Ted Osborne was born in Sheffield on 25 April 1893, the son of Frederick, a spring-knife cutler, and his wife, Annie.   He left school aged 12 and, with a break for Army service in First World War, he was to make knives for fifty-four years.  Later in his career he worked for George Ibberson, becoming their senior craftsman between the Wars and into the 1950s.  Osborne designed many of the Ibberson patterns.  His son, Harold, recalled Ted’s working habits:  

one of my earliest memories is of my mother collecting empty Rowntree’s ‘Elect’ cocoa tins and Coleman’s mustard tins (the oblong sort).   Every night Dad would put blades and springs he had brought home into these tins and then put them under the back boiler in the kitchen fire.   At bedtime all the embers would be piled round them, the damper drawn fully out so that the fire glowed a cherry red.   In the morning one of my jobs was to recover these tins for Dad, who would empty them and look at the contents and like as not say ‘Aye them’s champion’ and take them off to work, or if he was not satisfied, they would get another dose of the fire the next night (personal communication to author).   

Yet these skills barely earned a living in the days of piece rates and low wages.   Even buying winter clothes was sometimes beyond the pocket of a cutler working nearly 50 hours a week.  Nor did the prodigious skills of the cutler command other less tangible compensations, such as respect for their craftsmanship or any social status.   On the day Ted Osborne retired – his elbow joint worn out from the constant filing of knives, and his thumb like leather from a lifetime of touching blades to test their sharpness – the boss called him into the office and presented him with a bottle of whiskey (not the most appropriate gift for a Methodist!).   The company then forgot about him and there was no company pension.   Ted Osborne was adamant that no one in his family was to follow him into the trade.

In the opening page of a scrapbook he started in his happy retirement, Ted Osborne wrote: ‘in my younger days the wages were poor.   Men took a great interest in their work and some very fine workmen emerged of which I hope after looking through this book I think without boasting I may be one of them’.   Indeed, he was.   Not only are his Ibberson knives still in use (some stamped inside the liner ‘EO’ and sometimes dated), but his skills and patterns were transferred, at no little personal cost to himself, to Stan Shaw – the success of whom would have surely pleased him.  Ted Osborne died on 3 January 1975, aged 81.