Charles Proctor (c.1738-1808) and Luke Proctor (c.1743-1817) were the sons of Jonathan, a cutler.  After apprenticeships (Charles’s Freedom was granted in 1760; Luke in 1765), they began business in Milk Street.  Their products included lancets and fleams, table knives and forks, hunting knives, butchers’ steels, powder flasks, and brass inkstands.  The trade mark was ‘PROCTOR’ and an ‘S 7 LP’ device, besides a silver mark ‘C?LP’ (one of the first to be registered in 1773).  George Washington had a travelling knife and fork made by the Proctors, which (according to Mount Vernon Museum) he may have used during the Revolutionary War. 

In 1784, a ‘heart and cross’ plate mark was registered by Fox, Proctor, Passmore & Co.  In the following year, Thomas Fox left the partnership, leaving as partners Luke Proctor, Thomas Passmore, George Kibble, John Weaver, George Mettam, and Charles Roe.  Apparently, Luke next launched Luke Proctor & Co, a silver plate enterprise, which registered a silver mark in 1785 (its complicated genealogy can be traced in Law, 2000, and The London Gazette).  According to Leader (1876)¹, ‘Luke Proctor was an agreeable man of fashion, an accomplished violinist, and he soon fiddled himself out of the firm.  Charles, a lover of music, too, was a quiet, assiduous and successful man of business’.

In the 1780s, Charles joined Thomas Beilby (a Birmingham man, who was a drawing teacher in Sheffield) to form Proctor & Beilby.  They registered silver marks in 1792 and 1794 and concentrated on the manufacture of spectacles, telescopes, and scientific instruments.  They apparently relied upon Charles’s uncle, Samuel Froggatt (d.1790), who was credited as Sheffield’s first optician (Sheffield Independent, 10 September 1859).  In 1786, Proctor & Beilby installed one of the first (perhaps the first) steam-engines in Sheffield; and in the 1790s used Rivelin Bridge Wheel (Ball et al, 2006).  In 1788, the firm operated a Birmingham branch.  When Charles died on 4 July 1808, he left a fortune of £30,000 and was described as ‘a most useful member of the community’ (Sheffield Local Register).  He was buried in St Paul’s churchyard (where his brother Luke was interred on 12 November 1817).

Charles’s sons, by his wife Dorothy, were George (bapt.  9 February 1774); William (bapt.  27 May 1776-1836); Jonathan (bapt.  10 October 1777—1799); and Luke (11 May 1779-1800).  George went to Birmingham, while William – who married the sister of the founder of the Deakin Institution (see James & Thomas Deakin) – continued as an optician in Sheffield.  In 1817, he registered a silver mark in Fruit Market, but was insolvent within a year.  He continued to trade as an optician and cast steel refiner (he was listed in 1828 in Bell’s Square, Trippet Lane).  William, the ‘eminent optician’, died on 22 October 1836 at his lodgings in Fitzwilliam Street and was buried in St Paul’s churchyard.

^1. Leader, Robert E, Reminiscences of Old Sheffield (Sheffield, 2nd edn 1876)