The founder was Harold Edward Sherwin Holt (1862-1932) CBE.  He was born in Harrogate, Yorkshire, the son of Joseph Holt – a wealthy cloth merchant and manufacturer – and his wife, Matilda.  Sherwin Holt became an inventor and industrialist, who was involved in the developing automobile and aeronautical industries.  By 1911, he was living on ‘private means’ at The Grange, Farnborough, Hampshire.  He apparently launched Yorkshire Steel Company at about this time as a vehicle for marketing his patented ideas.  These included a boxed de-luxe safety razor, which was advertised as having the finest blade ever produced and ‘made entirely of British material’. The office was in Holborn, London, but after the First World War Holt also opened a Sheffield office in Rockingham Street. 

Besides the safety razor, Holt began marketing straight razors, scissors, pocket knives, and table cutlery.  These products were advertised in The Ironmonger (London), The American Cutler, and in Australasia, where the company had agents.  Cutlery was branded with the initials ‘YSC’ or ‘ORA-NOVA’ on safety razors.  ‘APIS’ was stamped on stainless cutlery, which was marked ‘UNSTAINABLE’.  It is not known whether Holt’s venture into cutlery was profitable.  He died on 3 January 1932 (leaving £71,798) and a few months later Yorkshire Steel Co Ltd was liquidated.