I have a LOT of traditional knives, but like everyone else, I have my favourites, and because they're the ones I tend to carry, many of the others don't get out very often. When I say I have a lot of knives, I don't have a world class collection of museum quality folders, a lot of the knives I pick up are of very modest quality, sometimes I'll buy a knife just because it's made by an old Sheffield firm I have little experience of, or because it's an unusual pattern, or just because I like knives and acquiring a new one puts a smile on my face. It saddens me that I can't carry them all, indeed that there are some I have never carried, so I had this idea to blindly pick a knife from my collection, and carry it each Tuesday. I started doing this last week, with the knife below, and the main purpose of me posting this thread, is simply as a reminder to myself as to what knives I have and haven't carried, and maybe as a resource to folks who might also have one of these knives. However, feel free to chime in, ask questions, even do the same if you want. My memory is bad, so I may miss the odd Tuesday, but I'll try not to
The knife I randomly picked last week is one I've never carried before, a Scout Knife made by Richards of Sheffield. My dad and uncle worked at the firm when I was a kid, both as machine-tool fitters, which means that they fixed the machinery when it went wrong, like a mechanic fixes a car. Richards were perhaps the Sheffield cutlery industry's only financial success story of the 20th century. Their success may have been relatively modest, but they did make money, and when I was young, the cheap shell-handled folders, in which they came to specialise, were sold in nearly every newsagent, corner shop, and barbers shop in the land. Richards was founded in 1932 by two members of the Richartz family, of the famous German cutlery house, and registered as Richards Brothers & Sons. Their main trade mark for pocket knives was a 'lamp post'. From modest beginnings, their financial security allowed the firm to rapidly expand, and by 1938, they employed 400 workers in two factories. Like other Sheffield cutlers, during WW2 (which saw one of the brothers briefly interned, and both factories bombed by the Luftwaffe), Richards produced Army Clasp Knives, as well as tools for the military. After the war, they built the most modern cutlery factory the city had seen, embracing technology that other Sheffield cutlery firms rejected, and flooding the market with tens of thousands of cheap and cheerful shell-handled pocketknives, which saw them grab 60% of the market by the early 50's. In 1977 Richards were acquired by Imperial, but the acquisition proved to be a poor decision by the US company, and they sold it in 1982, and the Richards factory was demolished a few year later (for a full history of the Richartz and Richards cutlery companies see mine and Neal Punchard's article in the January 2019 issue of
Knife magazine).
Richards produced many different Scout patterns. Unusually this one does not have shell-handles, but is of otherwise similar construction. It's my first Random Tuesday carry
