Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T16:03:55.965Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Personal Capitalism and British Industrial Decline: The Personally Managed Firm and Business Strategy in Sheffield, 1880–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Roger Lloyd-Jones
Affiliation:
Roger Lloyd-Jones is principal lecturer in modern business history and subject leader of the History Group atSheffield Hallam University
Myrddin J. Lewis
Affiliation:
Myrddin J. Lewis is senior lecturer in business history and history and computing atSheffield Hallam University

Extract

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has maintained that the persistence of the personally managed firm in Britain may be a cause of that nation's long-run industrial decline. This article contributes to the debate over decline through a detailed exploration of the business role of personally managed firms in a strategic sector of the Second Industrial Revolution: the metal and metal-making trades of Sheffield. Our study shows that the business strategies of Sheffield firms, based on quality production and flexible technology, had close similarities to those of American companies described by scholars such as Philip Scranton. Many of the Sheffield firms were not lacking in enterprise; they demonstrated tenacity and, in certain key segments of the metal trades, enjoyed a high degree of business success. Our examination of personal capitalism in Sheffield suggests that the terms of the debate over Britain's industrial decline may require further refinement.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Penrose, Edith, The Theory of the Growth of the Firm (Oxford, England, 1959), 9Google Scholar.

2 See Coleman, D. C., “The Uses and Abuses of Business History,” Business History 24 (1987): 151–52Google Scholar: the most important contribution to business history “has come in the shape of A. D. Chandler's justly celebrated works on ‘strategy and structure’ in the evolution of US business.”

3 Chandler's ideas have been developed in three outstanding works: Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)Google Scholar, developed the core generalization that structure followed strategy; The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar, expanded the concept of transaction costs and the rise of professional managers and explored micro-macro relations; Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar, developed a comparative analysis of business structures in the United States, Germany, and Britain. See also The Essential Alfred Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business, ed. McCraw, Thomas K. (Boston, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar.

4 Chandler, Scale and Scope, 262. See also Hannah, Leslie, “Scale and Scope: Towards a European Visible Hand?Business History 33 (April 1991): 301CrossRefGoogle Scholar: personal capitalism is “at the core of Chandler's description of British entrepreneurial failure?”

5 Contributions to this debate can be found in two reviews of Scale and Scope: Hannah, “European Visible Hand”; and Supple, Barry, “Scale and Scope: Alfred Chandler and the Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism,” Economic History Review 44 (Aug. 1991): 500514Google Scholar. For a broader review of personal capitalism in Britain, see Church, Roy, “The Limitations of the Personal Capitalism Paradigm,” Business History Review 64 (Winter 1990): 703–10Google Scholar.

6 Chandler, Scale and Scope, 262.

7 Payne, Peter L., British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (London, 1988), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hannah, Leslie, The Rise of the Corporate Economy, 2d ed. (London, 1983)Google Scholar, chap. 2.

8 We are presently engaged in a research project to reconstruct the business structure of Nottingham, 1880–1920.

9 Chandler, Scale and Scope, 45; Chandler, Visible Hand, 258.

10 Levine, A. L., Industrial Retardation in Britain (New York, 1967), 20Google Scholar.

11 Piore, Michael J. and Sabel, Charles F., The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Storper, Michael and Christopherson, Susan, “Flexible Specialization and Regional Industrial Agglomerations: The Case of the U.S. Motion Picture Industry,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77, no. 1 (1987): 105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Vatter, Harold G., “The Position of Small Business in the Structure of American Manufacturing, 1870–1970,” in Small Business in American Life, ed. Bruchey, Stuart (New York, 1980), 142–62Google Scholar; James H. Soltow, “Origins of Small Business and the Relationships between Large and Small Firms: Metal Fabricating and Machinery Making in New England, 1890–1957,” in ibid., 192–211; Scranton, Philip, “Diversity in Diversity: Flexible Production and American Industrialization, 1880—1930,” Business History Review 65 (Spring 1991): 2790CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scranton, Philip, “Build a Firm, Start Another: The Bromleys and Family Firm Entrepreneurship in the Philadelphia Region,” Business History 35 (Oct. 1993): 115–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Livesay, Harold C., “Entrepreneurial Dominance in Businesses Large and Small, Past and Present,” Business History Review 63 (Spring 1989): 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mansel G. Blackford, “Small Business in America: A Historiographic Survey,” ibid. 65 (Spring 1991): 1-26; Ingham, John H., Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820-1920 (Columbus, Ohio, 1991)Google Scholar; quotation from Livesay, “Entrepreneurial Dominance,” 4; emphasis in the original.

13 Quoted in Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 74.

14 Soltow, James H., “Origins of Small Business: Metal Fabricators and Machinery Makers in New England, 1890–1957,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55, pt. 10 (1965): 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Blackford, “Small Business in America,” 13.

16 Geelhoed, E. Bruce, “Business and the American Family: A Local View,” Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 33 (Autumn 1980): 5867Google Scholar, quoted in Blackford, “Small Business in America,” 12; Scranton, “The Bromleys,” 139.

17 As Scranton has shown, their companies “cycled from being means for getting a living to being large players on a national scale”; “The Bromleys,” 134. See Church, Roy, “The Family Firm in Industrial Capitalism: International Perspectives on Hypotheses and History,” Business History 35 (Oct. 1993): 1743CrossRefGoogle Scholar; D. C. Coleman, “Failings and Achievements: Some British Businesses, 1910–80,” ibid. 29 (1987).

18 Payne, Peter L., “Family Business in Britain: An Historical and Analytical Survey,” in Family Business in the Era of Industrial Growth, ed. Okochi, Akio and Yasuoka, Shigeaki (Tokyo, 1984), 172–73Google Scholar; Hannah, Leslie, “Visible and Invisible Hands in Great Britain,” in Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Modern Industrial Enterprise, ed. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., and Daems, Herman (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 53Google Scholar.

19 Chandler, Scale and Scope, 235–36.

20 Ibid., 240, and as quoted in Hannah, “European Visible Hand,” 302. Roy Church writes, “The entrepreneurial or family-controlled enterprise… refers to a firm in which the founders and their heirs recruited salaried managers but continued to be influential shareholders, held executive managerial positions, and exercised decisive influence on company policy.” Church, “The Family Firm in Industrial Capitalism,” 18.

21 Coleman, “Failings and Achievements,” 2.

22 Payne, “Family Business,” 171.

23 The use of rateable values as a proxy of size is a well-established procedure. See Lloyd-Jones, Roger and Lewis, M. J., Manchester and the Age of the Factory: The Business Structure of Cottonopolis in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1988), chap. 3Google Scholar; Lloyd-Jones, and Lewis, , “Industrial Structure and Firm Growth: The Sheffield Iron and Steel Industry, 1880–1901,” Business History 25 (1983): 261–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. G. Timmins, “Concentration and Integration in the Sheffield Crucible Steel Industry,” ibid. 24 (1982). “Rateable values” reflect a local tax placed on a property asset (factory, warehouse, residential house, etc.) based on a valuation of the property undertaken by the local authority (town or county council).

24 Pollard, Sidney, A History of Labour in Sheffield (Liverpool, England, 1959), 132Google Scholar. Lloyd-Jones, Roger and Lewis, M. J., “Business Structure and Political Economy in Sheffield: The Metal Trades, 1880–1920s,” in The History of the City of Sheffield, 1843–1993, vol. 2 (Sheffield, England, 1993), 218–24Google Scholar.

25 For example, the founders of John Brown's and Cammell's “are frequently cited as self-made men who began without capital and by dint of business success gained wealth and knighthoods.” Erickson, Charlotte, British Industrialists: Steel and Hosiery (Cambridge, England, 1959), 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Grant, Alan, Steel and Ships: The History of John Brown's (London, 1950)Google Scholar; Trebilcock, Clive, Arms and Enterprise: The Vickers Brothers, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, England, 1981)Google Scholar; Erickson, Steel and Hosiery, 143–47. In 1907, Vickers Sons & Maxim employed 22,500 in eight U.K. plants; John Brown's, 16,205 in three U.K. plants; Cammell-Laird's, 3,950 in five U.K. plants; see Shaw, Christine, “The Large Manufacturing Employers of 1907,” Business History 25 (1983): 5253CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In 1914 Firth's employed 3,100 in its Sheffield works; Tweedale, Geoffrey, “The Business and Technology of Sheffield Steelmakmg,” in History of Sheffield, 2: 163Google Scholar. From the 1870s some notable Sheffield steel firms— Sanderson's, Firth's, and Jessop's—established overseas subsidiaries in the United States. Tweedale, Geoffrey, Sheffield Steel and America: A Century of Commercial and Technological Interdependence, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, England, 1987), 87, 9197Google Scholar. By the 1890s, large firms also developed in cutlery, notably Joseph Rodger's (founded 1794), which employed two thousand workers in 1897. These firms, however, were the exception rather than the rule. Taylor, Sally, “The Industrial Structure of the Sheffield Cutlery Trades, 1870–1914,” in History of Sheffield, 2: 191, 521n34Google Scholar.

26 There was severe criticism from Sheffield businessmen over the adverse effects of the McKinley Tariff of 1890, and over the imposition of the German tariff on tool steel of 1901. See Lewis, M. J., “The Growth and Development of Sheffield's Industrial Structure, 1880–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Sheffield Hallam University, 1990), 187–98Google Scholar.

27 Cottrell, P. L., Industrial Finance, 1830—1914: The Finance and Organisation of British Manufacturing Industry (London, 1980), 74Google Scholar. Private limited status was a means of retaining family control. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr.,“The Growth of the Transnational Industrial Firm in the United States and the United Kingdom: A Comparative Analysis,” Economic History Review 33 (Aug. 1980): 406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pollard, A History of Labour, 132. In England there were no legal restrictions on the growth of firms in the second half of the nineteenth century: “England after 1850 had the most permissive law in the whole of Europe and one of its distinguishing features was the facility for the formation of a company.” Cottrell, Industrial Finance, 41. For a comparison of the legal systems in Britain and America, see Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, The Law, and Politics (New York, 1988), pt. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 For a discussion of the role of businessmen in Sheffield's community, see Mackerness, E. D., “Sheffield's Cultural Life,” in History of Sheffield, 2: 429–62Google Scholar.

29 William Edgar Allen to Robert Woodward, 30 March 1908, Records of Edgar Allen & Co. (Aurora 541b), Loose Letters, Sheffield Archives.

30 Woodward to Allen, 18 Feb. 1908, ibid.

31 Allen to Woodward, 27 Feb. 1908, ibid.

32 Woodward to Allen, 19 March 1908, ibid.

33 Allen to Woodward, 27 March 1908, ibid.

34 Similar observations could be made about a number of family firms in Britain. For example, Coleman, “Failings and Achievements,” 2, observes, “In the family glass making firm of Pilkingtons management and organisation had changed little since the nineteenth century; those outside the family were given only limited rights to determine policy.”

35 Tweedale, “Business and Technology,” 162, 163; Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, “Business Structure and Political Economy,” 232.

36 Beckett to Wostenholm's, 23 June 1893, Journey Reports of Edward Beckett in the United States, Records of George Wostenholm & Co. (Wos R 12e), Sheffield Archives.

37 Pollard, Sidney, Three Centuries of Sheffield Steel: The Story of a Family Business (Sheffield, England, 1954), 46Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., 54.

40 Spear & Jackson to Surveyor of Taxes, Sheffield, 9 May, 3 July 1906; General Profit and Loss Account, 31 Dec. 1912, all from Records of Spear & Jackson (SJC 69), Sheffield Archives; American Machinist 36 (1912): 33EGoogle Scholar; Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 290.

41 Payne, Peter L., “Iron and Steel Manufacturers,” in The Development of Industry and Foreign Competition, ed. Aldcroft, Derek H. (London, 1968), 72Google Scholar; Tweedale, “Business and Technology,” 158. Figures calculated from Mitchell, B. R. and Dean, Phyllis, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, England, 1962), 146–48; 304–5Google Scholar.

42 Sheffield the Arsenal of the World (Sheffield Local Authority Publication, n.d. [1916?]), 31Google Scholar.

43 Christopher Johnson's to J. W. Bundy (Melbourne), 23 Sept. 1886, Letter Book, Records of Christopher Johnson & Co. (MD 2374), Sheffield Archives. Also in 1886 Samuel Osborne, a tool steel manufacturer (employing seven hundred men in 1896 and one thousand by 1914, according to Tweedale, “Business and Technology,” 162–63), claimed “that we have been able to meet the Americans in many of our foreign markets…. the manufacturers of today are very much more alive to the need for quality than they have ever been.” Quoted in Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 118—19.

44 Spear & Jackson to H. M. Howe (Durban), 14 May 1906, Records of Spear & Jackson (SJC 69).

45 John Kenyon & Co. Bi-Centenary Celebration (Sheffield, England, 1910), 12Google Scholar.

46 Robert Woodward to William Edgar Allen, 7 March 1908, Records of Edgar Allen (Aurora 541b). In the production of rails in the United States, there was considerable tension between the large integrated steel-manufacturing firms and their customers the railway companies. Thus, Charles Dudley, the chief chemist of the Pennsylvania Railroad, claimed bitterly in 1908 that the large manufacturers were ignoring the need of customers for quality output. Knoedler, Janet, “Market Structure, Industrial Research, and Consumers of Innovation: Forging Backward Linkages to Research in the Turn-of-theCentury U.S Steel Industry,” Business History Review 67 (Spring 1993): 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 146; quotation from Spear & Jackson to F. B. Lee, Toronto, 14 Aug. 1906, Records of Spear & Jackson (SJC 69).

48 Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change in Western Europe, 1750 to the Present (New York, 1969), 315Google Scholar.

49 Industries of Sheffield and District (Sheffield, England, 1905), 106Google Scholar; A Family Business for Over 200 Years, Mr. J. Beardshaw & Sons Ltd., of Sheffield,” British Steelmaker 9 (1943): 5558Google Scholar; Baltic Steel Works Gazette 2, no. 1 (Joseph Beardshaw & Co., Sheffield, 1923), 38Google Scholar. The division of production and commercial functions was a common practice among Sheffield firms. The family partners of Marsh Bros., Harry Parker and John Parker Marsh, also divided responsibilities on similar lines. Pollard, Three Centuries of Sheffield Steel, 48.

50 The rising importance of London and the Southeast as the most rapidly growing economic region in the late nineteenth century is examined by Lee, C. H., “Regenerated Growth and Structural Change in Victorian Britain,” Economic History Review 34 (1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The firm of Spear & Jackson was also targeting the London market for the sale of special tool steel. See Spear & Jackson to J. B. Caryesford (London agent), 10 Jan. 1907, Spear & Jackson Records (SJC 69); Joseph Beardshaw, Minute Books, entries for 28 Sept. 1894, and 20 Dec. 1895; Monthly Report of H. Spear, 20 March 1899; Monthly Report 28 Aug. 1903, Records of Joseph Beardshaw (MD 7081 5).

51 Monthly Report, 27 Aug. 1897, ibid.; Baltic Steel Works Gazette (1923), ii.

52 Monthly Report of H. Spear, 29 July 1900, Records of Joseph Beardshaw (MD 7081 5). After 1900 the company developed high-speed steel for machine tools; see “A Family Business for Over 200 Years,” 57–60.

53 Baltic Steel Works Gazette (1923), 40. Family recruitment to sales positions was common practice. Thus, the directors of Spear & Jackson appointed D. Jackson Haggie, the grandson of the firm's founder, as deputy in the London office. He had been entirely engaged in the business since leaving school, being trained in the various departments of the works. His technical experience was invaluable in “endeavouring to open up new customers.” Spear & Jackson to P. Robinson, Sydney, 12 May 1911, Records of Spear & Jackson (SJC 69).

54 Letter Books, Miscellaneous Notes (n.d.), Records of Burgon & Ball (B & B 69), Sheffield Archives; “Index to the Records of Burgon & Ball,” Sheffield Archives; “Burgon & Ball Ltd.,” Quality of Sheffield (Sheffield, July 1977), 77Google Scholar; Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 194–210.

55 J. Swire & Co. (Liverpool) to Burgon & Ball, 1 Nov. 1871, Records of Burgon & Ball (B & B 68). This factor was recognized by the American Machinist 28 (1905): 746Google Scholar, which commented on the opportunities for small firms “who know the importance of using the best tools and of putting into the finished product the best practically obtainable material.”

56 Letters from Frederick to William Burgon, 28 Aug. 1887, Records of Burgon & Ball (B & B 70A). Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity,” 34, also shows that batch specialists in the United States developed the “capacity to create a wide range of intermediate or final goods” and pursued a “strategy of amassing sufficient lumps of diverse demand to keep the works going or expanding.”

57 Letters from Frederick to William Burgon, 15 April 1887 and 10 July 1887, Records of Burgon & Ball (B & B 70A). A similar marketing philosophy to meet American competition in Australia was adopted by two other Sheffield firms, Christopher Johnson's and Cooper Bros. See, for example, Christopher Johnson & Co. to William Cowlinshaw (Brisbane), 5 Sept. 1890, where the management comments on its success in combating American competition in files and edge tools by “maintaining a uniform system of quality.” Records of Christopher Johnson (MD 2374), Sheffield Archives. For Cooper Bros., see Letter Book 1883–1912, Records of Cooper Bros. (499/B), Sheffield Archives. When Burgon & Ball became a limited company in 1898, Daniel Doncaster's held 8,160 of Burgon & Ball, Ltd.'s £1 preference shares out of a total allocation of 20,000. Minutes of Burgon & Ball, Ltd., 1894–1915, 13 July 1898, Burgon & Ball Records (B & B 16).

58 Frederick Burgon to William Burgon, 25 July 1887; 6 and 28 Jan. 1888, Records of Burgon & Ball (B & B 70A).

59 Ibid., 11 Aug. 1887.

60 Ibid., 6 Jan. 1888; Quality of Sheffield, 77.

61 Soltow, “Origins of Small Business,” in Transactions, 27.

62 “Index of Burgon & Ball Records.”

63 Blackford, “Small Business in America,” 26.

64 Storper and Christopherson, “Flexible Specialization,” 105.

65 Scranton, “The Bromleys,” 115.

66 Piore and Sabel, Second Industrial Divide, 28–29, 104.

67 Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity,” 38.

68 Storper and Christopherson, “Flexible Specialization,” 105.

69 Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity,” 36.

70 Piore and Sabel, Second Industrial Divide, 311.

71 Pollard, A History of Labour, 50.

72 Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 139; Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 200.

73 Edward Beckett to Wostenholm's, 1 and 23 June 1893, Journey Reports of Edward Beckett in the United States, Records of Wostenholm's (Wos R 12e).

74 Handicrafts That Survive: Souvenir of the Master Cutlership of A. J. Hobson, 1902–1903 (Sheffield, England, 1903), 37, 38Google Scholar.

75 See Lloyd, G. I. H., The Cutlery Trades (London, 1913), 186–87Google Scholar; Townsend, H., “The Cutlery Trade,” in The Structure of British Industry, 2 vols., ed. Burn, Duncan (Cambridge, England, 1958), 2: 386–87Google Scholar.

76 Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 202.

77 American Machinist 29 (1905): 114EGoogle Scholar. See also Tweedale, “Business and Technology,” 160–62; Letter from Jonas & Colver (steel manufacturers) to Sheffield Chamber, 3 May 1900, Records of Sheffield Chamber of Commerce (LD 1986 [5]). Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 201–2, has observed that “Overall demand… was subject to wide, often unpredictable, seasonal and cyclical fluctuations.”

78 Monthly Report of H. Spear, 20 Oct. 1897 (negotiations for special lines in saws for the London retail trade); 24 June 1898 (negotiations with the India Office for band saws); 30 June 1899 (order from Royal Arsenal for a special mix of steel), Records of Joseph Beardshaw (MD 7081 5); American Machinist 36 (1912): 133EGoogle Scholar. One of the advantages of this system was that “the results of tests can be stated definitely to workmen” and modifications effected.

79 Memo, by Robert A. Hadfield, 28 April 1885; Robert A. Hadfield to J. D. Weeks (editor of the Pittsburgh publication The American Manufacturer), 29 May 1884; both from Hadfield Records (Hadfields 165), Sheffield Archives. Employment figures are from Tweedale, “Business and Technology,” 162.

80 Quoted in Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 149.

81 Memo, on Project for Laying Down Hot and Cold Rolling Plant, Jan. 1896, Records of Marsh Bros. (Marsh 105), Sheffield Archives; Pollard, Three Centuries of Sheffield Steel, 47.

82 Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity,” 32.

83 Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 203; More, G., Skill and the English Working Class (London, 1985), 176Google Scholar; see Scott, Allen J. and Storper, Michael, “Introduction,” in Production, Work, Territory: The Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism, ed. Scott, and Storper, (Boston, Mass., 1988), 12Google Scholar, who argue that “To speak of production without speaking of human labor is to abstract a technical and functional logic from its necessary social logic.”

84 American Machinist 38 (1913): 79E80EGoogle Scholar.

85 Brearley, Harry, Steel Makers (London, 1933), 85Google Scholar.

86 Under the “rule-of-thumb” method, a body “of knowledge had developed from earlier workers who had applied trial and error to achieve their results.” In the production of crucible steel, there was also a “peculiar combination of brute force and the highest skill.” Tweedale, Geoffrey, “Science, Innovation, and the Rule of Thumb,” in The Challenge of New Technology: Innovation in British Business since 1850, ed. Liebenau, Jonathan (Aldershot, England, 1988), 59Google Scholar; Soltow, “Origins of Small Business,” in Transactions, 9.

87 Sabel, Charles F. and Zeitlin, Jonathan, “Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology,” Past and Present 108 (1985): 152–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Pollard, A History of Labour, 34; Handicrafts That Survive, 14.

89 “A family Business for Over 200 Years,” 57. Similarly, the management of John Kenyon's “value character and long service, and preserve those old ideals by force of which the workman himself feels his interests to be identical with those of his master.” Kenyon & Co. Bi-Centenary, 12.

90 David Brody, “Labor and Small-Scale Enterprise during Industrialization,” in Small Business in American Life, ed. Bruchey, 265.

91 Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 194–95.

92 Ibid., 208. As the management of the cutlery firm of Needham, Veal, & Tyzack commented: they had “no control over the hiring of outworkers, and “there shall be no undue preference given to them in the way of work.” Letter to A. Fretwell, 8 May 1893, Minute Book, Records of Needham, Veal, & Tyzack (NVT 8), Sheffield Archives.

93 British Parliamentary Papers, Departmental Committee on the Truck Acts (Cmd. 4444, 1907), 952.

94 Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 209.

95 Pollard, Three Centuries of Sheffield Steel, 49.

96 Marshall, Alfred, The Economics of Industry (1879; London, 1946), 164Google Scholar.

97 Harrison Bros. & Howson employed six hundred in 1910; Taylor, “Cutlery Trades,” 521; Committee on the Truck Acts, 954–55; Handicrafts That Survive, 36.

98 Beckett to Wostenholm's, 23 Jan. 1896, Journey Reports of Edward Beckett in the United States, Records of Wostenholm's (Wos R 3).

99 Complaints by Sheffield firms to the Chamber against false marking by German companies producing for the American market were widespread. See, for example, 7 Nov. 1900, Records of Chamber of Commerce (LD 1986 [5]). Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 200; Pollard, A History of Labour, 138.

100 Peach, L. Da Garda, The Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire in the County of York (Sheffield, England, 1960), 1516Google Scholar.

101 See Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, “Business Structure and Political Economy,” 211–33. The commitment to quality was also supported by the trade unions in Sheffield, “whose campaign for the prosecution of trade frauds has had some success.” Pollard, A History of Labour, 138.

102 Sheffield Independent, 3 Feb. 1906. Bedford was a partner in the medium-sized tool and cutlery firm of J. Bedford & Sons.

103 Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity,” 27–28.

104 Pollard, A History of Labour, 332–34.

105 Tweedale, “Business and Technology,” 158, 161.

106 Ibid., 158. Scranton, “Diversity in Diversity,” 28–29, has also argued that “With less fanfare, other [non-Chandlerian] American companies had created an extensive capacity in trades where product character and quality were keys to capturing sales, even as products (and demand for them) changed readily.”

107 Tweedale, Sheffield Steel and America, 101.

108 American Machinist 36 (1912): 20EGoogle Scholar.

109 Supple, “Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism,” 506, quoting Chandler, Scale and Scope, 237.

110 Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, “Business Structure and Political Economy,” 229–31. See also Tolliday, Steven, “Steel and Rationalisation Policies, 1916–1934: The Politics of Industrial Decline,” in Businessmen and Politics, ed. Turner, J. (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

111 Nenadic, Stana, “The Small Family Firm in Victorian Britain,” Business History 35 (Oct. 1993): 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 245, 249. The act did cover tungsten and magnets. Capie, Forrest, Depression and Protection: Britain between the Wars (London, 1983), 41Google Scholar.

113 A New York Times headline said that Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill's announcement of the return to gold had carried “Parliament and nation to the heights of enthusiasm.” Quoted in Galbraith, John Kenneth, The World Economy since the War (London, 1994), 58Google Scholar.

114 Balfour quoted in Lewis, “Growth and Development,” 251; Tomlinson, Jim, Public Policy and the Economy since 1900 (Oxford, England, 1990), 75Google Scholar.

115 For an interesting discussion on British decline, see Pollard, Sidney, Britain's Prime and Britain's Decline: The British Economy, 1870–1914 (London, 1989Google Scholar).

116 Supple, “Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism,” 511.

117 Achievement 38, no. 1 (1971, published in the U.S.), special edition on Sheffield, 16, 31Google Scholar.

118 Scott and Storper, Production, Work, Territory, 10.

119 Piore and Sabel, Second Industrial Divide, 209–11; Reutter, Mark, Sparrows Point: Making Steel (New York, 1989), 422, 431Google Scholar.

120 Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 84.