advertisement appeared, the name was ‘& Sons’.  Lees is elusive in the Census, but in 1861 he was enumerated in Scotland Street, with his son James, a 20-year-old cutler.  His wife Eliza (born at Wadsley Bridge) had died in Hadfields Court, Scotland Street, on 22 April 1850, aged 56, from ‘congestion of brain and effusion’.  Paul Lees, a pensioner, died at Shrewsbury Hospital on 16 December 1871, aged 81.  The family – including son James, who was a painter, when he died in 1876, aged 34 – was buried in an unconsecrated grave in the General Cemetery.