Andy Cole has been forging steel in the same workshop in the Highfield area of Sheffield since he was 14 years old, 40 years ago. The building where he works, a stone’s throw from Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane football ground, is said to be where, in 1913, the metallurgist Harry Brearley made the world’s first stainless steel cutlery.
Cole is one of the city’s surviving “little mesters”, a term used for the craftsmen who rented the city’s redbrick workshops to work with the steel produced in the surrounding areas. He has seen the demise of Sheffield’s steel industry at close quarters. The news this week of Tata Steel’s decision to pull out of all its UK operations came as no surprise to him.
In 2011, Cole said, he was forced to shut the doors on his tool-making business, which employed 11 people, and set up shop on his own as a specialist maker of made-to-measure hand tools.
The problems facing his business were the same as those facing the UK steel industry at large, namely the influx of cheaper products from abroad. Tools like the ones made by his business were being sold from China for less than it cost him to buy the steel in the first place, he said. “I tried weathering the storm until eventually we ran out of money.” Of Cole’s customers, 90% are now from the US and are attracted by the “made in Sheffield” label and the quality it denotes, he said.
What is left of Sheffield’s steel industry, which employs about 2,600 people, largely concerns the manufacture of specialised steel products.
Sheffield Forgemasters, the biggest steel industry employer in the city, employing about 630 people, announced plans in February to cut 100 jobs from its plant in the Brightside area of the city. The private company, which makes parts for the submarines carrying the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons, also reported its first-ever loss, of £9.4m, for the 18 months to the end of 2014.
Source: The Guardian