Ebenezer Rhodes was born in 1762 at Holmes in Masbrough, near Rotherham.  His father, John, worked in the local ironworks.  In 1777, he was apprenticed to Thomas Cousins, a Sheffield scissor smith, and in 1784 was granted the mark ‘VILLE’.  By about 1791, he partnered David Champion and they built a reputation for scissors and razors from a workshop in the Wicker.  In 1791, Rhodes registered a silver mark.  In 1808, he became Master Cutler.  In 1811, he supported the campaign by Sheffield manufactures to secure the rescinding of the Orders in Council.  Alongside two other Sheffielders (John Bailey and George Naylor), Rhodes gave evidence to the government in London that the naval blockade of France seriously depressed trade.  Apparently, in one branch a quarter of Rhodes’s workforce had been laid off; in another, a half (House of Commons, 1812¹). 

In 1817, when David Champion died, the partnership (which by then included Thomas Champion) ended.  Rhodes continued alone, though increasingly he combined business with literary pursuits (Mackerness, 1981²).  He wrote and published Peak Scenery (1818-23), which described the scenic delights of Derbyshire.  The work was a financial flop.  Rhodes also published an Essay of the Manufacture, Choice and Management of a Razor (1824), which was part advertisement and part technical treatise. 

The New General Commercial Directory of Sheffield and its Vicinity piublished in June 1825 listed Ebenezer Rhodes & Co as a table knife manufacturer at 10 Wicker.  The Sheffield Directory and Guide (1828) carried an extensive advertisement for Rhodes’s razors, scissors, table knives and a ‘Frame-Bladed Razor’.  The latter was apparently a razor with a metallic back, which had been devised by Bennington Gill, of Birmingham, who licenced it to Rhodes (Sheffield Independent, 3 April 1824).  No sooner had the directory appeared than Rhodes’s business – in which he was co-partner with his son, William Henry Rhodes – was declared bankrupt (Sheffield Independent, 2 May 1829).  In his final years, he was supported by wealthy friends and patrons, such as the Duke of Devonshire and James Montgomery.  He died on 16 December 1839, aged 77, and was buried in St Peter’s churchyard.  He is one of the few Sheffield cutlers profiled in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but only because he was a man of letters.

^1. House of Commons, An Abstract of the Evidence Lately Taken by the House of Commons, against the Orders in Council (London, 1812)

^2. Mackerness, E D, ‘The Harvest of Failure: Ebenezer Rhodes (1762-1839)’, Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 101 (1981)