The youngest of five children, Doris Walsh was born on 31 July 1912 into a family with roots in the Sheffield trades (her grandfather had been a surgical instrument maker; her father worked in a steel firm).  In 1926, aged 14, she left school and started work as an errand girl at Albert Forrest’s etching shop at Butcher’s Wheel in Arundel Street.   As she later recalled, in an interview with Jenkins & McClarence (1989)¹, in those days ‘the cutlery empire covered all of Sheffield’.  In the days before trade marks and designs were electrically etched (c.1930), Doris learned the traditional craft of acid-etching.  She spent a decade at Forrest’s and then moved to Joseph Elliot, which had an etching shop, and where Doris would eventually employ two girls.  In 1948, she set up on her own.  A demand still existed, even into the 1970s, for traditional acid-etched marks.  After her husband died, Doris worked to raise her daughter, Elizabeth.  Doris Walsh retired in about 1982 and later recalled her working life with affection: ‘I loved it, loved it.  I have always liked my job.  I’ve had a wonderful life.  I really have.  I loved being single.  I loved being married, I loved my work.  Thank goodness I had it so that it pulled me out of a lot of corners.  I never had to ask anyone for owt’.   Doris died in May 1995, aged 82.

^1. Jenkins, C, and McClarence, S, On the Knife Edge (Sheffield, 1989)