When Chaucer’s Miller of Trumpington packed “a Sheffield thwitel” in his travel bag it was probably not the quality of the knife’s steel that sold it to him but the sharpness of the edge, the work of the grinder. Grinders have been at the heart of Sheffield at least since 1297 when the first cutler is mentioned in an official document – he’d made enough money to have to pay Tax – and probably for much longer. But while the names of Sheffield entrepreneurs and inventors are known -  Huntsman, Boulsover, Bessemer, Brearley – the grinders remain anonymous, heroes without names. In 1844 Frederick Engels pointed out that wet grinders rarely lived beyond 45 years, dry grinders hardly 35. If the wheel didn’t explode with the force of a shell, the dust raised from the stone by the metal held against it got into the lungs of the man crouched like a jockey over his wheel. Today “cutting edge” is how we describe innovation and yet the bespoke grinder, the man (almost invariably) who can put an edge on anything a designer or specialist toolmaker requires, seems destined to become history.

 

Sculptor Anthony Bennett met Brian Alcock, the last “jobbing” grinder currently working, when the great collector of Sheffield tools Ken Hawley showed him a tool whose handles were so worn by use that Bennett saw a kind of ghost: the hands of its user. He abandoned the project he was working on to take up Swarfhorse. Swarf is all the detritus that finds its way onto the board placed to collect it as the grinder works: dust from the stone, sweat, grease, bits of wood, discarded blades … thrown into the “swarf oyl”, it would be taken away for recycling. It had never been used, as far as is known, for sculpture before but produces an extraordinarily strong but far from impregnable texture.

 

It is just one of the materials Bennett has used in a unique series of artworks to be seen from the oldest industrial site in Sheffield (the 16th century Shepherd Wheel) to the – yes, cutting edge – Electric Works in the city centre. It is a unique blend of the artist’s imaginative eye and one of the hardest and most skilful manual activities employed by mankind to shape the world we live in. It celebrates centuries of labour by those nameless heroes, mourns the passing of a craft, graft and ingenuity that epitomise Sheffield, and rages against our casual acceptance of the dying of the light.

 

Paul Allen

Jan 2013