This partnership was active briefly in the late 1860s.  It was listed in 1868 as a table blade maker in Canning Street / Division Street.  The partners were John Perkington (1830-1905) and Walter Deakin (1820-1879).  The former was the son of Joshua Perkington and his wife, Martha.  He lived in Hodgson Street.  Deakin may have been the son of George (a cutler) and his wife, Hannah.  Walter Deakin was a cutler at Lee Croft in 1841.  He became a table knife hafter, who lived at Green Street in 1861 and Egerton Street in 1871.  Deakin’s three-year-old son, Wilfred, had met a grisly end in 1856, when James Hill (the brother of Walter’s wife, Emma) had severed the child’s head with a razor.  He was judged insane (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 15 March 1856).   (Walter Deakin, landlord of the Rockingham Hotel, was also featured in the press when his child, Edwin, was scalded to death by a mug of boiling water – though it is not known if this was the same Deakin.  Cf.  Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 19 April 1864.)  

The Perkington and Deakin arrangement was apparently defunct by 1871.  Walter Deakin, Court 5, Egerton Street, died in 1879 and was buried at Eccesall on 24 August.  Perkington continued as a table blade forger.  He died at Edmund Street on 30 December 1905, aged 75.  He was buried in the General Cemetery.