Robert Fead Mosley was born in Hatton Garden, London, on 23 August 1841.  He was the eldest son of Cornelius Lewis Mosley (1812-1885), a jeweller, factor, and steel pen manufacturer in Hatton Garden, and his wife Emma née Morgan (1815-1890).  Cornelius died on 25 August 1885 at Broadway, Streatham, leaving £432.

Robert Mosley came to Sheffield in 1856.  In the Census (1861), he was a ‘boarder’ and clerk, living at the house of scissors manufacturer George Oates in Upperthorpe.  After Oates’s death in 1861, Mosley (aged 20) became a manufacturer of scissors and table cutlery in Brookhill.  In 1865, at Highbury Wesleyan Chapel in London he married Martha Ann, the eldest daughter of Henry Hobson.  They moved into Rutland Lodge in Collegiate Crescent.  Possibly the connection with Hobson – who was prospering in London as a wholesale cutler – provided capital for Mosley (de Lange, 2013¹. Revised 2020).  Certainly, Mosley succeeded rapidly.  In 1870, he relocated to West Street at Beehive Wheel (later known as Portland Works).  In 1871, he was exporting table cutlery to Australia. 

Until 1873, Mosley’s partner was Henry Lawton (1835-1885), who was a local grocer.  Henry’s brother, George (1824-1892), became a table-knife manager at Mosley’s; George’s sons, Arthur (1855-1943) and Samuel (1867-1950), also became managers.  By 1874, Mosley was sufficiently wealthy to buy Croft House in Lyndhurst Road, Brincliffe.  Three years later, Mosley moved from West Street to Randall Street (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 1 May 1877).  (This is off Bramall Lane, where Sheffield United football stadium is now located.)  Mosley’s newly-built Randall Street factory – on the corner with Hill Street – covered about ¾ acres on the usual plan:  two and three stories of offices and workshops around a central courtyard.  Although some workshops were rented to other tenants (for example, Mammatt & Sons), Mosley was the main manufacturer in the building, which he named Portland Works.

Mosley told the Census (1881) that he employed 240 workers (200 men, 20 boys, and 20 girls).  As one of the larger cutlery enterprises in Sheffield,  Portland Works featured in the trade press:  

A valuable feature of their business, and one which has been made a speciality by them, is the manufacture of case goods on an exceedingly artistic and extensive scale.  These cases are fitted up with satin and velvet linings, etc., for the reception of cutlery of the best and highly finished kinds, also for silver dessert and table spoons, forks, fish knives, etc., mounted in pearl, ivory, silver, metal, and other choice mountings (Industries of Sheffield, 1888). 

In 1883, Mosley registered a silver mark in Sheffield under his own name.  In 1895, Mosley became a director of Boardman, Glossop & Co Ltd.  Further silver marks followed in 1886, 1890, 1894, and 1907.  In 1897, Mosley’s became a private limited company, with a capital of £35,000 (£24,170 paid up).  The shares were held mostly by Mosley and his eldest son, Henry Hobson Mosley (1867-1928).  But the directors included the brothers Samuel and Arthur Lawton, who were Mosley’s managers (Warner, 2013²).  Samuel Lawton later partnered Harrison Fisher.  Robert F. Mosley expanded the firm’s Australian trade (an agent was appointed there in 1908), but his chief market for table cutlery and silverware was in London.  By 1890, he had links with The Alexander Clark Manufacturing Co.  He and his second son, Robert Frederick Mosley (1870-1926), became partners in Clark’s.  In 1896, Robert Frederick left Sheffield to live and work in Market Place, off Oxford Street, where one of Clark’s showrooms was located.  R.F. Mosley’s biographer (de Lange, 2013¹, 2020³) has highlighted the close connection between the Mosley and Clark families.  Alexander Clark’s house was Brincliffe – the district in which Mosley lived in Sheffield.  That closeness is further revealed in an Alexander Clark catalogue (c.1908), which had photographs of Portland Works – except that the factory signage proclaimed it as Welbeck Works.  The caption beneath read:  ‘The company’s Sheffield Works, where they employ over 500 hands: - The Dinner Hour’.  The signage is faked and the workroll is also exaggerated (about 120 workers appear in the frame and it is unlikely that Mosley’s workforce was more than 300). 

On the other hand, Portland Works (if the photographs can be believed) was clearly a self-contained factory.  Mosley had his own electro-plating tanks, which were ‘large enough to plate a lamp-post’; he had skilled silversmiths and polishers and burnishers (many of them women); and he employed hand-forgers and blade grinders.  The power was supplied by six 80-HP gas engines.

R. F. Mosley’s disguised link with Alexander Clark may account for his relatively low profile before 1914.  That obscurity ended during the War.  He and his company played a significant part in cutlery history, after metallurgist Harry Brearley (who worked for Firth’s, the steel makers) turned to them in the summer of 1914 to make a trial with his new ‘rustless’ steel.  Even the best qualities of Mosley’s hand-forged shear steel inevitably tarnished and became rusty.  The manager of Mosley’s, Ernest Stuart (1875-1937), helped Brearley forge a dozen or so knife blades from the new alloy – a milestone in cutlery manufacture.  Consequently, Mosley’s was the first firm to predict a future for stainless steel and order supplies of the revolutionary alloy.  In his account of the discovery of stainless steel, Brearley heaped praise on Stuart and Mosley’s (Brearley, 1941⁴).  According to Brearley, Mosley’s would have liked a monopoly on the product, but for various reasons supplies were limited.  Intriguingly, when Mosley’s commercial blades appeared they were marked not ‘Firth-Brearley Stainless’ or ‘Firth Stainless’ – the most common markings on early stainless cutlery – but ‘RUSNORSTAIN’.  Knives with this trade mark began appearing for sale in New South Wales in Australia as early as 1915 – showing how quickly Mosley commercialised the alloy.  For example, an advertisement appeared in the Northern Star [Lismore, NSW] on 18 November 1915.  The war disrupted supplies of stainless steel, but once it ended, Mosley also began shipping cutlery to New Zealand.  In 1919, a Dunedin retailer placed a newspaper advertisement showing Mosley’s ‘RUSNORSTAIN’ table cutlery made to order.

The stainless breakthrough came late in R. F. Mosley’s life.  He remained chairman after the war, but died in Sheffield on 13 January 1921, aged 79.  About 400 were said to have attended his funeral at Fulwood, including many long-serving workers and Alexander Clark.  He left a large estate of £52,966.  After his death, the firm should have done well, despite the end of the Edwardian silver boom and the subsequent waning of the Clark connection.  Mosley’s advertised as the ‘first maker’ of stainless cutlery.  In 1924, Mosley’s registered ‘RUSNORSTAIN’ as a trade mark in Sheffield (Doncaster, 1990⁵).  In that year, the mark ‘RFM’ (in a rectangle) was registered in Canada.  Mosley’s opened a London showroom at Bath House, Holborn Viaduct, where it advertised cased sets of ‘RUSNORSTAIN’.  The canteens were branded as the ‘original stainless cutlery’.  Mosley’s also supplied Albert Cowley Bloxham (1868-1933), a London silversmith, whose table knives were marked ‘DIPLOMAT’ (Bloxham’s mark) and ‘RUSNORSTAIN’.

But the Mosley family struggled.  Henry Hobson Mosley became chairman but retired due to ill-health in about 1923.  He died on 12 March 1928 and was buried at Ecclesall, leaving only £4,830 (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 13 March 1928).  Robert Frederick Mosley started a London jeweller (Mosley, Flowers & Co), in Albemarle Street, London, with Arthur Samuel Flowers.  But this ended in 1921.  Robert died on 19 January 1926 at Hotel Bedford, Beaulieu, in the south of France.  He left £2,850.  In Sheffield, Henry had been succeeded as managing director by Albert Oswald Mosley (R. F. Mosley’s youngest son).  He had a colourful past.  In 1907, he had been sued for breach of promise after a seaside affair with a young Sheffield artist’s model.  Albert was married at the time.  He defended the case successfully, but the judge declared that his conduct was ‘about as disgraceful as it was ever possible to hear of’ (Hull Daily Mail, 17 July 1907). 

Ernest Stuart joined Albert as a director; and so, too, in 1930 (after the retirement of Arthur Lawton) did Albert’s son, Robert Clive Mosley (1905-1979).  Albert told one journalist that ‘rustless and stainless cutlery kept us going during the war and since’ but added that the firm suffered from foreign dumping of cheaper articles (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 4 February 1924).  Herbert Housley has described Portland Works as subsequently giving ‘work to about 200 people, with about half of them in that firm’s employment and the rest independent craftsmen renting the remaining small workshops’. (Housley, 1998⁶).

The Depression hit trade hard and in 1934 Mosley’s went into voluntary liquidation and sold its stock.  It was, however, reconstituted with a capital of £30,000.  Albert died at his home in Fulwood Road on 18 December 1950, aged 71, and was buried in Fulwood.  He left £5,116.  This left Robert Clive Mosley as managing director.  At the start of the 1950s, the firm was crippled by Australian import controls.  Robert felt that the restrictions were a ‘catastrophe’ for his firm and that he faced discharging most of the workforce (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 March 1952).  Mosley’s occupied Portland Works until 1968, when the company was wound up.  The names ‘MOSLEY’ and ‘RUSNORSTAIN’ were acquired by the Sipelia Group.  The factory still stands.  Indeed, in 2013, a local group of volunteers raised over £250,000 through a community shareholding scheme to preserve Portland Works as low-cost accommodation for craftspeople and the creative industries.

^1. de Lange, Anna, Robert Fead Mosley: First Manufacturer of Stainless Knives, Entrepreneur, Visionary, Innovator and Founder of Portland Works A Biography (Sheffield, 2013)

^2. Warner, Jeff, ‘A Short History of R. F. Mosley & Co Ltd’ (2013). Unpublished typescript posted at: http://www.hawleytoolcollection.com

^3. de Lange, Anna, Portland Works: Stainless Steel Cutlery (Sheffield, 2020)

^4. Brearley, Harry, Knotted String: Autobiography of a Steel Maker (London, 1941)

^5. Doncaster, Richard T, ‘Stainless Trade Names’, The Cutting Edge, No 6 (1990)

^6. Housley, Herbert, Back to the Grindstone (Sheffield, 1998)