Sheffield faked London’s mark for a century, then invented “Made in”

Every label that says where a thing was made descends from one Act of Parliament, and that Act exists because Sheffield cutlers were furious about German knives pretending to be theirs.

It is a better story than that, though, because Sheffield had spent the previous century doing exactly the same thing to London.

Twenty-five Sheffield cutlers who stamped LONDON on their knives

The Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire has kept books of its members’ marks since 1614, and those books record what the trade was actually doing rather than what it later said about itself. Joan Unwin, the Company’s archivist, went through them.

Between 1614 and 1814, 25 Sheffield craftsmen registered marks containing the word LONDON, sometimes with “IN” or “CITY” attached, sometimes with a cross. Nearly all were cutlers, and nearly all fall between 1708 and 1772, with the 1730s the busiest decade. London was where the prestige was, so Sheffield borrowed it, in writing, through the Company’s own registration system.

The end of it is a small comedy. Samuel Lindley was the last man to register a LONDON mark, in 1772. In September 1786 he went to the Company to complain that David Hinchsliffe and partners, scissorsmiths, had struck “Golden London” on razor blades without being assigned it. Hinchsliffe admitted the whole thing, and observed that others did the same.

Why there was a mark worth faking

A mark is a promise, and promises attract fraud, which is why Britain had already been marking goods for three hundred years by the time Lindley registered his.

Hallmarking came first. In 1300 Edward I required silver to be assayed and struck before sale, work that eventually happened at Goldsmiths’ Hall in London and gave us the word. It is generally described as the oldest form of consumer protection in the world, and Sheffield got its own assay office by Act of Parliament in 1773.

Sheffield’s cutlery mark is the other tradition, and it was not gentle. The 1624 Act of Incorporation that created the Cutlers’ Company carried a clause requiring that all blades must have an edge of steel, and the Company enforced it through officers called Searchers. Their job was to check that Freemen’s marks were properly registered, that no two designs were confusingly alike, that a man used only his own mark, and that the goods were not “deceitful wares”: blades with no steel in them, or otherwise poor. Falsely marked goods were confiscated. When the Company later moved against blades made by casting rather than forging, it set the fine at ten shillings per blade, and declared it lawful for Searchers to enter any Freeman’s premises at any time of the day.

Registering a mark cost three shillings and fourpence, plus twopence a year in mark rent. For that, a Sheffield cutler bought the right to be identified, and the obligation to be inspected. Those are the same thing, which is the whole idea: a mark is only worth having if somebody can be caught misusing it.

Consider what that machinery means for the LONDON marks. Twenty-five men did not evade the system. They went to the Company, paid the fee, and had a borrowed place name written into the official book by the same institution that sent Searchers into workshops. The register was policing the honesty of marks, not the honesty of the places named in them.

CHIFFILD

Then Sheffield’s own reputation overtook London’s, and the traffic reversed. Unwin puts it without flinching:

As Sheffield’s reputation rose, it began to suffer from the same abuse as it had practised on the London cutlers, namely other people, including those abroad, began using marks similar to those registered in Sheffield.

The abusers were largely in Solingen, the German cutlery town, and the surviving examples are wonderfully brazen. One Solingen mark was registered as CHIFFILD. Another took the name PATEN. Hearts, crosses and stars were generic enough to borrow outright.

Worse, from the Sheffield trade’s point of view, the deception was not only foreign. In February 1886 the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent ran a piece headed “The Treason of Sheffield Traders”, alleging that merchants were routinely passing off substandard German cutlery as Sheffield make. The knives came from Solingen; some of the people selling them as Sheffield goods were in Sheffield.

1887: the trade goes to Parliament

The Cutlers’ Company had complained for years and got nowhere, because the international agreement of the day only allowed a shipment to be seized where an established trade mark had been infringed, and “Sheffield” was not a trade mark. It was a place.

So the Company escalated, and the sequence is well documented. A complaint to the Board of Trade in 1883 drew wider attention, and the Daily Telegraph took up the cause. In 1886 the Cutlers joined a British delegation to Rome, pressing without success for an amendment to the Paris Convention that would make any false indication of origin an offence. In February 1887, deputies from the Company petitioned the Board of Trade directly, with A. J. Mundella, Liberal MP for the Sheffield seat of Brightside, alongside them. A Select Committee examined a Board of Trade draft that spring, and the Company had a significant hand in advising on the drafting. The Merchandise Marks Act passed in July 1887.

It required, for the first time, that imported goods carrying the name or mark of a British manufacturer declare their country of origin, and it let customs seize goods at the border on suspicion. Applying a false trade description carried a substantial fine or up to two years’ hard labour.

Sheffield had asked for a law to stop people writing its name on other people’s knives, and had got one that made every importer write down where their goods came from.

What Germany did with it

The immediate consequence was a phrase. Goods arriving in Britain now said “Made in Germany”.

Officially this was counted a success. The 1890 Select Committee reported that the Act “has generally been most beneficial to the manufacturing interest of the country, and the importation of fraudulently marked goods has materially diminished”.

Unofficially, something else was happening. In August 1890 The Economist carried the view of the British Consul General in Berlin:

The experience of the past year has demonstrated that the Merchandise Marks Act, 1887, far from damaging German export industry, has called the attention of foreign buyers to its capability. It appears that goods bearing the description “made in Germany” are frequently demanded.

In 1896 the journalist Ernest Edwin Williams published a polemic titled, of course, Made in Germany, and gave the objection its permanent form: “The best argument against it is that it operates as a free advertisement for German manufactures.”

Two cautions, because this is where the story usually gets told too neatly. The “it backfired” verdict was a contemporary opinion, argued at the time against an official view that the Act was working, and the economic history is not settled in its favour either: the LSE working paper this account draws on finds no evidence the Act halted the advance of German exports to Britain, and locates the real damage elsewhere, in Britain’s entrepot and transhipment trade. What is certain is narrower and still remarkable. A law demanded by Sheffield to defend a place name created the world’s most famous place-name label, and it belonged to somebody else.

Manufacturer versus trader, which is still the argument

Williams also caught the politics of it in a sentence that has not aged at all:

The conflicting opinions raging around its merits will be found to resolve themselves finally into a case of Manufacturer v Trader. Sheffield sees in the Act a protection against German cutlers: London, a blow at her trading interests.

That fault line is exactly the one this site had to pick a side of. Our rule is that the maker is the subject and the shop is the offer: a retailer is never listed as the maker of anything, and products are attributed to whoever made them even when that means a shop we like loses the credit. We arrived at it by finding resellers in our own catalogue, not by reading Williams, and then found the same division set out in 1896 with the same two cities standing on either side of it.

What the marks are worth now

Here is the part that makes the whole story sting a little.

The Act Sheffield obtained is long superseded, and the convention it created is universal and nearly weightless: “Made in” appears on almost everything and guarantees only that somebody filled in a customs form. Meanwhile the specific thing Sheffield actually wanted, legal protection for the name of the place, it still does not have. The UK’s only statutory scheme for protected place names covers food, drink and agricultural products, so Sheffield cutlery cannot be registered at all. What exists instead is a licensed mark administered by the city, £200 for two years.

And the test that licence applies, whether the goods underwent a treatment or process resulting in a substantial change, is recognisably the 1624 question wearing modern clothes. The Searchers wanted to know whether there was an edge of steel on the blade. The committee wants to know whether anything was really done here. Four centuries, three legal instruments, one question, and it is the same question we answer every time we decide whether printing a card in Nottingham counts as making it.

The honest moral of four hundred years of British provenance marking is not that the marks protect the makers. It is that a mark is worth precisely what the inspection behind it is worth, and the inspection has usually been weaker than the promise.

Sources, and how to read them

Two documents do most of the work here, and both should be read directly by anyone who wants to check this.

The Sheffield mark books, the LONDON marks, the Searchers and the 1624 edge of steel clause are from Joan Unwin, “‘Deceitful Wares’: the quality control of knives by the Searchers of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire”, Historical Metallurgy 42(2) 2008, 148 to 156. Unwin was the Cutlers’ Company archivist and is working from the Company’s own records.

The 1887 chronology, the Act’s provisions and the quotations from the 1890 Select Committee, The Economist and Williams are from Oliver Harvey, “‘Hidden’ British Protectionism: The Merchandise Marks Act 1887”, LSE Economic History Student Working Papers No. 005, December 2021. It is a master’s working paper rather than a peer-reviewed article, which is worth stating plainly; what it is very good for is its primary citations, and those are what this piece leans on.

We have not read the nineteenth-century originals. The Consul General, the Select Committee, the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent of 13 February 1886 and Williams’s Made in Germany of 1896 are quoted here as quoted in Harvey, and anyone relying on the exact wording should go to the sources themselves. The hallmarking dates are the standard account given by the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Sheffield Assay Office. Made in Sheffield’s present criteria and fee are as published by the scheme.