Ask most people in the UK to picture the knife drawer of their childhood kitchen, and one memory tends to turn up without fail: a black handled knife with a wavy, scalloped edge, worn smooth from years of Sunday roasts and packed lunches. That knife almost certainly says Kitchen Devils on the blade. It is one of those brands that has quietly furnished British kitchens for generations, so familiar that most of us never stop to ask who actually makes it, who owns it now, or where it came from. The real story involves a London hardware trader turned away by his own country's cutlery firms, a Sheffield cutler with centuries of blade craft behind it, and a Nordic company most shoppers have never heard of. Here is the genuine version.
A London Hardware Man With an Idea
The Kitchen Devils story starts with Harold George Bearston (1916 to 1990), a hardware trade entrepreneur working out of London in the years after the Second World War. Britain was rebuilding, and Bearston believed there was room for an affordable, everyday kitchen knife that ordinary households could rely on. It sounds a simple enough pitch. It was not simple to deliver.
When Bearston went looking for English cutlery firms willing to manufacture the knives, he was turned down. England's traditional cutlery trade, still finding its feet after wartime disruption, was not interested in taking on the work. So Bearston did what plenty of resourceful traders did in that period: he looked abroad. His earliest Kitchen Devils knives were made in Germany, produced by manufacturers willing to take on a contract that English firms had passed up.
It is a detail that tends to surprise people who assume a brand called Kitchen Devils, marketed as thoroughly British as tea and toast, must always have been forged in Sheffield. For those first years, it was not. The knives were distributed through Bearston Cutlery Ltd, run from a Chiswick office, while Bearston kept looking for a way to bring production closer to home, ideally into the one city the rest of the world already trusted for good steel.
1965: A Sheffield Cutler Says Yes
That opportunity arrived in 1965, when Bearston approached Taylor's Eye Witness, an established Sheffield cutler with deep roots in the city's cutlery trade, a trade that had guarded its blade marks and its reputation since medieval times. Taylor's Eye Witness agreed to take on production, and from 1967 the firm began manufacturing Kitchen Devils knives in earnest.
This was the moment the brand as most of us know it was really born. The blades were made from surgical grade, precision honed steel, and the now familiar handles were molded in polypropylene by a firm based in Huddersfield, not far down the road. Sheffield supplied the blade craft, Huddersfield supplied the handles, and between the two a genuinely useful, affordable knife came together.
What made it distinctive was that scalloped edge, a wavy blade design that ran across the range, from paring knives to all purpose and salad knives, steak knives, bread knives, tomato knives and cheese knives. It gave the blades a gentle serrated bite that suited soft skinned fruit and crusty bread just as well as everyday chopping. Combined with a price point that never pretended to be anything other than a hardworking kitchen tool, the range became a genuine bestseller through the 1970s, landing in kitchen drawers up and down the country. If you have ever searched for who used to manufacture Kitchen Devils riveted knives, this is the answer: Taylor's Eye Witness of Sheffield, working from a design Bearston had spent years trying to get made properly.
You can still see the family resemblance in the tomato and bread knives sold under the brand today, both descendants of that original scalloped edge idea.
Who Owns Kitchen Devils Now? From Bearston to Wilkinson Sword to Fiskars
Kitchen Devils Ltd existed as its own registered company too, company number 00945585, incorporated in January 1969, separate from though closely linked to the Bearston Cutlery distribution business. That original registered company was eventually dissolved in 2014, by then a non trading shell rather than an active manufacturer. The active brand, by that point, had long since moved on to bigger owners.
In 1984, Bearston sold the Kitchen Devils brand to Wilkinson Sword, a name most people associate with razors but one that also had a substantial cutlery and garden tools business at the time. Wilkinson Sword was later acquired by Swedish Match, folding Kitchen Devils into a larger corporate structure.
The brand changed hands again in 1990, when Fiskars, the Finnish consumer goods group best known worldwide for its orange handled scissors, acquired Kitchen Devils. Fiskars still owns and sells the brand today.
So who makes Kitchen Devils knife sets now, and who owns Kitchen Devils? The short answer is Fiskars, a large international group with its own manufacturing oversight and quality standards. For anyone wondering whether that is a good thing, it generally is. A brand owned by a serious international group tends to have more consistent manufacturing standards, clearer guarantees and better supply chain accountability than a small independent trader could offer alone, a large part of why Kitchen Devils can still back its ranges with meaningful guarantees decades after Harold Bearston first had the idea.
Today's Lifestyle and Control Ranges: Same Idea, Modern Materials
Walk down the knife aisle today and you will find Kitchen Devils sold under two main range names: Lifestyle and Control. Lifestyle knives come with a 10 year guarantee, while Control steps up to a 15 year guarantee, reflecting a slightly higher specification. Neither range promises to be a lifetime knife in the sense some shoppers assume from the name: the guarantees are genuinely generous, but tiered by product and range rather than one unlimited blanket promise.
What has not changed is the underlying philosophy Bearston set out with almost eighty years ago: an affordable, hard wearing knife that does its job in a busy kitchen without any fuss. You can see that continuity across the current range. The Kitchen Devils multi purpose knife (10 year guarantee) and its step up sibling, the Kitchen Devils multi purpose knife (15 year guarantee), are the modern versions of the all purpose knife that first made the brand's name. The Kitchen Devils carving knife and Kitchen Devils bread knife carry on that same scalloped edge tradition for Sunday roasts and fresh loaves, while the Kitchen Devils tomato knife still handles soft skinned fruit and veg the way the original range did in the 1970s.
If you are starting from scratch rather than replacing a single blade, the Kitchen Devils Control starter set and the Kitchen Devils knife block set bundle several of these essentials together, much as Bearston's original range was built to cover most kitchen tasks with a small, sensible set of knives rather than an overwhelming block of rarely used blades. Browse the full Kitchen Devils collection to see how the range has grown since those first Sheffield production runs.
A Few Quick Questions About the Kitchen Devils Story
Is Kitchen Devils still made in Sheffield today?
Not exclusively. Production moved to Taylor's Eye Witness in Sheffield from 1967, and the city's cutlery expertise shaped the brand's early reputation, but Kitchen Devils has passed through several corporate owners since, first Wilkinson Sword from 1984 and then Fiskars from 1990, and manufacturing has evolved along with that ownership. What has stayed constant is the commitment to an affordable, hard wearing everyday knife, the same idea Harold Bearston set out with after the war.
Is Kitchen Devils the same company as Wilkinson Sword?
No, though the two brands are connected historically. Wilkinson Sword bought the Kitchen Devils brand from Harold Bearston in 1984 and owned it for several years before Fiskars acquired Kitchen Devils in 1990. Wilkinson Sword was later acquired by Swedish Match and continues today as a separate razor and grooming brand, unconnected to Kitchen Devils' current ownership under Fiskars.
Was Kitchen Devils always a British made knife?
Not from day one. Harold Bearston's earliest knives, before Taylor's Eye Witness came on board, were made in Germany, because English cutlery firms had turned down the work after the war. It was only once Taylor's Eye Witness of Sheffield began production in 1967 that Kitchen Devils became closely associated with English cutlery craftsmanship, an association that has shaped the brand ever since.
Eight decades on from Harold Bearston's first, rejected pitch to England's cutlery trade, Kitchen Devils remains one of the most recognisable names in British kitchens, a brand built on Sheffield steel, Huddersfield handles, and a scalloped edge design that simply kept working. Whether you are replacing a knife that has finally given up after twenty years of service or building a full block for the first time, browse the Kitchen Devils range at Essentials Fix and pick up a piece of that history for your own kitchen.
