by Simon Moore

I have always had an interest in pocket knives and discovered pocket fruit knives 40 years ago in Portobello Road market when you could buy them for around £1 each. Their appeal was instant and that first day I purchased three and still have two of those. Over the next twenty years gradual research revealed that pocket fruit knives have a history going back to the reign of Louis XIV. They arrived in Britain around the mid-18th century and enjoyed an often overlooked vogue for around 180 years!
From a collector's point of view there are many plus points too: they are small and easily stored; the amount of types and decorative designs seems to be infinite (even after 40 years collecting and researching, I am amazed how frequently another decorative design can turn up out of the blue!); and they have an interesting history which also relates to many vagaries of hallmarking, especially at Sheffield where they were principally made.
Pocket knives can be traced back to the Romans, circa 100 AD. These knives enjoyed a rather fluctuating popularity versus the knife-in-sheath until the mid-17th century when the first spring-backed pocket knives appear to have been made. From then onwards, having a blade which would stay reliably shut in your pocket and which didn't require one's thumb to hold the blade open, became rapidly popular and many cutlers began making them in earnest. In Britain, the established cutlery centres of London and ascending Sheffield were the principal producers and France too had many cutlery centres - Paris, Thiers (and later Laguiole), Chatellerault, Rouen, Orleans - almost anywhere there was a big town or city.

From the 1890s, pocket fruit knives were often made with additional tools such as pipping blades (right), orange peelers (lower centre), toothpicks (upper) and saws, perhaps to revitalise trade in pocket fruit knives.

The earliest pocket fruit knives were French and began to appear during the later 17th century although there is no precise way of dating them. They seem to have been made first, rattier experimentally, to see how a pocket knife with an additional blade of hardened silver - that would not taint the delicate flavours of fruit - would fare on the market. It could be argued that a nobleman might have hit upon the idea and commissioned the first such item. Whatever happened, the idea was well received and by the beginning of the 18th century many cutlers and silversmiths were collaborating to produce these items.

French pocket fruit knives
The earliest forms of these are known as Couteaux sans Clous or knives without rivets, since the rivet heads were either blended into the haft decoration or concealed beneath decorated or plain sheets of nacre (mother-of-pearl) or tortoiseshell. There is also a fine one donated to the Army & Navy Club in Pall Mall, which was supposedly given by Charles II to Nell Gwyn, there being no fruit knife manufacture in Britain at that time. This type of pocket knife normally had haft scales (grips) of nacre, held in place by a scalloped edge of engraved silver or a tortoiseshell haft overlaid with a fine silver openwork tracery involving small figures and animals scurrying decoratively across it. This type of decoration has been assigned to Jean Berain (1637-1711) whose influence can be seen later in the renowned furniture work of Andre-Charles Boulle. Each knife was made with two blades, one of steel and one of silver, equally sized and shaped and with a cutler's stamp on the steel blade as was normal. The silver blade was left unmarked, being an item of small weight, and it wasn't until the later 18th century that precious metal quality laws were tightened up and quality-related hallmarks were stamped on these earlier blades, else they could be seized and destroyed. The later hall-marking of these knives has often led to their being wrongly dated and I have seen such knives supposedly dating from the early 19th century, by which time they were way out of fashion, the mechanism having been considerably refined.
The spring for these knives was amazingly strong and rather crude and shutting the steel blade, especially, would have been carried out with care! For this reason the silver blade was often mounted on a steel tang to prevent wear and the blade was often decorated with a small silver panel in the form of a triangle or scallop shell at its base to prevent rust seizure.