This London-based business was launched by James Rawlins Wilkins (c.1802-1873), who had been born at St Pancras, London. In 1830, he married Elizabeth Sarah nee Reid. He traded alongside other members of his family (William, Henry and Joseph) as a coach smith and harness maker at Soho Square. This enterprise was bankrupt in 1840. James resumed work as a coach maker. By 1861, when he was living in Marylebone Road, he was a patent solid ink manufacturer, employing two men and a girl.  A decade later he was enumerated in  the Census as a ‘Sheffield warehouseman’, still at Marylebone Road. His son, James Rawlins Wilkins (1838-1920), was living at home and also working in the same job. The father died on 16 December 1873, aged 71.

The son relocated to 354 City Road, EC, where his enterprise was listed in the London Post Office Directory (1877) as Wilkins & Son, Sheffield and Birmingham warehouse, wholesale cutlers and electro-platers. In the Census (1911), James was still living at 354 City Road and working on his own account as a wholesale dealer in Sheffield cutlery. He apparently never married and lived for many years with his sister, Louise Blanche (1846-1931), and a servant, Elizabeth Capel. He died in 1920; Louise on 31 August 1931 at Upper Norwood. She left £1,054.