The ancestor of this firm was Broadhead, Gurney & Co. One of the partners was Samuel Broadhead, whose son was Rogers Broadhead (1807-1876). In 1833, Rogers was listed in Queen Street as a manufacturer of Britannia metal goods and spoons, having perhaps inherited his father’s business. Also residing in the same street was Charles Atkin, a table knife manufacturer in Workhouse Croft. Broadhead & Atkin was listed in North Street in 1837, making Britannia metal goods and spoons. An advertisement for their North Street Works appeared in Drake’s Road Book of the Sheffield & Rotherham Railway (London, 1840). In 1845, the firm’s address was Britannia Works, Love Street, when it became one of the first licensees of the Elkington electro-plate process. The firm displayed its products at the Great Exhibition (1851). William Wells Brown, the liberated American slave visited the works at about this time. While he toured the factory, the workers hastily collected a subscription to present to him as a token of their support for the anti-slavery cause (Brown, 18551). Broadhead & Atkin prospered. Charles Atkin told the Census (1851) that the factory employed about 100 workers.
In 1853, however, newspapers reported that Atkin, who lived at Parker Row, East View, had been in ‘a low, melancholy, and desponding state of mind concerning some partnership misunderstandings, and the great expense he was incurring in the erection of a country residence at Endcliffe’. After the sound of a gunshot on Sunday morning, 29 May 1853, Atkin was found ‘seated in a chair, with a looking glass on a dressing table before him, and a pistol in each hand, that in the right being clenched firmly and discharged, and that in the left was still loaded’ (Leeds Mercury, 4 June 1853). An inquest judged him insane. He was aged 44.
Rogers continued the business in Love Street as R. Broadhead & Co, Britannia metal and electro-plate manufacturer. A new partnership was formed, which included Rogers Broadhead, Thomas Marshall, Joseph Curr Thompson, and Benjamin Grayson. In 1857, the workmen made a presentation to their employer, which probably marked Rogers’ retirement (Sheffield Independent, 3 January 1857). In 1860, Broadhead and Marshall formally withdrew, and Thompson and Grayson took over the business. The firm took out a full-page advertisement in the local directory (1860). In his retirement, Rogers Broadhead lived with his wife Mary in Upper Hanover Street. He died on 28 April 1876, aged 68, and was buried in the Quaker burial ground in Meetinghouse Lane, Woodhouse. He left under £12,000. The business was in financial difficulties in the mid-1880s. It had moved to Pond Street by the 1890s but had ceased trading by 1900. A crossed-arrows device was the trade mark.