From Cockerill to Cockerel (and Disston)

Hello all,

There is not a lot of point to this topic, except to illustrate that the Victorian penchant for a play on words or images was alive and kicking within Spear and Jackson during what I assume is the middle-ish part of the 20th century.

The first offering (actually it is the second because I have got the photo's out of sequence) is a quite ordinary but probably utilitarian saw of the later Victorian/ early 20th century? period. Unless it has an etch that has worn off, it would not have stood out from tens of thousands of other saws sold at the time.

The second (first) is the "Cockerel" handsaw with the etched image and which immediately catches the eye (well, my eye in any case). I don't know what sort of quality this saw is compared to the backsaw (I would imagine that they would not be too far removed from each other), but this one has got the marketing right.

It also has a rather eyecatching but unfortunately cheap looking medallion which I have not seen before, although I am sure that it will be nothing new to the S and J enthusiasts out there.

One of the other advantages of this era of saws is that you can still pick them up in very reasonable condition, and for not an awful lot of money for handsaws at least (understatement for ridiculously cheap).

And just as a gratuitous example of this, I also attach images of a Disston K6 Challenger that I have. The etch looks better in real life than on the photo and I think that it is a real work of art. Also note the Keystone medallion but with "Warranted Superior" and not Disston on it. I assume that was because, although it was from the Disston "stable" it was a lesser quality saw.

The thing that I have noticed about these two very different images is that they both portray movement in the form of speed. The running and crowing cockerel and the speedboat. I wonder whether you are supposed to equate that to the speed of sawing that these saws will provide?

Fred

 

Cockerill/cockerel

I can't get much closer to knowing why S&J used this name, but here is what I included in something I wrote earlier

In the 1820s Belgium was beginning to industrialise along its southern border with France, mainly in the ancient weaving towns of Flanders – Verviers, Mons, Ypres, Liège, Tournai, Malines, Bruges, Gand (Ghent) and Brussels; today’s Aachen (then Aix-la-Chapelle) on the eastern border, besides being an industrial town in its own right, may have been the gateway to German markets . In all these places Spear & Jackson were making sales, but only six of the 56 were for saws alone (table 8.4). As might be expected from the pattern cards Jackson took on his journey, the firm also sold a great deal of steel in many forms, and a large range of Sheffield goods – cutlery, shoe jacks, wire, files, busks, silver plate, edge tools, razors and so on: the firm were well justified in calling themselves merchants. The main purchaser of this steel was an Englishman, John Cockerill, who was then laying the foundations of Belgium’s own industrial revolution .
Cockerill’s name can still be found on today’s maps of Liège, where he established an industrial empire that led him to be “universally recognised as one of the principal entrepreneurs of the early industrial development of the Continent†. His father had moved from Lancashire around the turn of the century, first selling (fraudulently imported) English machinery for the Belgian cotton industry, but soon moving very profitably into manufacturing similar goods in Belgium itself. The son, born in 1790 in Haslingden (Lancashire), was plainly a born entrepreneur, taking over as the driving force, with ample family money behind him, in his late teens. At the age of 27 he persuaded the Dutch king to sell him at a fraction of its real value a vast empty property with a huge park round it that had once been the residence of the prince-bishops of Liège . This site, which remains at Seraing on the outskirts of Liège, once separate but now a suburb of the city, is still part of the industrial empire of Cockerill S.A. The company became in the later 19th century probably the largest industrial business in Belgium, with interests in steel, heavy engineering, paper making and railways. All these interests were prefigured in the purchases made from Spear & Jackson by Cockerill only a year after he had bought Seraing . The historian of the firm has unfortunately been able to gain access to almost no documentation of the early years, as the records have been partly destroyed by fire and flood, and are partly inaccessible in a Russian archive . It is therefore not possible to know exactly why Spear & Jackson later named their second quality line of saws “John Cockerillâ€. They sold him large amounts of materials and tools for the building of his establishments, but it can only be surmised that it was later on that Cockerill perhaps did so much saw buying from Sheffield that his name could be attached to a product line . On the other hand, such naming was always about marketing, the creation of an attractive and eye-catching good that would sell, and Cockerill was a legend in his own time, always in the forefront of developments and well known all over Europe . After his sudden death in Warsaw, returning from St Petersburg after a trip in 1840 that might have resulted in the far earlier industrialisation of Russia, his funeral was said to have been followed by 6000 people . Perhaps Spear & Jackson adopted one of the most famous names of the time as a mark of respect for a great man, but also with half an eye on a good marketing opportunity . The principle of using a completely different name from that of the parent firm was not, however, confined to sawmaking. The Manchester cotton spinners McConnel and Kennedy adopted a slightly different method, and sold their lower quality yarn without their manufacturer’s name stamp on it at all, thereby aiming to avoid diminishing their own reputation.

Not sure if all that really helps - but Fred's sadly debased and feeble etch is indeed the end of the line - well post WW2, maybe about 1970.