David Rogerson Mellor was born in Sheffield on 5 October 1930, the son of Colin and Ivy Mellor.  His father worked for the Sheffield Twist Drill Co.  His earliest paid employment was making models of the ships broken up by local scrap merchant Thomas Ward.  He studied silver smithing at Sheffield College of Art, the Royal College of Art (with a thesis on the Sheffield cutlery industry), and the British School at Rome, before returning to Sheffield in 1954 to set up his own workshop and design office in Eyre Street.  This was across the road from the imposing Electro Works of Walker & Hall.  In 1954, Walker & Hall appointed Mellor as a design consultant.  He developed a reputation for his commissioned pieces for various organizations and private clients.  These included the large bowl commissioned by the Company of Cutlers to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the Sheffield Assay Office. 

Mellor’s primary interest, though, was cutlery (particularly flatware).  For Walker & Hall he developed the ‘PRIDE’ silver-plate design with white xylonite handles.  Soon it accounted for 30 percent of Walker & Hall’s electro-plate cutlery sales (Inchbald, 2013¹).  Further popular designs followed:  notably ‘CAMPDEN’, one the first modern stainless designs;  ‘SYMBOL’, an attempt to mass produce high-quality cutlery by precision engineering; ‘EMBASSY’, commissioned by the government for British embassies; and ‘THRIFT’ for the opposite end of the spectrum – government canteens. 

In 1969, Mellor opened a London shop at Sloane Square, but his ambitious plans for further expansion in the capital had mixed success.  In 1973, he set up a small workshop at Broom Hall, a renovated historic building in Sheffield.  It was mechanised (producing cutlery from coiled stainless steel strip), but Mellor wanted an organization that allowed scope for a small group of designers and craftsmen (originally about five).  By 1990, a new facility and shop – The Round Building – had been opened at Hathersage in Derbyshire.

Mellor won Design Centre Awards and examples of his work can be seen at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  In 1998, an exhibition of his work toured English cities (Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust, 1998).  By pitching his products at the design-conscious sector of the market and creating a retailing brand, he side-stepped the decline of the industry.  He was made CBE in 2001.  He married Fiona MacCarthy, a features writer and biographer, who in 2007 reported that her husband was in a Sheffield nursing home.  David Mellor died in Sheffield on 7 May 2009, aged 78.  He was described as ‘a rare example of the talented, committed craftsman technocrat-entrepreneur who knew as much about manufacturing as he did about the more superficial aspects of design’ (Guardian, 8 May 2009).  His son, Corin (b. 1966), now runs David Mellor Design.

^1. Inchbald, Peter B, Jack of All Trades and His Family: A Personal Memoir and Family History (2013)