From completing his apprenticeship (1843 to 1848) to becoming owner of the business less than a year later, Edward Pryor made his name through the quality of the marks he made – but his real legacy was the generations of apprentices that found their ...
White’s Sheffield District Directory is a historical directory that provides information about the city of Sheffield and its surrounding districts. Directories like these were common in the 19th and early 20th centuries and served as valuable resour ...
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 ...
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 ...
Did you know, we manufacture a wide range of left-handed scissors? We were recently approached to help with the return of the Birmingham Black Sabbath bench by supplying Black Sabbath star Tony Iommi with a pair of our left-handed scissors. The bench ...
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 ...
The 1800s: a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom. From the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837, to her death in 1901, it was an extraordinary time for our country and commonly k ...