Rather than being a Sheffield manufacturer, the knife in our Collection is most likely to have been made in Sheffield for Whiteaway, Laidlaw & Co., a department store chain originally established in Calcutta with branches in twenty other cities in India, along with branches in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai.

The founder of Whiteaway, Laidlaw & Co, was a British Liberal Party politician, Sir Robert Laidlaw (1856-1917).  His business life started in Hawick and he went to India in 1877, residing in Calcutta for about 20 years.  In 1882, he founded ‘Whiteaway, Laidlaw, and Co’ with Edward Whiteaway (1851-1927).  Laidlaw became chairman.  The partnership was dissolved in 1899, but the company continued to grow under Laidlaw’s leadership..

Whiteaway, Laidlaw & Co was ‘the’ colonial emporium or department store in India and became a household name throughout the East.  The company was often nicknamed as the Selfridges of India, indicating its role as a high-end department stores.  It became a favourite used to procure items that appealed to the Europeans and the anglicized wealthy locals.  Part of its trade was in importing and selling household products.  However, the situation changed abruptly after the independence of India in 1947, when the British military personnel and civilians left India for their home country.  It continued to trade until 1962 in Calcutta when it closed along with the remaining branches elsewhere in the Far East.