The founder of this cutlery and tools conglomerate was Alywn Howard Wild (1886-1968).  He had been born in Sheffield, the son of Mark Henry Wild (1855-1895) and Kate Ellen née Howard.  Mark Henry was a schoolmaster and private tutor for professional examinations.  He was buried at Walkley Cemetery.  Alwyn was trained as a steel analyst; his younger brother, Ronald (1888-1972), as a metallurgical chemist.  By 1908, Alwyn partnered Clement Foreman Carr in Carr, Wild & Co Ltd at St Mary’s Road.  They manufactured ‘goffed blades’ (in other words, table knife blades stamped out by machine).   In 1909, the firm was registered as a private limited company, with £3,000 capital, at New Enterprise Works, Egerton Street.  During the First World War, Wild also had an interest in Sheffield Scissors, Razor & Tool Co Ltd, Chaucer Works, Clough Road.   At the same address was Chaucer Plating Co and Arnold & Son.   These were small, backstreet ventures, but Wild had grander designs.

In 1919, Wild was ready to announce Sheffield Steel Products Ltd [SSP Ltd].  It was intended as an integrated cutlery and tools manufacturer, which had at its core the decommissioned National Projectile Factory at Templeborough.   Wild’s scheme was ambitious, to say the least.  As first envisaged, it included Carr, Wild & Co; Boswell, Hatfield & Co; E. W. Cheesman & Co; Arnold & Son; Chaucer Plating Co; and Sheffield, Scissors, Razor & Tool Co.  The original list of about ten firms was soon doubled to include a Sheffield foundry and rolling mill, a stamping firm at Birmingham, and a pliers manufacturer at Warrington.  SSP owned a colliery and gas plant, besides 354 houses to provide some of the homes needed for a projected workforce of 6,000.  

SSP was presented to prospective shareholders as the largest manufacturer of cutlery and tools in the UK and probably the world.  An output of 7m pieces of table cutlery a year was expected, at a price undercutting competitors by a quarter (Sheffield Independent, 3 November 1920).  The authorised capital of this vast endeavour was £4m, of which £727,000 was issued in preference shares and about 1.7m in ordinary shares.  (As a comparison, the authorised capital of Sheffield’s largest cutlery firm, Mappin & Webb, was a mere £1½m.)  The scheme grew ever more expansive.  In 1922, a prospectus for Sheffield Steel Products (Stores) Ltd was published.  This was a chain of 150 shops attached to the group, which was capitalised at £½m.   

The inflated capital invited press comment, as did the new chairman and managing director.  The Sheffield Daily Independent, 1 January 1919, noted that Wild:

has been essentially a cutlery and tools manufacturer, and is counted as one of the most alert of the younger Sheffield business men … His home is Greystones Hall.  Incidentally, he finds time amongst his many business activities to be a connoisseur of art, and is reputed to have one of the finest collections of water-colours in the country.  The directors include also ‘J. H. Stewart’, who is better known as Sir Henderson Stewart, the great Scottish distiller.  It is understood that he is responsible for a quarter of the capital.  Another director is Mr. A. Walter, prominent in leading journalistic circles in London.

The newspaper added that SSP ‘makes a clean break from the antiquated methods and premises of many years ago, while retaining all the best in Sheffield, skill and knowledge and patent rights’.  Wild was ‘a Sheffield man with full knowledge of the industries he directs’ (Sheffield Independent, 8 April 1920).  Others were unimpressed.  One experienced Sheffield tool maker observed: ‘This firm was quite big and produced in quantities for the lower end of the cutlery market.  In other words, rubbish’ (Iles, 1993¹).  

Certainly, assimilating this rag-bag of firms proved beyond Wild and his managers, especially when the postwar boom and business confidence unravelled.  SSP was bankrupt by the end of 1922, which triggered angry scenes among the shareholders, when £2m was written off the capital (The Scotsman, 23 July 1923).  The Stores group was liquidated three years later.  Sir William Barclay Peat was appointed as receiver for the whole group to stage a reconstruction.  However, the fallout included the suicide of deputy chairman Sir John Henderson Stewart, whose business ventures were awash with debt.  In 1924, Stewart shot himself with a revolver at his Scottish castle.  Alwyn Wild filed for bankruptcy in the same year, with personal liabilities of £158,767.  Besides his problems in Sheffield, he also incurred heavy losses because of his involvement in Sorbo Rubber Sponge Co in Woking, Surrey.  Henderson had been its managing director.  

In 1924, Wild left for America.  He and his metallurgist brother, Ronald, launched the Rustless Iron Corporation of America in Baltimore.  This was a pioneering attempt to manufacture stainless steel direct from chromium ore.  In 1931, Alwyn Wild, returned to England (where he was about to be discharged from bankruptcy) and with Ronald registered Darlington Rustless Steel & Iron Co Ltd, with an authorised capital of £300,000.  It folded in 1934.  Alwyn became a US citizen in 1942, when he was living in San Francisco.  He returned to London in 1956 – again to face creditors.  He died in 1968 at Hastings, Sussex, and was buried at St Andrew’s churchyard, Fairlight.

Meanwhile, SSP was re-organised.  With government funding, the company began extending its product range by manufacturing two-wheeled trailers.   By 1929 (when its paid-up capital had plummeted to £53,000) the output was even more diverse and included automatic scales, bacon slicers, and vending machines.  Safety razors were apparently marketed through The Sheffield Razor Company Ltd.  In the early 1930s, when the depression hit its standard lines of cutlery and tools, the company began manufacturing magnets, forgings, and stampings for the motor trade.   SSP survived the difficult 1930s and, as it edged back into profitability, continued to market table cutlery and holloware.  

Advertisements in the early 1930s (published in Quality, the journal of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce) featured ‘Firth Stainless’ table knives (either stainless throughout or with xylonite handles) and spoons and forks.  The latter were made in either stainless steel, or chromium plated with a ‘KROMPLAT’ finish.  Spoons and forks were made of ‘ANTISTAIN’ metal throughout, or in a material described as ‘self colour’ hard-wearing solid metal (‘OPOBA’).  These plated goods were probably produced by the SSP subsidiary, Eagle Plate Co Ltd.   During the Second World War, SSP made solid handle knives and clasp knives, but in the 1950s sank into obscurity.   It had ceased trading by the 1960s and was would up in 1972.   Its trade marks included ‘SSP’, the word ‘DURALITE’ on stainless cutlery (registered in 1931), ‘The REAPER’ (words and picture) on safety razors, and the word ‘PRODUX’ on stainless table knives.

^1. Iles, Ashley, Memories of a Sheffield Tool Maker (Mendham, NJ, 1993)