Clarbours – a Quaker family – appear in the apprenticeship records of the Company of Cutlers (Leader, 1905-06¹).  These show that the family was active in cutlery since the early eighteenth century.  In the Directory (1787), Benjamin Clarbour was listed as a fork maker at Pond Lane.   In the same directory, Hoyland, Clarbour & Barnard was a manufacturer of silver and plated table knives at Hill Foot.  The firm’s trade mark was ‘ZC CLARBOUR + SURIOUS’.  The next incarnation was apparently Hoyland & Clarbour, cutlers and factors, which was directed by Thomas Hoyland and Joseph Clarbour.   It was dissolved in 1793.  By 1797, Clarbour & Hancock had appeared as a table knife maker at Hollis Street.  The trade marks were ‘ZC CLARBOUR ORFA’.  The partners were Joseph Clarbour (1743-1809) and Robert Hancock (1766-1842).   The latter, a cutler, was the son of John, a yeoman of Handley, Derbyshire, and his wife Ellen.  Robert had married Joseph’s daughter, Betty (1767-1827), in 1798 at the Quaker’s Meeting House, Sheffield (Leeds Intelligencer, 12 March 1798).   

The partnership between Clarbour and Hancock was dissolved in 1808.   Joseph Clarbour died on 26 February 1809 and was buried at the Friends Burying Ground.  He left his effects in trust to his widow, Sarah née Sheldon (1746-1834).  His executor was John Turnpenny, a factor’s clerk, who had married Joseph’s daughter, Tabitha.   Robert Hancock apparently formed a partnership with William Ibbotson, but this was dissolved in 1819 after Ibbotson’s death.  Hancock then disappeared from directories, but was enumerated in the Census (1841) as a warehouseman living at George Street.  He died after ‘a lingering illness’ on 1 November 1842, aged 76.  According to a brief obituary, he was a ‘gentleman (a member of the Society of Friends), brother to Henry Hancock, farmer, etc., Dore, and uncle to William Townsend, joiner and builder, Broad Lane’ (Sheffield Independent, 5 November 1842).

Joseph Clarbour’s family had other cutlery connections.  One daughter, Esther (1790-1868), had married Samuel Marshall, table knife manufacturer, West Street.  Joseph’s eldest son – also named Joseph (1774-1841) – may have been the cutler who filed for bankruptcy in 1821.  He was described as ‘formerly of Greenhill, in the Parish of Norton … but late of Sheffield’.  In 1825, Joseph Clarbour was a table knife manufacturer listed at Oborne Street.  He died on 14 September 1841 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was interred at the Friends Western Burial Ground on the following day.

^1. Leader, R E, History of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire in the County of York (Sheffield, 1905-6)