George William Thornton (1885-1950) was born in Sheffield, the son of William Thornton (described in the Census, 1881, as a ‘hammer driver’, then a decade later as a table blade maker) and his wife, Lilly.  By 1911, George William was a table blade forger (employer) in Fitzwilliam Street.   His brother, Fred, was assisting in the business.  In 1919, George was based in Trafalgar Street.  During the 1920s, the firm began mass producing blades.  By 1929, it was rolling annually 300 tons of stainless steel.  It relocated to Lowther Road, Owlerton, and in 1934 became a private limited company, capitalised at £40,000, and with Thomas A. Shaw and Percy Toothill as Thornton’s fellow directors.  In 1939, Thorton lived at Lowther House, Stumperlowe Hall Road, and described himself as a cutlery manufacturer (Register of England & Wales, 1939).    G. W. Thorton died on 28 October 1950 at Angel Hotel, Market Harborough.  He left £94,683.

In the 1960s, when the address was Sedgley Road, the firm was sold to Bramah Stainless Products Ltd.  Robert Laurie Walsh – the former owner of the scissors firm Champion – became managing director.  He diversified its products (partly in conjunction with Sanenwood).  By the 1970s, Thornton’s was a leading forging company, which (as the cutlery industry declined) became involved in the manufacture of artificial hips.  After various mergers and takeovers,  the company traded after 1999 as Thornton Precision Components.  In 2003, it was acquired by an American company, Symmetry Medical, only for the US company to discover that prior to the merger a former Thornton executive and three former employees had been involved in a fraudulent scheme to inflate the share price.  The fraud, based on massive fictitious revenues, was described as motivated by pure greed.  In 2012, a settlement agreement was reached relating to the charge of accounting fraud filed by the Securities & Exchange Commission.  Symmetry Medical Sheffield Ltd currently trades at Buelah Road (More Sheffield Memories, 2007).