The Ken Hawley Collection at Kelham Island Museum, holds important archival material and manufacturing artefacts relating to the Sheffield firm of William Marples & Sons, which produced many types of woodworking tools in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Any surviving archival material usually deals with the ‘nuts and bolts’ of running such a business, and personal details of the workforce are lost.

Recent research has uncovered little known union records from the early 1900s which have enabled identification of individual workers at Marples. In this talk, Barry Chambers, volunteer curator of the Hawley Tool Collection, will discuss one particular family who worked as wooden plane makers and reveal how it has been possible to ascribe individual manufactured planes to different family members.

After the talk, a number of artefacts will be available for examination.