The Spencers manufactured files in the early eighteenth century.  According to a company history (Spencer Clark, 1978), the key individual was Matthias Spencer I (1723-1796), who was a file smith in Pea Croft.  In 1749, he had been granted a trade mark of a crescent and the letter ‘Z’.  His two sons, John Spencer I (1754-1809) and Matthias Spencer II (1760-1823), eventually joined him and the file manufacturer Matthias Spencer & Sons was formed.  

The Pea Croft business prospered.  After the death of John Spencer I in 1809, the business passed to his nephew John Spencer II (1792-1874), who became the dominant personality in the enterprise.  Apparently, he began file cutting aged seven and inherited the business from his uncle, when he was only 16.  The executors wished to sell the company, but John took control along with his mother.  He also inherited his uncle’s mark, granted in 1777, which combined the crescent and Z device with a diamond (picture).  John Spencer II boosted the company’s trade before 1820 by travelling to France for orders, which apparently gave him with an enthusiasm for improved methods of travel (later he was a strong supporter of the railways).

In the 1820s, the business was restyled Matthias Spencer & Son, after John Spencer II began bringing his sons into the business: John Roberts Spencer (1814-1875) and William Spencer (1820-1876).  John Spencer II became Master Cutler in 1835 (his portrait hangs in Cutlers’ Hall).  He managed the Pea Croft business until 1849, when at the age of 57 he handed it to his sons and moved to Rotherham.  By then, the company also manufactured (or factored) table knives and razors at Albion Steel Works in Pea Croft.  In 1851, the workforce was 250 men.  The sons lived at West Mount House, Glossop Road.  In 1863, they formed two companies: J.R. Spencer & Son at Albion Steel Works; and William Spencer & Son at Kingston Steel Works, Malinda Street.  In 1868, both advertised in the Sheffield directory, with J.R. Spencer’s two-page illustrated advertisement showing (with a degree of artistic licence) a large manufactory containing three bottle-shaped converting furnaces.  John Spencer II’s youngest sons, Walter and Thomas, meanwhile launched a steel business in Rotherham that became Walter Spencer & Co.

John Spencer and his sons died within only three years.  John died at Masbrough Cottage, Masbrough, on 24 November 1874, aged about 84.  A Methodist, he was described by one newspaper as a ‘relic … [of] … medieval Sheffield’, who epitomised a Sheffield manufacturer of the ‘old school, retaining the vernacular in all its purity … and living in terms of hearty familiarity with his workmen’ (Sheffield Independent, 26 November 1874).  He refused to discard breeches for such ‘new-fangled things as trousers’ (Leader, 1876).  He left under £4,000.  His son John Roberts Spencer did not long survive him: he died on 1 November 1875, at the Hotel d’Univers, Paris, aged 60.  He left under £35,000.  William Spencer, Oakview, Broomhall Park, died (aged 56) on 12 November 1876.  He left under £12,000.

In 1882, the old name of Matthias Spencer & Sons was restored by John Spencer (1841-1886), who was J.R. Spencer’s son and had inherited the company.  In 1881, he told the Census that the firm employed 241 (170 men, 18 women, 39, boys, and 14 girls).  He journeyed to Hyères in the south of France to restore his health, but died there on 13 February 1886, aged 44.  He was buried in Ecclesall, leaving £10,605.  By the early 1890s, the company had moved to Albion Steel Works in Arley Street (St Mary’s Gate).  In the twentieth century, the company switched from cutlery and tools to steel and engineering, and by 1929 (when it became a limited company, with £10,000 capital) it was controlled by the Vessey family.  The firm survived until the 1980s. A similar mark (with the addition of a diamond and the word ‘Rotherham’) – granted in 1777 – was used by Walter and Thomas Spencer & Co, which was a branch of the family selling steel and files in Rotherham.  The latter operated until the late twentieth century.