Crawshaw was one of the most important Sheffield cutlers in the early nineteenth century.  He may have been baptised on 16 March 1777 at the parish church: if so, he was the son of James, a grinder.  Possibly he was apprenticed (the rolls of the Company of Cutlers listing two James Crawshaws as Freemen in 1801/1802).

More certain is that in 1816 Crawshaw registered a silver mark as a ‘plate worker’ at the Sheffield Assay Office.  His address was ‘Mr Nowill Shop, High Street’.  This was Nowill & Kippax’s ironmongery shop at 37 High Street, which Crawshaw took over as a jeweller, plater, and hardware man.  In the Sheffield General &  Commercial Directory (1821), Crawshaw’s full-page advertisement listed a variety of best-quality cutlery and fancy knives.  However, in 1828 37 was occupied by Thomas Champion & Son (‘successor to Mr James Crawshaw, late Nowill Kippax’).  Crawshaw was listed separately as a ‘pen, pocket, silver dessert and fruit knives, and razor manufacturer; dressing case instruments, inventor of the improved penknife, long or patent tang lobster and quadrangular knives, etc., 39 Solly Street’.  Crawshaw supplied Champion’s – the latter’s advertisement listing pen, pocket and sportsman’s knives from ‘the manufactory of Nowill & Kippax, now Mr Crawshaw’.  Crawshaw employed some of the best spring-knife makers in the trade, such as James Gillies.

Crawshaw was Master Cutler in 1828.  Sir Richard Phillips (1829) described his products and shops: ‘Very fine cutlery is manufactured by Mr Crawshaw.  I saw in his warehouse all those elegant patterns of penknives which, in the best of shops of London, Bath, etc., excite so much admiration.  His lobster knives, with four or more blades on slit springs, with pearl and tortoise-shell handles, are the most perfect productions of British manufacture’.  According to Phillips (as reported in Allen, 1831), Crawshaw made the best pocket knives in Sheffield, which fetched in ‘high mounting’ (i.e. gold and silver) from two to five guineas.  And Phillips credited Crawshaw as:

the inventor of the patent tang and pen-nibbing knives;  the lobster-knife, by which four blades open upon one spring;  and of the quadrangular knife, the principle of which is adapted to any number of blades and has been adopted for show knives with from one thousand to two thousand blades.  To this gentleman the trade is indebted for what is called the lobster knife, consisting of a spring, which, instead of forming the back, as in the old method, is placed along the middle of the handle, and between the scales or sides of the handle, so that it works on each side, and hence admits of blades at each end, and even of any number of them.  The mode of slitting the spring gave rise to many bladed knives in all their varieties.  Mr Crawshaw took out no patent, but is a wholesale manufacturer, and the retail shop in his connexion, is Champion’s, in High-street.

In 1832, Champion’s sold the retail side of its business to Crawshaw.  His entry in the 1833 directory stated:  ‘jeweller, silversmith and cutler and dealer in fancy goods, 39 High Street, table, pocket, silver, dessert, fruit and improved pen knife and ultimatum razor, 61 Solly Street’.  His last entry in 1837 described him as a cutlery manufacturer, silversmith, and owner of a ‘fancy warehouse’ in High Street.  Crawshaw died on 10 March 1838, aged 61.  His business record was apparently uneven.  But The Sheffield Independent, 17 March 1838, described him as a man ‘without pretension … of excellent attainments; and some of his inventions in cutlery effected an important change in that branch of Sheffield manufacture’.  Mention was made of the lobster and quadrangular knife; and also, his Orreries, which exhibited ‘workmanship and mental power’.  Crawshaw’s extensive stocks of cutlery, jewellery, and silverware were auctioned in 1839. 

James Crawshaw’s burial has not be traced.  He had married Ann Ward in 1800.  Soon after James’ death, she married Francis Newton, ‘gentleman’, in April 1839.  She died in 1884, aged 81.  Her son, James Thomas Crawshaw, a spring-knife maker, traded in High Street and Tudor Street in the 1840s.  However, despite his intellectual inclinations (he sometimes described himself as an ‘artist’), after 1847 he became a civil registrar for Sheffield until his death, aged 72, in 1874.