Joseph Bailey (1751-1824) was the son of Matthew Bailey (of the Walker ironworks in Masbrough) and Elizabeth Wood.   Joseph was apprenticed in the scissors trade and by 1774 was a scissors smith in Bow Street.  He registered a silver mark in 1786 in Westbar.  He combined with John Eadon, who became his brother-in-law when Joseph married John’s sister, Mary Eadon, in 1775 (Hall, 1915¹).  In 1787, Bailey & Eadon was a scissors smith, ironmonger, and factor in Westbar (trade mark ‘DEI & C’).  This mercantile concern expanded.  It rented a steel furnace at Bridge End, near Attercliffe, and shipped knives and other hardware to New York and Boston.  Joseph became one of the first American merchants in Sheffield.   He was Master Cutler in 1801; John Eadon in 1811.  

The Bailey family included John (1776-1842) and Samuel (1791-1870).  The firm became Bailey, Eadon & Bailey.  John Bailey gave evidence to Parliament on behalf of Sheffield manufacturers, who opposed the Orders in Council (House of Commons, 1812²).  He stressed the importance of the American trade and raised the spectre of US competition.  In 1813, Bailey, Eadon & Bailey was dissolved.  Joseph built a works in Spring Street (at the corner of Love Street) under the style, Joseph Bailey & Sons.   In 1822, the partnership between Joseph and his sons ended.   Joseph had built a country house, Burn Greave, in the days before Burngreave was swamped by heavy industry.  He died there on 16 March 1824, aged 73, and was buried at the Old Chapel, Attercliffe (where his tomb still stands).  The local press reported: ‘we shall rarely, if ever, have to record the death of a better man’.  His left a £300 annuity to his wife, Mary (d. 1830).

John and Samuel were ‘men of cultivated intellect, liberal politics, and gentlemanly demeanour’ (Leader, 1905-6³).   John was a friend of the poet, James Montgomery, and a frequent anonymous contributor to The Iris newspaper on trade matters (Holland & Everett, 1856, v. 6⁴).  Others found him ‘pompous and imposing’ (Bell, 1909⁵).  Like his father, he defended the ‘stuffing system’, which forced cutlers to take goods (often at high prices and of low quality) instead of cash.   John Bailey amassed a fortune.  He traded briefly as J. Bailey & Son, merchant, Love Street.  But in 1824, he married Mary Anne Walford (1798-1880), who was over twenty years his junior, and retired to Cheltenham.  He died on 11 January 1842, aged 66, and was buried at Prestbury parish church.   His lengthy will, with its various codicils, left a string of bequests to Sheffield charitable bodies and the Town Trust, which became payable on his widow’s death (Sheffield Independent, 20 January, 28 February 1880).

Samuel Bailey, too, retired from the Love Street business in the 1820s.  In 1831, he was appointed chairman of the Sheffield Banking Co.  In that year, he sought election as Sheffield’s first parliamentary representative, but was rejected – apparently because of the family’s notoriety for ‘stuffing’.  He ‘withdrew into the seclusion of a philosopher’s study’ to write about metaphysics, politics, and economics (Leader, 1876⁶, 1916⁷).  Reclusive, aloof, and unmarried, this ‘Bentham of Hallamshire’ was said to have led a life of clockwork regularity (Sheffield Independent, 4 May 1887).  He was found, partly dressed, lying dead on the floor of his residence, Norbury, on 28 January 1870.  His burial was at the Old Chapel, Attercliffe.  His estate was valued at under £120,000.  The residue of that amount (about £100,000) was left to the Town Trust. 

^1. Hall, T Walter, Sheffield Pedigrees (Sheffield, 1915)

^2. House of Commons, An Abstract of the Evidence Lately Taken by the House of Commons, against the Orders in Council (London, 1812).

^3. Leader, R E, History of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire in the County of York (Sheffield, 1905-6)

^4. Holland, John and Everett, James, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of James Montgomery (London, 7 vols, 1854-56)

^5. Bell , Alexander B (ed), Peeps into the Past: Being Passages from the Diary of Thomas Asline Ward (Sheffield, 1910)

^6. Leader, Robert E, Reminiscences of Old Sheffield (Sheffield, 2nd edn 1876)

^7. Leader, R E, The Sheffield Banking Company Limited: An Historical Sketch (Sheffield, 1916)