The founder was George Wolstenholme (1775-1833), whose family name had various spellings.  The company once admitted that ‘the precise date of its founding is unknown … [and] … the beginnings of the firm are wrapped in obscurity’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 10 December 1919). But this did not prevent Wostenholm’s from advancing various establishment dates (such as 1745 or 1785) and publishing a house history that linked the family to spring knife makers in Stannington in the early 1700s (Bexfield, 1945¹). It was more likely that George Wolstenholme started as a fork maker at Thomas Lane (off Egerton Street). Martin Wolstenholme (1758-1844) – apparently George’s older brother – was listed as a fork manufacturer in a Sheffield directory in 1797. He was the first family member to be listed in Sheffield. Their father was fork maker Henry Wolstenholme (1729-1803), who had been baptised at Eckington, the son of George Wostinholme (occupation unknown). If this identification is correct, George was apprenticed to John Micklethwaite, a cutler, in 1790 and was granted his Freedom in 1799 (trade mark ‘2162’).  George later moved to Broad Lane and began making spring knives. He was first listed in a Sheffield directory in 1816 as a pen and pocket knife manufacturer at Rockingham Street (he had registered a silver mark at that address in 1809). His workshops expanded to become Rockingham Works.  He was said to have shortened his name to ‘Wostenholm’ to facilitate its stamping on blades.

The next George Wostenholm (1802-1876) – the most remarkable of the family – was born on 26 January 1802, the son of George of Rockingham Works and his wife, Elizabeth (d. 1811). He was baptised on 23 February at Howard Street Congregational Chapel. He was apprenticed to his father, who brought him into the business.  It was described in a directory in 1825 as ‘George Wolstenholme & Son, manufacturers of table knives, and forks, pen, pocket, and sportsman’s knives, and general dealers in cutlery, 78 Rockingham Street’. George Wostenholm became a Freeman in 1826.  

Surviving portraits and photographs of George Wostenholm show a short, stocky man, with balding head and determined gaze.  According to one observer, he was the archetypal ‘successful manufacturer, masterful, keen, energetic and far-sighted, whose whole thought and ideas – apart from realizing a fortune – seemed to be centred in achieving in his cutlery the legend of his trade mark, I*XL’ (Coward, 1919²).  He was not only a practical cutler, but a dynamic salesman.  Some less printable adjectives were also used about him by his employees.  An excitable workaholic, he had a volcanic temper which he did not hesitate to vent on subordinates.  He used the ‘bounty system’ to bind men to him by advancing loans of £5 or £10 to be paid by instalments; and enforced the rule of ‘fourteen to the dozen’ knives.  But if he did not spare his workers, Wostenholm did not spare himself either.

Wostenholm’s early business trips were in England, but it was in America that he found scope for his prodigious energy.  Wostenholm’s pen knives were soon known to American customers (Delaware Journal, 14 December 1827).  In 1830, the Wostenholms, father and son, launched a partnership with William Stenton.  The latter was an experienced cutlery merchant, whose standing was recognised by the style of the firm:  Stenton, Wostenholm & Son. However, in November 1831 the partnership was dissolved. The story is that George Wostenholm Jun. and Stenton fell out. In the following year, a new partnership between father and son was drawn up. In 1831, George Wostenholm was granted the trade mark he was to make famous – I*XL. This mark – originally granted to William Aldam Smith in 1787 – had been bought by George Sen. in 1826.

However, George Sen. died ‘suddenly’ on 31 December 1833, at his residence at Crookes Moor. He was buried at Howard Street Chapel, where he had been deacon. George Wostenholm then took firm control of Rockingham Works and its American business.  He had apparently first visited America in 1831. He certainly made the journey in the next year. Passenger lists show him disembarking in New York from the sailing ship Sheffield on 19 April 1832.  He was accompanied by Joshua Moss (qv, Wilson, Hawksworth & Moss). Wostenholm was said to have made about thirty visits to the USA – no mean achievement when crossing the Atlantic took four to five weeks (sometimes longer) and was perilous.  

In 1844, a New York office was opened under Asline Ward (1821-1905) – the son of Thomas Asline Ward (qv, Broomhead & Ward). In the 1850s, Wostenholm also had agents in Philadelphia and Boston. It was reported that Wostenholm thought nothing of travelling to San Francisco to defend his name in a trade mark court case.  Consequently, one newspaper said: ‘Probably no Sheffield face was so well known as his in America, and none of our people could vie more successfully than he with the business enthusiasm and push of the keenest New Yorker’ (Sheffield Independent, 19 August 1876).

For Wostenholm, America was the ideal market with its expanding frontier and enormous demand for folding knives, razors, and weapons. The firm’s trade became almost exclusively American and Wostenholm made little attempt to nurture other markets.  His imagination fired by all things American, Wostenholm began thinking big.  Only a few blocks away from Rockingham Street was a vacant tenement factory, known as Washington Works, which fronted Wellington Street and was bounded by Bowdon Street and Eldon Street. In 1848, Wostenholm bought it. The size of Washington Works would be greatly exaggerated in company engravings. Under Wostenholm, it retained its tenement character and, like most Sheffield factories, was unhygienic and hazardous. But Washington Works had warehouses, grinding wheels, and steam engines and economies of scale were achieved by bringing so many workers under one roof (Sheffield Independent, 12 January 1839). Other economies were achieved by Wostenholm’s hard-nosed attitude to labour and tough bargaining over wages.

Despite his autocracy, Wostenholm earned the loyalty of his workforce as American orders rolled into Washington Works. Few business records have survived from this era (apparently Wostenholm destroyed most of them before his death), but one letter in 1858 from Asline Ward to George Wostenholm captures the bullish spirit. Ward wrote: ‘The future trade with America must be immense, territories that are now half savage will gradually become desirous of better and better goods & educated to aspirations of babaric [sic] cost and splendour’ (Tweedale, 1987³).  

The workforce was probably a hundred or so at the start of the 1830s. In 1861, Wostenholm told the Census that he employed 850 workers.  By then, his firm was said to be the largest maker of spring knives in Sheffield.  Wostenholm also became the most prolific maker of Bowie knives in the 1850s. ‘No other Sheffield cutler’, wrote Bowie knife authority Norm Flayderman (2004), ‘came close to producing the prodigious quantity of Bowie knives as George Wostenholm’⁴.   Alongside the I*XL stamp, the blades were often decorated with acid-etchings that pandered to American patriotic or frontier sentiments.  These included eagles, General Zachary Taylor mounted on his horse ‘Old Whitey’, and slogans such as ‘CALIFORNIA KNIFE’ (Williamson, 1974⁵).  

The high quality of the firm’s Bowie and spring knives was achieved by ‘drilling’, in which every knife was critically examined – sometimes by ‘His Majesty’ [‘Georgie’].  One spring knife cutler, who was ‘drilled’, ‘used to marvel at the way he struck the blades on a tiny anvil to find out any defect.  I thought, at the time, he was foolish to run such risks of breaking the blades.  It was part of his plan, for above all he would have sound blades in every knife he sold’ (Coward, 1919²).  Drilling had the desired effect and soon ‘I*XL’ vied with Rodgers’ star and Maltese cross as a badge of quality.  The company also acquired the Pipe trade mark from William Hutchinson in 1843 (which was granted in 1694 and Wostenholm described as the oldest mark on the Company of Cutlers’ register). The ‘TALLY-HO’ razor mark of Frederick Fenney was purchased in 1863. ‘CONGRUENT’, which had been the mark of James Bingham, was used on Wostenholm razors by the late 1870s. Wostenholm’s later acquired the ‘EXCELSIOR’ mark of Hides – probably to remove it from the marketplace.

Like Rodgers, Wostenholm made its share of exhibition pieces.  At the Great Exhibition in 1851 Wostenholm displayed a set of ornate sheath knives, including one commissioned from the well-known artist Alfred Stevens. The company also displayed a collection of exhibition multi-blades. The display won a Prize Medal for Wostenholm. The firm also carried off prize medals at exhibitions in Paris (1855) and London (1862).  

George Wostenholm had little time for public office. In September 1838, he declined to serve as Master Cutler, because he was about to sail for America  (though he eventually agreed to serve in 1856).  His main interest outside Washington Works was property development and land investment.  In the late 1830s, he lived at The Mount, Glossop Road, which was a neo-classical block of houses popular with aspiring merchants. But by 1835, he began buying land around Cherry Tree Hill at Nether Edge and decided to build himself a house there and a suburb.  With Wostenholm’s wealth, it could be no ordinary pile. With the help of a leading architect and landscape gardener, Wostenholm built the Kenwood Estate, at the centre of which was a large stone mansion, Kenwood.  It was said that the property was designed to emulate the country estates that Wostenholm had seen in America.

Walking around the pleasant, leafy roads and the beautiful grounds of Kenwood (now owned by a hotel), is a fine way of appreciating the unprecedented wealth and social standing of its owner.  George Wostenholm lived there in some comfort with a succession of wives and several servants. Wostenholm was married three times: first to Mary Hobson (d. 19 April 1853); second in 1855 to Frances Crookes, the daughter of a London merchant, who died in Bayswater on 30 May 1866 (aged 49); and finally in 1868 to the considerably younger Eliza (Lizzie) Maria Rundle (1840-1886), the daughter of a Gosport physician.  However, Wostenholm had no children.

George Wostenholm had remarkable stamina. In early 1869, in his late sixties, he set off for a tour of Europe with his bride, and in October made another trip to New York. In 1872, he again visited New York. He was active until the end, though he sold out to his business associates in 1875, when Wostenholm’s became a limited liability company with a paid-up capital of £43,400 and over 500 workers.  Wostenholm had no business partners and he probably realized that, after a period of ill-health, the end was close.  However, he was appointed chairman and presided at the annual meeting in April 1876. He died at Kenwood on 18 August 1876, aged 74, from long-standing prostate disease and kidney stones. The Sheffield Independent stated cryptically:  ‘[Wostenholm] was as most of us are, a mixture of good and evil, of weakness and strength’.  But everyone paid tribute to his single-minded determination and business acumen, and his dogged battle against illness.  A characteristic story has him on his death bed asking to examine a set of Wostenholm knives.  An obituarist remarked: ‘It would certainly have conduced more to his comfort and might probably have prolonged his days if he had in his late years devoted less thought and time to business; but it was not in the nature of Mr Wostenholm to do so’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 19 August 1876).  He was buried in Ecclesall churchyard, leaving nearly £250,000.  This was an unprecedented fortune for a cutlery manufacturer – worth a staggering £30m at 2019 prices.

Wostenholm and I*XL would be forever linked with the frontier era of the American Wild West. But that chapter in the firm’s history was closing. The American Civil War had brought Wostenholm’s transatlantic trade to a virtual standstill.  According to Wostenholm himself, the workroll in 1871 was 526 (288 men, 83 boys, and 54 girls) – a significant fall from the 1850s.  The trade recovered, though never to its former extent.  George Wostenholm would have known more than anyone that America was no longer the place he had first visited in the 1830s – a country where the Sheffield manufacturer could arrive with his sample case and return loaded with orders.  No sooner had the vast potential of the American market revealed itself than it began dissolving like a mirage. The ‘heroic’ age of the American frontiersman was passing and the Bowie knife was passing into history and folklore.  Moreover, the Americans were no longer content simply to import knives: they began manufacturing their own and introduced machinery to give them a competitive edge.  After returning from New York in 1869, Wostenholm warned his fellow manufacturers and workers that ‘the Sheffield trade with many parts of the world would soon be lost’.  He gave one of the reasons:  ‘In consequence of the introduction of machinery in America in the table-knife trade, a much more beautiful and cheaper article could be produced than in Sheffield’ (Sheffield Independent, 31 December 1869). These products would soon be protected by hefty tariffs, which priced most imported Sheffield knives out of the market.  As George Wostenholm was laid to rest, the problems for his successors were only beginning.

The new company chairman was Bernard Wake (1820-1891), who was quite unlike his predecessor. Wake was a successful solicitor, but he was better known for his prowess on the cricket pitch (he once played for Yorkshire) than for his cutlery expertise.  Other important directors at Wostenholm’s during the late nineteenth century included William Nixon (1842-1926) and James Cooper Wing (1844-1925).  None of them would prove to have the dynamism and vision of George Wostenholm.

Initially, Wostenholm’s continued to make good profits.  By 1888, the value of the company’s shares had doubled.  But the McKinley Tariff (1890) raised the duties on Wostenholm’s American exports to unprecedented heights and caused a crisis at the company.  An attempt by Wostenholm’s to cut workers’ wages provoked an immediate two-month strike in early 1891.  However, Wostenholm’s refused to abandon the American trade – even keeping an unprofitable New York office open until the early 1930s.  Meanwhile, attempts to break into other markets, such as Australia, were initially unsuccessful (Tweedale, 1993⁶).

After 1900, the managing director was James A. E. Paine (1849-1929).  Under his direction, in 1907 Wostenholm’s registered another silver mark (a century since its last one), but it still neglected the booming electro-plate market.  Paine became a diehard defender of the company’s craft traditions and opposed the introduction of machine technologies.  The result was that Wostenholm’s was a declining force in the decade before the First World War, whilst rivals such as Mappin & Webb, Joseph Rodgers, and Walker & Hall prospered.  The Wostenholm workforce fell to about 400 by the outbreak of the War.  Further contraction occurred between 1914 and 1918, when Wostenholm’s quality pocket-knife trade was severely disrupted.  Wostenholm’s workforce halved to about 200, and 36 men never returned from the trenches. Unable to compete effectively, even at the high-quality end of the market, Washington Works was becoming a relic. One director wrote that unless the board acted, its members would face ‘virtual extinction as directors, and possibly actual extinction as a company’ (Sheffield Archives, Nixon to Wing, 10 January 1918).

In 1922, Paine was eventually forced into retirement (he was into his seventies) and the management of the company passed to Frank B. Colver (1873-1954). He was a seasoned traveller in the USA and Canada, who recognised the superiority of American mass production technologies. He had also toured Solingen in 1919 to assess the reasons for Germany’s successes. Despite some trepidation from Wostenholm’s senior directors, Colver overhauled the antiquated administration at Washington Works and installed American machines for making pocket-knives. However, turnover had plummeted after the First World War and in 1923 Wostenholm’s suspended dividend payments to the shareholders. Trading became even worse in the Slump. In 1930, a reconstruction scheme at Wostenholm’s reduced capital from £150,000 to £51,800. In 1933, J. B. Thomas, a leading Sheffield accountant and financial adviser (who was also adviser to Hadfields steel company), was appointed chairman to steady the ship.

More positively, during this period Wostenholm’s range of cutlery widened. Pocket knives, hand-forged from crucible steel, remained an important line. So, too, did traditional straight razors. But stainless steel table cutlery now made its appearance, either as boxed knives or cased sets. Kitchen knives were on offer for the butcher, baker, pastry cook, and provision dealer. The company also followed the vogue for serrated (or as Wostenholm’s termed them) saw-edged bread knives. Kitchen knives with a saw edge were also available for slicing tomatoes, cutting fruit and vegetables, and preparing grapefruit. A major departure was the installation of a scissor plant from Germany. Scisssors could now be drop-forged and ground by machine. Wostenholm’s made a speciality of chromium-plating cast steel scissors, which combined the stainless properties of chromium with the sharp edge of carbon steel. By 1932, fifty workers – suitably protected by rubber gloves and fans – were involved in plating chromium onto scissors, with plans to recruit another fifty (Ironmonger, 25 June 1932). Slowly, Wostenholm’s swung back into profitability and in 1935 dividend payments resumed – the first distribution for over a decade.

In 1940, part of Washington Works was destroyed by a German bomb, though it avoided total destruction. At the end of the War, the firm’s London sales director, Harold C. Befield (1895-1962) completed a house history of the company. It was an uninspiring and not always accurate effort, which largely focused on the glories of the past. It contained the fiction that an ‘I*XL’ knife was found on the body of Col. James Bowie at the Alamo (Bexfield, 1945¹).

Wostenholm’s was poorly positioned to exploit the economic upturn in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  In 1955 and 1957, respectively, the firm acquired Christopher Johnson and Champion, partly to strengthen the company in the scissors market. In 1958 a new showroom was opened and a fresh range of table cutlery (‘Monte Carlo’) was introduced, designed by an outside consultant, Guy Bellamy. In 1958, the managing director, Sidney Fowler, travelled to Canada (Wostenholm’s best overseas market) to drum up business. The signs were not encouraging. ‘The market is absolutely swamped with Japanese and German cutlery …’, he communicated to his fellow directors; adding that in Edmonton he was greeted with the words, ‘Your goods are OK, but your delivery is B. awful’ (Sheffield Archives, Fowler to Wostenholm’s, 12 June 1958).  ‘Monte Carlo’ cutlery was plagued with production problems, which meant that Wostenholm’s fell behind in overseas deliveries.  

In 1961, the firm employed about 350 workers. Most of Wostenholm’s sales were in the UK, but this market was being swallowed by imports from the Far East. In 1971, Wostenholm was bought by Joseph Rodgers & Sons and the new company (Rodgers-Wostenholm) moved into premises at Guernsey Road, Heeley.  In 1975 this joint firm was bought by Richards, which in turn was absorbed in 1977 by Imperial Knife, an American cutlery conglomerate based in New York.  The Imperial connection linked the rump of Wostenholm with a famous name in US cutlery – Schrade. This led to the production of a small range of pocket-knives marked ‘I*XL Schrade Wostenholm’. These included heavy-duty stockman’s knives with stainless blades and wooden handles. Some had an etched cartouche on the master blade, enclosing ‘1787’ – the registration date of I*XL.

In 1982, Rodgers-Wostenholm moved to part of Richards’ factory at Moore Street, where about a hundred workers were employed (Quality, May/June 1982).  However, the business lost money for its American owners and by 1983 the Richards-Rodgers-Wostenholm group was bankrupt. The I*XL brand was briefly owned by Meteor Industries. It then passed to Egginton. Washington Works had been demolished in 1978. The Wostenholm company records are preserved at Sheffield Archives.

There is a further brief history of Wostenholm’s on the Egginton Group website - click here  (www.eggintongroup.co.uk/history/the-history-of-george-wostenholm.html)

¹ Bexfield, H., A Short History of Sheffield Cutlery and the House of Wostenholm (Sheffield, 1945)

² Coward, H., Reminiscences of Henry Coward (London, 1919)

³ Tweedale, G., Sheffield Steel and America:  A Century of Commercial and Technological Interdependence, 1830-1930 (Cambridge, 1987)

⁴ Flayderman, Norm, The Bowie Knife: Unsheathing an American Legend (Woonsocket, RI, 2004)

⁵ Williamson, W. R., I*XL Means I Excel:  A Short History of the I*XL Bowie Knife (1974)

⁶ Tweedale, G., ‘Strategies for Decline:  George Wostenholm & Son and the Sheffield Cutlery Industry’, 25 THAS 17 (1993)