Where It All Started Our company has a remarkable history that spans an impressive 263 years, but unofficially longer than that. The story passed down through our family is that an ancestor of mine started manufacturing scissors in a picturesque lo ...
Over the years, I have discovered that William Whiteley’s actively engaged with or had connections to Royalty and Chatsworth. In 1879, we acquired Thomas Wilkinson, who crafted scissors for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, earning Wilkinson the Roya ...
Whiteleys: Trusted Scissor Supplier to the Ministry of Defense Prior to the 1990s, Whiteleys manufactured scissors for the Ministry of Defence (MOD). During that time, fabric cutting was predominantly done by hand, necessitating the production of s ...
The Festival of Britain took place just six years after World War Two ended, and was held so that people could celebrate Britain and give the population a boost by everyone being able to see how British manufacturing had recovered and what great th ...
These scissors arrived in a very dirty condition due to their age and the owners were keen to know how old they were, alongside other details! The scissors were made by Thomas Wilkinson’s factory around 1850. They are part of a series of nine Scis ...
A customer bought some old, but unused 8” scissors of ours from e-bay and immediately sent a question to us about how old we thought they were. As I have been at Whiteley’s for so long, I recognised them and took them down to Andrew, our longest sta ...
In 2003, Sheffield completed the building of its Winter Gardens which were the largest of its kind to be opened in the UK in the last 100 years. Sheffield City council invited HM Queen Elizabeth to open the gardens and wanted to give her a special gi ...
Since we began making scissors in 1760, we’ve been commissioned to make quite a few unusual and spectacular pairs of scissors – from trimming the grass around golf course holes, to being presented to royalty. We now have many of these historical pi ...
This is an upholstery fabric loaned to us by Brita Hirsch who fell in love with it some years ago. It was woven by Abraham Moon, who have been manufacturing fabric in Guiseley, West Yorkshire since 1837. Almost as much of an impressive history as o ...
One day back in the early 90’s, at Old Whiteley’s, we received a package from a famous London jewellers. Inside was a pair of scissors belonging to the Queen which needed repairing. Not the first time we had worked on bespoke scissors for royalty, t ...