The cruellest cut

They've made – and still make – scissors for trimming toe nails, wicks and golf holes. Plus fetlock shears, carpet napping shears and zig-zag pinking shears. If there's something that needs cutting, Eric, Cliff and Ian, all of them past retirement age, can make something to cut it with.

The problem is that a lot of the cutting over the past few years has been in the scissors industry itself. There used to be 62 firms in Sheffield making traditional all-steel scissors. Now there are just two: William Whiteley & Sons (estab 1760) and Ernest Wright & Son (estab 1902), where the three men work.

Wright's was one of the world's biggest scissor producers in the 1970s, employing 60 workers. Now there's just Eric, Cliff and Ian, skilled "puttertogetherers" as they're known in the trade. They are among the last of their line and their skills could die with them. Soon no-one may understand the arcane language of scissor-making and be able to tell a shank from a sidebent.

Wright's is down to a three-day week and Philip Wright, its chairman and managing director, has drawn no salary for three years.

The firm is based in a small factory in the Kelham Island area, a once-thriving centre of cutlery and engineering works, now best-known for its industrial museum.

Some of the older factories along the street, with their towering walls of windows and their broad Victorian arches, have been turned into apartments for young urbanites.

Others look long-abandoned, grim, crumbling into dereliction. The signs along the front of one of them spell out what was made inside: nails... hinges... rivets... bolts... nuts... screws... studs... washers. They held most things together, except Britain's fractured industry.

Cutlery and tool-making has always been a grimy, greasy, grubby industry, full of sparks, steam and smoke, of banging and whirring. It was never glamorous, but it once employed 40,000 Sheffielders. And that doesn't take into account the vast steelworks. Now? Perhaps 1,000 people at most. The cutlers' last stand.

But that's enough of the downbeat. Things are stirring at Ernest Wright's, known for the past 50 years by its trade name, Kutrite. The name, with its memorable initial "K", is still on the outside of the factory, but inside, in an office up steep stairs and with a giant pair of scissors hung on the wall, Philip ("Mr Kutrite" to many customers) and his son Nick, fourth and fifth generations of the family firm, explain why they're planning to ditch it.

It's part of a company rebranding, mainly at the instigation of Nick, a former sales consultant who helps his father on a voluntary basis. Kutrite, he thinks, is now a dated name (he was nicknamed Nicky Kutrite at school). "I've done market research on the name and everybody who doesn't know it already tends to say: 'What?' A lot of people don't know how to pronounce it. But Ernest Wright & Son, the firm's old family name, has a ring of heritage about it."

So much of the industry's heritage has, after all, already gone. There is less call for "scissor-makers' dozens" – traditionally (for obscure reasons) 14 pairs rather than 12. The trades for which Wright's supplied specialist lines – in over 150 different patterns, with left-handed options – have gradually dwindled in an age of mass-produced imports.

Rubber-trimming scissors are no longer in such demand now that so many car tyres are imported; weaver's scissors, traditionally twisted round to the back of the hand when not in use, have a limited market; the last order for mailbag-opening scissors came from Hong Kong Post Office. Philip produces pair after pair from behind his desk and urges me to try them out; I gradually cut my notebook to shreds.

"We're dealing with minuscule industries now," says Nick. "But there are modern industries too. A company that makes blades for wind turbines uses ten-inch tailor's shears for cutting fibreglass. We're trying to find little niche industries all over the place."

The designs are amazingly specific. Take the Geisha range of floral art scissors. "For the amateur flower arranger," says Philip. "Very short blades to give them strength, serrated to grip wet stalks and with a notch to cut florist's wire."

But it all comes down to price. Wright's standard office scissors are likely to sell at several times the price of Chinese imports, which are cheap enough to be disposable. "But if we can't compete on price, we can compete on quality," says Nick. The company, in fact, has ironically become a victim of its own high standards. "It's the problem of making scissors that are so good that they never need renewing," he says. Then there are the scissors that may be used just once – "ceremonial scissors" with gold-plated handles for ribbon-cutting, used by, among many others, the Queen. They often have to be supplied at very short notice. "A new building project might have been 40 years in planning and construction," says Philip. "But people sometimes ask for a pair of the scissors the day before the opening ceremony."

In these difficult times, there's little money for advertising and promotion, or for the apprenticeships which would ensure that the skills of Eric, Cliff and Ian are passed on. But a change in marketing may help. Nick points out that some customers who baulk at paying 15 for a pair of scissors strapped to a card are happy paying 30 for the same scissors stylishly displayed in a presentation box.

"You can have a real love affair with this industry," says Nick. "It starts with the smell. It's the smell of oil and the smell of grinding."

We head downstairs to the factory floor, packed with machines and furnaces, with "blanks" (the basic rough-cast scissor) piled in cardboard boxes and threaded on rods or "scissor sticks". Hunched over a grinding wheel is Eric, 67 years old and a scissorman since 1956 ("Eh, all our yesterdays," he says wryly.) One of his former workshops was high in a Victorian tenement factory called Butcher's Works, now converted into apartments and studios.

"It gradually creeps up on you that you're among the last of the line," he says and shows me a huge rotating drum for smoothing out scissors. "Called a rumbler," he says. "For rumbling." Simple as that. Across the factory, Ian, 66, is hardening blades.

Like his colleagues, he is an outgoing, outspoken enthusiast for his job. "Ever since I started at 15, I've always found something interesting. Every job's a challenge." And beyond him, Cliff, 66, sits at a bench covered with carpet and puts the finishing touches to poultry shears, gently hammering them on a stiddy, or miniature anvil: "titivating them up".

He shows me the hammer he has been using for six or seven years.

Its wooden shaft is thin and twisted by the constant handling. Working with him, Leanne Jules, a young warehousewoman, checks the screws that anchor the scissors together. With Jackie Cox, upstairs in the office, that's the total workforce.

"I've been doing this now for 51 years," says Cliff. "You can't walk away from something you've been doing for half a century."