The founder, Harris Miller, was born in about 1875 at Koona, Russia.  Frustratingly little else is known about his early life, except that he was Jewish and that he and his family apparently arrived in England in about 1900.  By 1911, they were in Sheffield.   In the Census of that year, ‘Harry’ Miller was enumerated at Fawcett Street with his wife, Sarah, and several children.  These included a daughter, Leah, and son, Bernard.   Miller worked on his own account as a ‘draper-dealer’.  In 1915, he switched to cutlery and started his own business.  In 1922, Harris Miller & Co was listed in the Sheffield directory as a cutlery manufacturer at 92 Trafalgar Street and Court 3, Trafalgar Lane.  By the mid-1920s, Miller had relocated to 51 Rockingham Street.  

Miller recruited a partner.  This was Armin Krausz, who had been born on 24 December 1902 in Hungary, the son of Simon and Sara (Gelb).   Krausz had planned a medical career, but anti-Semitism in Hungary and elsewhere blocked his path.  In 1923, he settled in London, where he planned to sell Hungarian wines from his father’s vineyard.   However, the market for wine failed to materialise.  Krausz had not abandoned his hopes of studying medicine, but meanwhile he had been introduced by a friend to Leah – the daughter of Harris Miller.  In 1924, they married at Stepney Orthodox Synagogue in London.  In the same year, the couple moved to Sheffield, where Armin joined Harris Miller.  However, Armin’s temperament created tensions within the family (personal information from Judy Simons, 1 March 2022).  After only two months, Armin left the business and so, too, did Harris’s son, Bernard Miller (who founded M. Bernard.  

In 1925, Armin was allowed under the Aliens Restriction Act  to register Armin Krausz & Co.  He was described as a knife handle manufacturer, silversmith, and cutler, of Jericho Street.   He launched his new enterprise by renting the loft in a building at 262 Rockingham Street, which was owned by Harry Polan, a Jewish entrepreneur from Lithuania, who made lead pipes (personal information from David Sayliss, 2012).   Krausz soon proved himself and Miller asked him to return as partner.   Two coterminous businesses were created: Harris Miller & Co at 51 Rockingham Street; and A. Krausz & Co at 49/51 Rockingham Street.  The workshops, known as Victor Works, were chiefly involved in the finishing of table cutlery and flatware.  A workforce of young girls buffed the spoons, forks, and stainless blades.  Their working conditions were typically hazardous.  Fires on the premises occurred repeatedly from highly flammable celluloid dust, which was generated by grinding and buffing cutlery handles.  For example, a fire in a dust extractor gutted the workshop and left 14 to 20 girls temporarily out of work (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 21 May 1931).   The trade mark on the firm’s stainless table knives – ‘TO SAVE’, with a fireman on a ladder – was appropriate!

Harris Miller & Co / A. Krausz & Co expanded slowly in the 1930s.  A small cutlery forge run by A. Hodgson was acquired in 1931 and the plant transferred to Rockingham Street.  By 1939, the partners employed over eighty workers.  Krausz became naturalised in 1935.  His interests expanded beyond cutlery into property development.  In 1934, he was involved in the building of a block of flats at Duke Street, which he said were modelled on Viennese designs.  He was also the promotor of the nine-storey Regent Court Flats, which were opened in 1937 at Bradfield Road, Hillsborough.  He soon became prominent in Sheffield’s Jewish community.  He was photographed laying the foundation stone for a new Jewish burial hall at Blind Lane, Ecclesfield (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 7 September 1931).

During the war, Miller and Krausz manufactured ¼m commando knives, besides many 24-inch machetes for the Far Eastern jungles.   After hostilities ended, the firm acquired new premises at Emu Works at Eyre Street / Matilda Street / Eyre Lane.  This multi-storey factory opened in 1949.  In the following year, Harris Miller died and was buried at Ecclesfield Jewish Cemetery.  Armin Krausz became the senior partner.  He shed his own trading name in favour of Harris Miller & Co.   The firm became one of the largest producers of stainless cutlery, especially for hospitals, prisons, and other government institutions.  In 1950, the firm began the production of cutlery with coloured plastic handles, which Armin hoped would be a dollar-earning novelty in the American market (Sheffield Telegraph, 4 January 1950).  Harris Miller & Co had a plethora of brand names: ‘CRAFTWOOD’, ‘NOVA’, ‘MELACRAFT’, ‘TREND’, ‘LUSTRE GRAIN’, ‘OLD ENGLISH’, ‘UNICRAFT’, AND ‘TREND’.  Cutlery was also apparently imported and sold under the name ‘SHEFFIELD SILVERSMITHS’.  Inside the factory, Krausz was known as the ‘Old Man’ by his workers and was apparently a hard-headed businessman.   After 1951, he was helped by his son, Neville (1927-2014), and works director, Andrew Frankl.   Armin’s brother, Naftali, was also involved in the cutlery industry (see Ellis & Co).

Armin Krausz was part a network of successful Jewish industrialists in Sheffield, which included cutlery manufacturers Ruben Viner, Isidore Lewis, and Bernard Miller.   That  network was described by Krausz himself in his book Sheffield Jewry (1980).  On its back cover is a picture of Armin ‘at home in his library’ at Mount Scopus, 3 Broomhall Road.   He was a keen scholar of Jewish religious history.  Unfortunately, Krausz’s heavyweight treatment of Jewish congregations, education, and youth work precluded any discussion of the cutlery industry.  Despite a photograph of Emu Works on the front cover, his book contained almost nothing on his business career or Sheffield cutlery.   He hardly mentioned his mentor, Harris Miller.

Armin Krausz was a prominent Zionist (his parents had perished in the Holocaust).  In 1947, he was planning a cutlery factory in Israel.   In 1954, he built a plant at Azur, near Tel-Aviv, with the encouragement of the Israeli government.  In 1970, he linked with Koor Metals to establish an automated cutlery plant at Dimona, known as Israel Cutlery Industries Ltd.  Krausz became the senior partner (Pessy, 2021¹).  In 1975, Neville returned to Israel.  In 1979, Harris Miller became a limited company.   In the early 1980s, its authorised capital was £400,000, with a turnover surpassing £1.5 million.  Towards the end of that decade, turnover had topped £2m and the factory employed about 130 workers.  However, the firm was unable to withstand the cutlery import invasion from the Far East.  Harris Miller & Co went into receivership in 1990 and was wound up.  Armin, too, returned to Israel, and shipped with him some of the firm’s machinery.  He died in Jerusalem in 1996.  Neville died on 29 October 2014.

^1. Krausz, Pessy, ‘The British Origins of Israel’s First Cutlery Factory’, Jerusalem Post, 11 November 2021