Francis Newton was apparently baptised at Sheffield parish church on 1 January 1796, the son of Francis, a grocer, and his wife, Hannah.  The grocery business was in Campo Lane.  Francis Sen. died in 1804.  In 1811, Francis Jun. joined John Middleton, who had established a cutlery business in West Street in 1793.  Eventually, Newton took over the firm.  By 1821, he partnered John Greaves in Greaves & Newton, merchant / manufacturer of table, pen, pocket and pocket knives, razors, and brass founders.  The firm was in West Street, but by 1834 traded at Portobello Works, Portobello Street.  Edward Greaves (John’s son) and Samuel Sikes became partners, with Edward Eyre as traveller (he died suddenly in Edinburgh on 24 January 1833, aged 45).  The partners had an interest in Walkley Bank Tilt.

In 1837, Greaves & Newton was dissolved.  Francis Newton continued manufacturing (or factoring) table cutlery, pen and pocket knives, sportsman’s knives, razors and various tools, such as saws and files.  He also advertised blister, shear, and cast steel.  Besides Portobello Works, until 1853 Newton owned the Roscoe Wheel in the Rivelin Valley.  Newton was Master Cutler in 1844.  He became a wealthy man and acquired Broombank House (at the corner of Clarkehouse Lane and Park Lane) and bought over four acres of land around it.  He became a director of the Sheffield Banking Co. R. E. Leader (1916)¹, in his history of the bank, described Newton as ‘a gentleman of sedate mien who, from the style of dress he affected, might well have been thought to be a clergyman, rather than a cutlery manufacturer and merchant’.  Elsewhere, Leader (1905)² described Newton’s ‘tenacious cleaving to a tail coat with velvet collar ... [with] a neckcloth, adorned with a pin whose design was an eagle’s claw clasping a large emerald’.

Francis Newton retired in 1854.  He died at Broombank House on 21 July 1864, aged 68.  His tomb can be seen in Ecclesall churchyard.  He left under £30,000.  His wife, Harriet, died in 1878.  By the 1850s, he had brought his sons – Thomas Newton (1824-1892), Francis Newton Jun. (1827-1904), and James Greaves Newton (1831-1878) – into the enterprise, which became Francis Newton & Sons.  J. G. Newton withdrew in 1858 (he died a bachelor in Handsworth on 25 December 1878, leaving £450).  Francis Jun. and Thomas remained active in the business.  The personal life of Thomas was colourful.  On sales trips, he had befriended 19-year-old Rhoda Baylis Hall at Bilston, near Birmingham.  He married her in 1857 and the couple settled at Kenwood Road.  Rhoda had a past and a drinking problem – a lifestyle she resumed in Sheffield, while Thomas was on the road.   In 1861, Thomas used the new divorce laws to end the marriage on the grounds of adultery.  He had little trouble proving his case, but the proceedings filled three columns of The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 7 June 1861.  The divorce had a twist.  One of the key witnesses to Rhoda’s infidelities was Thomas’ 26-year-old servant, Sarah Ann Elliott.  Within a year, the couple had a child – Thomas Elliott Newton (1862-1907) – who was born at Derby (the birth was apparently not registered).   They married in 1865 at a Methodist Chapel in Leeds, when Thomas was living at Handsworth.

Perhaps as a result of Thomas’ unsettled life, by 1868 the firm had a new partner.  This was Hamer Chalmer, who had been born in Liverpool on 18 December 1839, the son of Edmund Boteler Chalmer (the vicar of Fulwood) and his wife, Mary.  Chalmer was apprenticed at Newton’s, became a traveller, and eventually chief partner.  For forty years, the company was also assisted by its manager, John Scholefield.  When he died on 21 September 1891, aged 82, he was described as the oldest cutlery manager in Sheffield.  He was buried in Norton cemetery.

The number of workers at Newton’s was 45 in 1871, but by 1881 that figure had apparently increased to a hundred (seventy men and thirty boys).  In 1884, Newton’s took over the assets of the bankrupt steel, tool, and cutlery business of Joseph & Robert Dodge.  A trade review stated that:

The front portion of the building [Portobello Works] is occupied as general and private offices, stock warehouses, and packing and dispatch departments; in the rear of which are the works, comprising ranges of premises of varying height appropriated to the various industrial branches.  These include grinding shops, smiths’ forges, with a full equipment of machinery and appliances for forwarding the work of production on the most efficient labour-saving methods.  Motive force is supplied by steam power, and about four hundred hands are employed in the various departments (Sheffield and Rotherham Up-to-Date, 1897).

The number of workers was exaggerated, though certainly Newton’s prospered.  It sold cutlery in the home market and on the Continent, particularly to Dutch and German customers.  Thomas Newton had retired by 1891 and died on 2 March 1892, aged 67, leaving £11,989.  He was buried in the General Cemetery.  Sarah had died in 1878, aged 35.  Thomas’ brother, Francis, evidently retired, too, and by 1901 had moved to Heather House, Tansley, near Matlock.  He died on 27 February 1904, aged 76, leaving £30,988.  Thus ended the Newton involvement in the firm.  Thomas’ son, Thomas Elliott Newton, was described as a merchant, when he died on 20 August 1907 (aged 45), but he does not seem to have been a partner in the firm.  He left £4,042.

In 1906, Newton’s became a private limited company (capital £10,000) and registered a silver mark.  The directors were Hamer Chalmer, Ernest Lincoln Goodrich (1867-1920), and Joseph Sellars Gregory (1870-1942).  Goodrich was the son of tailor from north Lincolnshire; Gregory was the son of a fork maker from Ecclesfield.  By 1900, they were commercial travellers (presumably for Newton’s).  Hamer Chalmer died on 3 March 1913, aged 74.  He had been a Churchman, Conservative, and Alderman.  His son, Hamer B. Chalmer, had been trained as a cutlery merchant’s clerk, but had enlisted in 1900 to fight in the Boer War.  Goodrich and Gregory managed the company until after the First World War, when Newton’s began marketing stainless cutlery.  Goodrich died at Cliftonville Hotel, Cromer, on 6 September 1920, aged 53.  He left £9,824.  The business struggled in the Depression and in 1932 it was wound up.  Joseph S. Gregory, of Sunnylands, Eastfield Road, Pickering, died on 31 January 1942, aged 71.  He left £8,581.

In 1932, Newton’s marks were bought by George Butler.  These included ‘PREMIER’; a swan with the word ‘TRY’ (once owned by Samuel Wing, but assigned to Chalmer in 1870); and ‘JUSTE JUDICATO’ (Dodge’s old mark).  James Hedderwick (1880-1951), a former director at Newton’s, joined Butler’s.  Francis Newton & Sons Ltd continued to be listed in directories at Trinity Works, Eyre Street, but in name only (it was Butler’s address).  In 1952, when Butler’s was liquidated, the ‘name’ was acquired by Hiram Wild, so that Newton remained listed in directories until the 1980s.  In the 1990s, Broombank House metamorphosed into Aunt Sally’s pub and then became (in 2021) The Francis Newton.  The grounds of the house – though less extensive than in Newton’s day – were restored by the local community as Lynwood Gardens.

^1. Leader, R E, The Sheffield Banking Company Limited: An Historical Sketch (Sheffield, 1916)

^2. Leader, R E, Sheffield in the Eighteenth Century (Sheffield, 2nd edn, 1905)