THE HISTORY OF BRITISH SWORD manufacture is a tale characterised by a series of economic highs and lows, due in part to the changing necessities of periodic military conflict, governmental intransigence, and an on-going struggle by British sword makers, against a flood of cheaper foreign imports, most notably from Solingen, Germany. For most of the 19th Century, this inability to compete on price with Solingen ensured the steady decline of British sword making and the resulting emergence of only a small number of companies who were able to trade more on quality than price.
The most notable of these was the Wilkinson Sword Company, who manufactured military service swords for the British Army, Navy and Air Force until 2005, when the company closed. The founder, Henry Wilkinson, never claimed that he could produce a cheaper sword, but through rigorous testing procedures and innovative blade design, he could rightly claim that his swords were of world beating standard. As an example; in 1900, the German sword trade could sell a British officer’s sword to a London retailer for 21 shillings (£1.05), who would then sell on the sword at 30 shillings (£1.50). If you wanted to buy a Wilkinson “Best proved sword, with a patent solid tang”, a customer would be asked to pay 5 guineas (£5.25). The price difference is staggering but it is a testament to the high regard in which these swords were held by British officers, that they were still purchased in such large numbers. It took many years for the British military authorities to grudgingly accept that if you paid a little more for better quality, home manufactured blades, the critical issue of combat reliability could therefore be properly addressed.
The axiom that you get what you pay for could have been etched, literally, on the blades of many swords purchased by the British Army. Indeed, there were earlier times when swords supplied to the British Army were regarded as practically useless when wielded in the heat of actual battle. Reports from both officers and men detail constant service problems with broken and bent blades that, in some circumstances, led directly to the unnecessary deaths of servicemen. The actual quality and design of swords carried by British soldiers had always been a bone of contention and in typically British fashion, led to the establishment of numerous Committees of Enquiry, that had followed a series of very public scandals in which swords carried by British troops had failed at critical moments. British sword makers and their myriad suppliers lived through frequent periods of economic feast or famine. It was the nature of their business. The availability of regular work was particularly erratic during peacetime and many companies went in and out of business with alarming regularity.
The Napoleonic Wars of the late-18th and early 19th centuries brought some stability to the trade. It created a temporary boom time for sword making and its allied trades, with government contracts placed for thousands of swords, bayonets and guns. The city of Birmingham was a major beneficiary of these contracts and became a centre for both the manufacture of sword blades and the fitting of hilts and scabbards and the application of engraved and etched decoration to blades, including the blueing and gilding of officers’ sword blades. A number of notable Birmingham companies whose names are still known to this day produced large quantities of swords and surviving examples still bear their names to blade spines and ricassos. Names such as Deakin, Woolley, Bate and Craven, supplied large quantities of military pattern swords to the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. London also had an important sword making trade, and were particularly concerned with the manufacture and retailing of officers’ swords. The sword making histories of these two great cities and other relevant locations will be featured in more detail shortly. It should also be remembered that the history of British sword making was driven by great theoretical debate and argument. A fundamental question that ran through the design and development of British swords from the 18th century onwards, centred around whether a military sword should be primarily one of cut or thrust. It actually took over one hundred years of trial (and sometimes plain error) for this debate to be properly satisfied. By then, the conclusion, that a thrusting sword was the most effective had become completely irrelevant in a new world of machine guns and static warfare.
HISTORICAL ORIGINS
Let us first take a look at the historical origins of indigenous British sword manufacture. The recognition of sword making in Britain as a distinct trade can be traced back as far as 1416, when The Worshipful Company of Cutlers based in the City of London, received Royal Assent from King Henry V (1413-1422). They produced knives, swords and edged implements from the Medieval period to the 19th Century. Into the 16th Century, we see the expansion of a more organised system of British sword manufacture. Henry VIII (1509-1547) initiated a thriving armoury at Greenwich, South East London, which produced some remarkable pieces of armour and edged weaponry that can still be seen today in the Tower of London, the Wallace Collection (London) and the Royal Armouries, Leeds. Even though the armoury was based in England, a shortage of skilled workers meant that German craftsmen had to be imported from Solingen and Passau. Although it might seem highly contradictory, at least German workers were producing “English” swords in England, rather than in their own homeland, where they would be in competition with English sword makers.
For the next three hundred years there would be bitter rivalry between German sword makers and the small number of fledgling English manufacturers. Following the influx of German Protestants into England due to Catholic religious persecution in the 1600’s, a number of skilled German metal workers were brought over to help establish a new sword blade factory on Hounslow Heath (near London), in 1629*. It was initiated by Sir William Heydon, although it is now thought it was his brother, John Haydon(sic) who established the factory, but the name on the later Royal Petition of 1672, was William’s, who had actually been killed in a military expedition to France two years earlier. The names of the first swordsmiths at Hounslow are known and include the Solingen craftsmen, Johann Kindt and Joseph Jenckes (or Jencks).
The English born swordsmith Benjamin Stone was also among this first group of workers. At the time of the English Civil War (1642-1651) more German swordsmiths had joined the manufactory, including Johan(nes) Hoppe and Peter Munsten. Hounslow blades are rare and few have survived but most can be easily recognised as they feature the engraved name of “HOUNSLOWE”, “HOUNSLO”, “HOINSLO” and other derivations.
* A number of other sources use the date 1620 to denote when the Hounslow factory was established but I have used the date 1629, which is quoted by John Toft White (1917-2002) who was the original historian of the Hounslow sword factory.
By the late 1600’s, the business of producing sword blades at Hounslow had obviously become uneconomic (due mainly to the end of the English Civil War) and most of the original German swordsmiths had returned home. The factory was closed around 1672. Johann Kindt remained in England, changed his name to Kennett and became a naturalised Englishman. The Hollow Sword Blade Company was also formed in 1690, at a new northern factory in Shotley Bridge, County Durham. The choice of location was due to the rich iron ore deposits found in the local area, the fast flowing River Derwent that was ideal for tempering blades, and also the fact that its remoteness was handy in keeping the secrets of manufacture away from prying eyes, e.g. competitors.
An interesting local story highlights the pride with which these newcomers viewed their enterprise.
“There is a story that one of the Shotley sword-making fraternity, a certain William Oley, was once challenged by two other swordmakers to see who could make the sharpest and most resilient sword. On the day of the challenge, the three men turned up, but it seemed that Oley had forgotten to bring an example of his work. The two other sword makers, assuming that he had been unable to make a sword of a suitable standard, began to boastfully demonstrate the strength, sharpness and resiliency of their workpieces. Eventually their curiosity got the better of them and they asked Oley why he had not brought a sword. With a mischievous grin, Oley removed his stiff hat, to reveal a super-resilient sword, coiled up inside. He challenged the other two sword-makers to remove the sword from the hat, but their attempts nearly resulted in the loss of their fingers. In the end the sword could only be removed by means of a vice. For strength, sharpness and resiliency Oley’s sword was undoubtedly the winner.”
One of the Hounslow founders, Benjamin Stone, confidently declared that he had “perfected the art of blade making”. His swords were “as good and cheap as any to be found in the Christian world.” These boastful claims were soon to suffer ridicule when it was found that Hounslow and Shotley Bridge could not reproduce the quality of manufacture that was coming out of Germany, particularly in the lucrative area of hollow-ground or “colichemarde” blades used in smallswords, which had become the standard dress arm for both gentleman and military officers. Solingen had also developed specialist machinery for the production of these blades, which involved rolling out the hollows of the blade. It was a revolutionary technique and dramatically cut down the time it took to produce each blade. Rate of production in England was tiny when compared with the established German sword making guilds.
Despite the imposition of heavy taxes by the British Crown on the importation of foreign blades in order to stimulate home production, Hounslow and Shotley were only able to produce simple, flat bladed weapons, rather than the more sophisticated swords being manufactured in Germany, and it soon faded into obscurity. A typical “Hounslow Hanger” of the late-17th century is now an extremely collectable genre of sword. Importantly, the secret knowledge of how to hollow-ground blades rested primarily in Germany and determined attempts were made to bring back the technology to England, including an unsuccessful invitation for German smiths to come and settle in England and teach native workers.
An English patent was granted in 1688 for the production of hollow-ground blades but progress was slow, due mainly to the unsettled political environment in England. Shotley did not appear to turn out many hollow-ground blades and within a relatively short period of time the group of businessmen who started the enterprise sold out to one of its employees, a certain Herman Mohll. The name Mohll or the anglicised Mole as it was to later become, deserves a special place in British sword making history as it is synonymous with the subsequent manufacture of British swords, particularly those service patterns supplied directly to the British Army. The first of Mohll’s hollow blade ventures at Shotley Bridge soon ran into trouble with British Customs, due to his involvement with a cargo of smuggled, partly finished, hollow-ground blades from Germany, that he planned to retail as his own.
We then next see him starting up another company, Herman Mohll and Son, which concentrated on the manufacture of military blades. This he eventually sold out to Robert Oley (nee Ohlig), in 1742, who carried on the business until 1832, when Robert Moll, a descendant of the original family, bought back the firm, and changed the name again to Mole. They continued as a military contractor of swords and bayonets until being subsumed in 1922, by the Wilkinson Sword Company. It is interesting to see that Shotley Bridge had high ideals when it came to proclaiming the quality of their blades and even impressed a running horse mark to blades in imitation of the running wolf marks seen on German Solingen/Passau blades.
© Harvey Withers Military Publishing, 2024
Taken from The British Sword – From 1600 to the Present Day – An Illustrated History by Harvey J S Withers – 12,000 full colour photographs – 884 pages For more details please click on the images.
