John Owen Butler was baptised in Sheffield on 24 March 1799, the son of Charles (a cutler) and his wife, Ruth.  His name in the printed sources was usually John Owen.  He may have been the cutler of that name listed in 1825 as a table knife manufacturer at Whitehouse Lane.  Other sightings of ‘John Butler’ were in George Street, Little Sheffield (1828), Walkley (1841), Bower Spring (1846), and Portobello Street (1852).  His first wife was Sarah and they had a son, John Owen Butler Jun. (1826-1901), who became a table knife hafter.  Sarah had died by 1841, when John remarried to Mrs Elizabeth Wilson.  

By the 1860s, John Owen Butler can be positively identified as a table knife manufacturer at Walkley.  In 1860, his address was Howard View; in 1862 it was Municipal Works, Howard View.  He lived in a district that was being developed by freehold land societies, with many of the houses occupied by ‘little mesters’ (Walkley Historians, 2020¹).  In the Census (1861), he was enumerated at Prospect Street (later renamed Fulton Road), Walkley, employing four men and a boy.  In that year, John’s youngest son, Walter, died on 19 February, aged 22.   

In 1864, John Butler was listed for the last time in a directory at Globe Works (presumably the factory of Ibbotson Bros,).   John Owen Butler, ‘table knife manufacturer’, died on 20 March 1875, aged 76.  He was described as formerly of Howard View, but late of Fulton Road.  He was buried in St Thomas’s churchyard, Crookes.   He left under £100 and a will, which was proved by his daughter, Lucy.

^1. Walkley Historians (ed Georgia Litherland), Victorian Walkley: Origins of a Sheffield Suburb (Sheffield, 2020)