Walker & Hall was established by George Walker (1816-1881), a Derbyshire-born table-knife forger.  Walker had learned electro-plating in Birmingham at the behest of the first Sheffield licensee of the process, John Harrison.  George Walker later quarrelled with Harrison and joined forces with a Doncaster schoolteacher, Samuel Coulson, and William Robson.  Coulson supplied the capital and they began an electro-plate venture at Electro Works, Howard Street, after taking out a license from Elkington of Birmingham in 1845.  The firm was named George Walker & Co, electro-platers and gilders.  Initially, it plated for the trade and James Dixon & Sons became a customer.

After Robson retired in 1848, Henry Hall (c. 1802-1889) joined the partnership.  Hall had prospered in the grocery trade, partly in partnership with Sheffield wholesale grocer Edward Bingham (1808-1880).  He had retired to his native Worcester, but electro-plate tempted Hall with a fresh challenge.  In 1852, when the firm employed about 60 workers, Coulson left, and Walker & Hall was formed.  Hall was the traveller and Walker the technical man.  John Edward Bingham (1839-1915) – Edward Bingham’s son and the nephew of Anne Hall (Henry Hall’s wife) – joined them in 1856.

Walker & Hall made good profits and registered its first silver mark in 1862.  After this steady start, it emerged as one of the leaders in the silver and electro-plate trades.  Walker told the Census (1861) that the firm employed 136 workers.  In 1865, he retired to Warwick and died at Southport on 4 May 1881, leaving £13,378.  Hall retired in 1873 and died at Abergavenny on 3 January 1889, aged 87, leaving £15,548.  John E. Bingham took control with his brother Charles Henry Bingham (1848-1900) as partner.  In 1881, J. E. Bingham told the Census that the firm employed 413 workers.  Other sources stated that the firm had between 500 and 700 workers by the 1880s (New Monthly, October 1882; Sheffield Independent, 4 July 1885).  In 1892, Walker & Hall bought for £1,000 the assets of silversmiths, Henry Wilkinson & Co.

In 1863, John Bingham had married Maria Fawcett, the daughter of William Fawcett, a director at James Dixon & Sons.  He became Master Cutler in 1881 and in 1884 (when he was knighted).  The Binghams were ‘men of mark’, even physically.  Charles H. Bingham, who was Master Cutler in 1894, ‘stood 6ft 3in, beating his nephew, Mr A. E. Bingham, by half an inch.  Even he, however, fell short of his grandfather, who stood 6ft 7in in his stockings’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 3 October 1900).  When Charles H. Bingham died on 2 October 1900, aged 52 (leaving £74,000), Sir John’s only son, Albert Edward Bingham (1867-1945), became a director.

Fuelling Walker & Hall’s rise was the almost insatiable Victorian and Edwardian demand for silver plated goods:  fancy entrée dishes, soup tureens, meat and venison dishes, tea trays, presentation plates, and prize cups.  The firm apparently cast and plated its own products, ground its own cutlery, had engineers’ and cabinet-makers’ shops, and even made its own ‘Instantaneous Plate Cleaner’.  All the firm’s products, whether large or small, were stamped with the ‘Flag’ trade mark – a banner bearing the letters ‘W & H’ – which was registered in 1861.  In the nineteenth century, the company was the most prolific lodger of marks at the Sheffield Assay Office: it registered nine between 1862 and 1896.  In 1904, Walker & Hall also received the first gold assay ticket, after the Assay Office was allowed to stamp its own gold mark.

Electro Works was described as ‘one of the sights of Sheffield, particularly at night time, when its hundreds of close-set windows, emitting a ray of light from within, present a very brilliant and striking scene indeed’ (The Century’s Progress, 1893).  By 1906, besides an office at Holborn Viaduct, London, Walker & Hall had sales outlets in Glasgow, Leeds, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, and five other cities.  It also had offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, and Cape Town.  Most of these branches began as stockrooms, so that sales representatives could supply the catering and shipping industries.  But Sir John Bingham realised he could cut out the middlemen – the retail jewellers – by turning the branch stockrooms into retail showrooms.  To attract members of the public, Bingham offered goods at ‘wholesale’ price – his famous 50 per cent discount (a fictional reduction, which undercut ordinary retailers by about ten per cent).  First, though, individuals had to be ‘introduced’ and ‘accepted’ as a customer, ‘which was presented as a great privilege’ (Booth, 1991).  Bingham’s showrooms and discount were a major factor in Walker & Hall’s rise, though the policy antagonized other retailers and led to problems in the twentieth century.

In Sheffield, the business and public activity of Sir John Bingham was described as being ‘so comprehensive … as to touch almost every department of local life’ (Sheffield & District Who’s Who, 1905).  He was a Conservative, a zealous Protestant and Orangeman, and a prominent Freemason (his oil portrait hangs in Sheffield’s Masonic headquarters at Tapton Hall).  Bingham constantly made good copy with his forthright views on smoke abatement and the dangers of granite setts (having once been thrown on his head, when his horse slipped on them).  Observed one newspaper editor: ‘He is a man of strong antipathies.  The mention of granite to him is worse than the waving of a red flag before a bull’ (Derry, 1902).  For several years, he was president of the Sheffield branch of the protectionist Fair Trade League, founded by J. F. Atkinson.  Bingham always seems to have been involved in a fight of one kind or another.  Her hated organised labour and in 1902 offered £10,000 as an inducement to his fellow industrialists to form a combination to fight trade union ‘mischief’.  He had a long-standing feud, dating from 1880, with the Sheffield Assay Office.  Bingham resented its assaying fees – which he claimed were too high – and its slow service (until the 1890s the Office was only open three days week).  In 1906, after the Assay Office had generated a surplus of £13,000, he served a writ on it for the same sum as recompense for alleged over-charging.  Another claim that Bingham pursued in the late nineteenth century was that the electro-plate process had been discovered by George Walker and not by Elkington.  This bogus claim was peddled in the press with increasing vehemence by Bingham, until it was discredited by Robert E. Leader (Tweedale, 1997).

Bingham headed a corps of the local Volunteers and enjoyed the title of Colonel.  Only Bingham could have founded a group named The Sheffield Society for the Recognition of Bravery.  He organized his staff like an army, too, and was an early advocate of national service (Olive, 1994).  Paradoxically, he combined militarism with support for the international peace movement, which flourished in the years immediately before the First World War.  The company was then reaching its peak.  Sir John was now into his seventies, but he had not loosened his hold on the business.  However, his old age was increasingly tinged by folie de grandeur.  In September 1912, he set off across the Atlantic simply to register a two-line peace resolution at an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Boston (New York Times, 3 October 1912).  A press story has him returning from this trip to Liverpool late at night, but he was still back at Electro Works by 10.00 o’clock the next morning.  In 1913, he was at the French resort of Le Touquet, where Yorkshire MP Arnold Rowntree encountered him.  He found Bingham a ‘bit of bore’, who was ‘very busy promoting a huge combine of employers to smash Trades Unionism, which seems a curious accompaniment to an international peace movement’ (Parker, 2002).  Bingham died unexpectedly in London on 18 March 1915, after an operation for an abdominal thrombosis.  He was aged 75.  His gravestone in Ecclesall churchyard is surprisingly modest for such a bombastic individual, who was also one of the richest men in Yorkshire.  He left £342,136 and a substantial mansion, West Lea in Ranmoor, which was eventually given to the Church of England (and is now Ranmoor Parish Centre).

The First World War was a major setback for Walker & Hall as demand for luxury products fell, silver supplies diminished, and craftsmen were either conscripted or found better paid jobs in the big steel works.  For a time, the old glory seemed intact.  Sir Albert Bingham became Master Cutler in 1918, and the next year rolled out the red carpet for King George V and the Prince of Wales and gave them a tour of Electro Works.  In 1919, Walker & Hall (alongside Barker & Allen, Birmingham) acquired Wm. Gallimore.  In 1920, Walker & Hall became a private limited company with £450,000 capital.  Its trade catalogues – which bragged that it was the largest works of its kind in the British Empire – had an impressive array of cutlery (spoons, forks, table and pocket knives), luxury goods (canteens, glassware, clocks, travelling cases), and presentation regalia (such as cups and masonic mallets and trowels).  Products continued to be sold with the famous 50 per cent discount.  However, stainless steel and chromium-plated cutlery, changes in consumer taste, and economic depression were a severe challenge for the company.

A German bomb destroyed most of Walker & Hall’s records in 1940, so that reconstructing the firm’s history is difficult.  But clearly, in the interwar period the firm stagnated, and the management lacked Sir John’s drive.  Sir Albert, who lived near Retford, was known as the ‘sporting baronet’, because he preferred riding to hounds and shooting grouse to running the business.  He left that to his managers.  Sir John’s general manager had been Heber Ward (1852-1921), who had been replaced in 1917 by John Coulson Riddle (1866-1938).  The latter had started at Walker & Hall in 1887 as its London sales representative.  In 1919, Riddle became the firm’s managing director.  Other key board members included Lt.-Colonel Arthur Neale Lee (1877-1954), a solicitor and distinguished soldier, who had joined the Walker & Hall board in 1919.  Lee was cut from the same cloth as Sir John.  When he became Master Cutler in 1932, Lee used the occasion to blame the world depression on excessive taxation and ‘outside influences’, which he alleged fomented labour unrest (Peach, 1960).  When Riddle died in 1938, Lee and George Reeves Slater (an accountant) became joint-managing directors.  Walker & Hall’s non-executive director was Major Pierre (Peter) Elliot Inchbald (1890-1958), who was a wealthy stockbroker and had married Sir Albert’s daughter, Esmé.

Despite losing part of its factory in the blitz and its Sheffield, London, and Liverpool showrooms, Walker & Hall survived the Second World War largely intact.  Electro Works still dominated the city skyline.  A company booklet (c.1955) illustrated its main departments: EPNS ware (the largest), cutlery (knives), cabinets and cases, sterling silver, pewter, hire, plate cleaning preparations and repair.  The firm’s output was destined for ships, hotels, service messes, and the catering business generally (with the Government as a big customer).  However, Walker & Hall was in financial trouble and in dire need of modernisation.  Sir Albert Bingham had died on 25 February 1945.  After his death, his executor and trustee, Sir Douglas S. Branson (1893-1981) – another military man – became chairman.  He appointed as his managing director Peter Bingham Inchbald (1919-2004), who was P. E. Inchbald’s son (and thus the great grandson of Sir John).  Peter Inchbald lived in London and was an artist, designer, and writer of detective novels.  In 1953, Inchbald – responding somewhat reluctantly to a request from his father to help rescue the ailing family firm – headed to Sheffield.

After touring the works and its fifteen branches, Inchbald concluded that the company was ‘Victorian, inbred, dead on its feet’ (Inchbald, 2013).  Walker & Hall Ltd employed about 500 workers, with Electro Works still organised as a federation of independent craftsmen, organised into semi-autonomous shops.  According to Inchbald, the firm had barely recorded a profit for forty years.  But this had not prevented the partners from becoming very rich!  In 1945, Sir Albert had left the enormous sum of £981,847; Riddle left £36,471; and A. N. Lee’s estate was £63,353.  Inchbald found that he and his brother-in-law, Lt-Col J. (Jimmy) T. A. Wilson, were the only board members under sixty (Hughes, 1967).  In a published memoir, Jack of All Trades (2013), Inchbald gave a withering assessment of the various directors and managers as either ‘stuffy’, ‘geriatric’, or ‘fundamentally thick’.

Inchbald hired management consultants Urwick Orr.  In 1960, he launched a programme of rationalisation.  One strategy was to push the company towards the forefront of design.  He recruited David Mellor as a consultant, which resulted in the ‘Pride’ and ‘Symbol’ ranges of table cutlery.  Inchbald disliked the rituals of the Company of Cutlers – its male-dominated Feasts, long-winded speeches, and smoke-filled rooms – and shunned such gatherings.  But he did agree to serve on the Council of Industrial Design, which gave him a platform to ram home the ‘design’ message.  In his lecture, ‘Silver, Steel and Style’, Inchbald criticised his audience at the Design & Research Association in London for being indifferent to cutlery design.  He told them that Sheffield and Birmingham were ‘extremely ugly places’ and added: ‘We must become an engineering industry, rapidly, in order to survive.  We can only compete by making the machine do the chores.  Stainless steel forces an engineering approach'. (‘Cutlery – The Poor Relation’, Sheffield Telegraph, 7 April 1960).

Recognising the need to switch from craft-based silverware to volume production of stainless cutlery, Walker & Hall installed new plant at a disused jam factory in Bolsover, Derbyshire.  To market this plant’s output, Inchbald modernised Walker & Hall’s existing retail outlets, abolished the old discount, and began selling tableware through department stores.  Inchbald, however, failed to complete his modernisation programme.  He also failed to make the company profitable again.  He blamed his own bad judgement: ‘I have never been very streetwise … I overestimated the imminence and pace of the coming revolution in public taste; I was too eager, much too eager, to buy the sales and production forecasts.  And I made mistakes over pricing’ (Inchbald, 2013).  On the hand, the times were hardly favourable with growing competition from the Far East and the machinations of property developers and speculators.  In 1963, Walker & Hall was sold to the Clore group for £300,000 (some of which was paid in shares) and merged into British Silverware Ltd.  This group included Sheffield firms (Gladwin and Mappin & Webb, and, ironically, Elkington of Birmingham.  In 1965, that great Victorian relic, Electro Works, was demolished.  The factory in Bolsover was also closed and its machinery transferred to Elkington in Walsall.  British Silverware itself closed in 1971.  Walker & Hall was revived briefly as a retailing brand, but only under the control of Mappin & Webb.