A spring-knife manufacturer named Samuel Robinson was active by 1841 in School Croft.   By 1849, Samuel Robinson had relocated to Marsden’s Wheel in Love Street, near Kelham Island.  At the start of the 1850s, he appears to have worked briefly in Eyre Lane, before becoming a ‘manufacturer of all kinds of spring knives’ in Garden Street.  In 1861, when he was aged 52, he employed 16 men and a girl.  In 1865, he was listed specifically as a Bowie-knife maker, when he also operated from Radcliffe’s Wheel in Love Street.  Some of his knives are pictured in Flayderman (2004)¹.  After 1868, his works address was Love Street (Marsden’s Wheel again), with a residence in Court 4, Apple Street (Harvest Lane).  The Census in 1881 listed him as a seventy-two year-old lodger in Apple Street.  He last appeared in a directory in 1884 and may have died in 1887.

^1. Flayderman, Norm, The Bowie Knife: Unsheathing an American Legend (Woonsocket, RI, 2004)