W. A. F. Batty was listed as a table knife manufacturer in Williams’s Manufacturers’ Directory, London and the Principal Market Towns of England (1864).   The address was 196 Solly Street.   The General Directory … of Sheffield (Wm. White, 1864) reveals William Batty, table knife manufacturer, at the same address.   But curiously, the initial’s ‘W.A.F.’ are absent; nor do they appear in any other Sheffield source.  Why Batty used them is a mystery, unless they were to differentiate his name from other William Battys in Sheffield.

William Batty (c.1807-1883) had been born at Rotherham and his early life is obscure.  His wife, though, was Ann.  The Sheffield Independent, 5 February 1831, reported the marriage of William Batty Jun., silverplater, to Ann, the daughter of Jasper Ryalls, ‘all of this place’ – though it is difficult to be sure whether this was *the* William.  In 1841, William Batty – alongside Ann and son, Eli Batty (1838-1914) – was living at Jericho and working as a table knife cutler.  The family had moved to St Philip’s Road by 1845, when William was a table blade forger.   By 1861, William was living and working at 196 Solly Street, with Ann, two daughters, an apprentice, and a boarder (a table knife hafter).  In 1867, however, Batty held a sale of his household furniture and his table-blade maker’s tools, benches, and ‘lots of blades’ (Sheffield Independent, 23 April 1867).  Batty must have been insolvent, though he and Eli were listed in 1868 in the local directory as cutlers at Solly Street and St Philip’s Road, respectively.  

William continued to work at Solly Street at the start of the 1870s, but soon he and Ann moved to Firth’s Almhouses at Hanging Water.  They died there in 1883: Ann in July, aged 70; William on 5 November, aged 76.   Their grave is in Burngreave Cemetery.  Eli also fell on hard times.   In 1881, he was a resident in Cambridge Workman’s Home at Balm Green, where he was described as a whitesmith’s striker.   He spent the rest of his life institutionalised.  In 1911 (three years before his death), he was enumerated as an ‘inmate’ and former ‘butcher knife cutler’ at Sheffield Union Workhouse at Firvale.   He was buried at Burngreave.