Birmingham Heritage Week – a potted history of pen manufacturing

One of the ways our founder, Sir Josiah Mason, made his fortune was manufacturing steel pen nibs. But how big was the pen trade in Birmingham in Josiah’s time? Read on to find out!

How Sir Josiah Mason shaped Birmingham’s crucial role in pen manufacturing

In 1825, James Perry began manufacturing pens in Manchester and then in London. He was a former schoolteacher who was so dissatisfied with the quality of pens available for his students that invented his own, the Perryian pens.  

This was in advance of John and William Mitchell, Joseph Gillott and Josiah Mason who pioneered the mass production of steel pens in Birmingham, but there was one notable difference – Perry’s pens were not entirely made by machine so were costly to produce and varied in quality.

James Perry’s method was to stamp the blank, file it into shape and make a mark for the slit. After the steel had hardened, the slit was formed by striking the mark with a hammer.

Josiah Mason started a small-scale barrel pen manufacturing operation in 1827 alongside his larger split ring business.

In 1828, he spotted nine James Perry ‘slip’ pens on a card in a book shop window and instantly knew he could improve the design. The shop owner, Mr Peart, would not sell just one of the pens on the card, but instead agreed to sell Josiah the pen with which he was writing for sixpence.

Josiah later made three pen nibs and sent the best example to the address stamped on the pen he had bought, ‘Perry, Red Lion Square, London.’

James Perry visited Josiah at his workshop and was so impressed that he contracted him to produce the new pen nibs at his Birmingham factory.

The nibs bared only the name Perry which could be assumed to have been Josiah’s choice. He was a humble man who was happy to remain as little known as possible, but in the case of this invention he had no desire to conceal his name. He only agreed to do so if no other manufacturers made pens for Perry.

This agreement lasted 46 years, and Josiah’s operation saw significant growth in that time. In 1829 and 1830, Josiah’s Lancaster Street factory supplied 20 or 30 gross per order and employed around 12 people using 100 weight of steel per week. On 20 November 1830, the first batch of 100 gross was despatched.

By the 1850s, Birmingham dominated the industry and was considered the world centre for steel pen manufacturing. There were around 100 factories in the Jewellery Quarter and surrounding area. Historians estimate that over half of worldwide manufacturing took place in the city and as much as 75% of written materials were produced with a pen made in Birmingham.

By 1874, Josiah employed around 1,000 people and used in excess of 3 tons of steel weekly. Around 1.5 million pens could be produced from just one ton of steel.

In 1876, the Perry and Mason companies merged with Wiley and Son to become Perry & Co Ltd, the largest pen manufacturer in the world.

The mass production of ballpoint pens in the mid-1940s resulted in a sharp decline in demand for steel pens. By the 1960s, pen manufacturing in Birmingham had almost disappeared.