This factory stands on the corner of Arundel Street/Newton Lane.  Lettering above the entrance states: ‘Electroplaters to All Trades.  Est. 1856’.   The significance of that date is unclear, since the firm was apparently launched in 1865 as Fox & Biggins, electro-platers and gilders.  According to Biggins, capital was £200.  In 1868, the address was 53 Arundel Street.   The partners were Henry Fox (1818-1899) and John Walter Robert Biggins (1843-1924).   Fox was an Eckington-born razor striker and butcher, who lived in Granville Street.  He was the son of Joseph Fox, a scythe smith, and his wife, Ann.  John W. Biggins was the son of Henry, a table knife manufacturer in Pond Street.  In 1861, John was living with his widowed mother, Eliza, in Leadmill Road, and was an apprentice electro-plate burnisher.  In 1866, Biggins married Fox’s, daughter, Emma.

In 1881, John W. Biggins told the Census that Fox & Biggins (at 34 Arundel Street and 25 Howard Street) employed three men, seven women, and four boys.  Henry Fox had retired by 1884.  He died at Fentonville Road on 3 January 1899, aged 81, and was buried in Norton Cemetery.  The firm continued under John W. Biggins and Louis Henry Fox (Henry’s son), but in 1885 that partnership ended.  Biggins then traded alone as an electro-plate manufacturer at 34 Arundel Street.   The two-story factory was on the corner of Arundel Street and Howard Street, with part of the ground-floor section on the corner occupied by a retailer, The Wee Cutlery Shop.  Whether Biggins had an electro-plating facility at this time is unknown: most of his advertisements for staff were for burnishers.  The firm may not have been very profitable.  After the mid-1890s, Biggins tried to expand his business by acquiring W. R. Nutt & Co and Briddon Bros.  Biggins claimed to have pumped £3,000 into Nutt’s, but when trade turned sour he stated later that in 1903 he had dispensed with William R. Nutt and rolled the business into Briddon Bros (based at Suffolk Road).  By 1900, Biggins had also acquired cutlery manufacturer W. T. Staniforth. 

None of these ventures made money, so Biggins devised a scheme to retain personal control, whilst shielding himself (he hoped) from his accumulating debts.  In 1905, J. W. Biggins (the electro-plate firm in Arundel Street) was sold for £250 to his sons, John (1874-1953) and William (1883-1942).  Biggins stated that he was glad to get rid of it.  Briddon Bros & Co was sold to his other son, Walter (1871-1930), for the same amount; and W. T. Staniforth was sold to his wife, Emma.   In 1907, both Briddon Bros & Co and Staniforth were registered as limited liability companies with £5,000 nominal capital each.  Biggins, who at that point was ‘cutlery manager’ at Staniforth’s, arranged matters so that he was ‘permanent director’ until he died.  Biggins’ machinations did not prevent his bankruptcy, with debts of £16,000.  ‘Big Sheffield Failure’, was the headline in The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 23 April 1907, above two columns of reportage.  At the bankruptcy hearings, Biggins offered the lame excuse that he retained control, because Emma was ‘often in bed for weeks together’. 

John W. Biggins somehow continued to trade at Arundel Street as Biggins Bros, with the help of his family.  He also had an interest in other tenement factories.  His workshops were notorious for their dangerous and squalid working conditions.  Biggins ignored factory regulations, even after being fined by the Factory Inspectors.  His offences often related to failures to fence machinery.  Biggins’ response was usually to blame someone else, such as his workers.  He and Emma were also owners of Select Works, 188-190 Rockingham Street, which by the early 1920s housed about forty tenants (including W. H. Parkin) and over 120 workers.  It apparently earned John and Emma Biggins ‘very substantial rents’, but by the early 1920s was deemed so unsafe that the Factory Inspectors ordered its temporary closure.   It was the first such case in Sheffield.  The Inspectors had been requesting improvements in the building for nearly a decade and felt that the only safe course was to ‘blow it up’ (Sheffield Independent, 23 May 1922). 

John W. Biggins died at his residence 247 Western Road on 30 December 1923, aged 80.  Emma died on 14 November 1932, leaving £1,102.  They were buried at Fulwood.  In the following year, Biggins Bros was registered as a private limited company, with £1,200 capital (Yorkshire Post, 14 November 1933).   Biggins’ sons, John and William, were directors (their brother, Walter, had died on 15 September 1930, leaving £1,488).  Another director was Annette Hoodless (1869-1949), of Beauchief, who was the daughter of John W. Biggins.  She had married Charles Hoodless (a joiner) in 1923.  The firm continued to trade at 34 Arundel Street, where working conditions remained unsafe.  In 1934, Charlotte Corbidge (aged 20) died after drinking tea laced with cyanide for plating teapots – an ‘accidental death’, according to the inquest (Yorkshire Post, 8 February 1934).  

The firm remained in family hands after the Second World War.  John Biggins was still managing director in the early 1950s.  His brother, William, had died on 17 January 1942, leaving £3,347.  John died on 3 November 1953, aged 79.   His estate was valued at £18,245.  By the early 1960s, Biggins Bros had relocated to more modern premises at 154 Arundel Street.  John had two sons: John Edward (1904-1980) and Mark Leslie (1905-1992).  The latter was described as a works manager in the Register of England & Wales (1939); and was listed as an electroplater in a Sheffield directory (1951).  He left £125,000 when he died on 25 May 1992.   Biggins Bros was in business until the early 1990s, with the family still involved, but it was dissolved in 2000.   The factory then stood empty for several years.