George Herbert Lawrence was born in Fitzwilliam Street on 5 October 1888, the son of John Lawrence and Martha Jane neé Thompson.  His father was a silver engraver; the family had distant Italian roots (and was originally named ‘Lorenzo’).  After selling newspapers, George became an apprentice razor grinder and then learned about a new product – safety razors.  In about 1913, he began making them himself and by the end of the First World War was a ‘manufacturer’.  It was a backstreet business with only three or four workers and based where Lawrence lived in Southgrove Road.   By 1922, the enterprise was in Eyre Street, where it also traded in pocket knives.  In 1930 – registered as George H. Lawrence Ltd with £3,000 capital – it moved to Brunswick Road.  In February 1932, Lawrence relocated to Laurel Works, Nursery Street.  Despite the depression, the factory was said to have soon doubled in size with the sales of Lawrence’s ‘Laurel Safety Razors’ (in homage to Stan Laurel of Laurel & Hardy).

Lawrence and his wife Elsie left Sheffield to reside at Belmont in Hathersage.  He became a benefactor in the village, helping to rebuild the Methodist Chapel and various recreational facilities.  He gave generously to causes in Sheffield and helped finance houses and a crèche (École Lawrence) in Bapaume (a French town adopted by Sheffield after the battle of the Somme).  He also became a director of Sheffield United Football Club.  According to Tilbury (1996)¹, he was a ‘Tartar to work for who expected his pound of flesh’.  However, he was respected as an employer, who provided good wages and working conditions.  If production exceeded one million blades a month, an extra week’s wages were paid as a bonus.  On the night of 12/13 December 1940, he drove from Hathersage to Laurel Works in Nursery Street with food hampers and drinks for his staff in the air raid shelters.  He was killed when the factory received a direct hit.  He left £29,269 net.  Elsie eventually resumed production, though she died in 1946.  George and Elsie Lawrence were buried in the parish churchyard at Hathersage.  The gravestone reads: ‘He died as he lived serving others’.  It has been calculated that Lawrence’s philanthropy totalled about £1 million in present-day values.

Nursery Street works was rebuilt in 1948 and the firm continued under Percy Bradley Lawrence, who had been the departmental manager and had married Elsie in 1945.  He was a widower, whose name was Johnson, but Elsie insisted that he become ‘Lawrence’, if he wished to marry her.  Tilbury described the firm as one of the last of the Sheffield razor blade makers.  The razor blade trade was eventually swallowed by large-scale competitors, such as Wilkinson Sword.  Lawrence’s concentrated on surgical and industrial blades, but eventually relied upon supplying modelling blades to balsa-wood kit makers.  In 1964, the company was bought by Grunwerg Ltd.  It ceased trading in 1973, when the factory was occupied by other companies.  It was demolished in 2008.  George Lawrence was the subject of a short biography (Ward, 2011²); and further details on the firm’s history have been posted on the web (Hobbs, 2013³).

^1. Tilbury, Peter, The British Razor Blade Industry (Derby, 1996)
^2. Ward, Brian, The Story of George Lawrence: The Forgotten Philanthropist (Sheffield, 2011)
^3. Hobbs, Chris, ‘George Lawrence’. Posted at: www.chrishobbs.com/sheffield/georgelawrence.htm