A well-known and highly respected maker of grinding machines, the Sheffield-based Snow company started as a family business in the 1920s. Although little has been found recording their early years, inthe period 1937 to 1960 the works managers are recorded as Arthur Smith, Mr. Noble and Arnold Thompson and the foremen "wee pipe France", George Wilkinson, Jack Shirtcliffe,and George Rhodes. Expert scrapers included "Sam" and "Lewie".
Information collated from a Sheffield history groups mentions: "My father, Stan Lilley, worked at snow from being an apprentice fitter before war WW2 (when he was in the RAF), to something grandly called European Sales Engineer - he left in the mid 1970's.
It was a remarkable firm: the MD in my Dad's time was Jack Snow and the designer might have been Arthur Steele. He used to be very good friends with Arnold Thompson. They made the precision tools that ground the blades of the RB 211 Rolls Royce jet engine and were obviously a very high-tech company in their time. My mum has photographs of Dad showing round a Japanese trade delegation in what must have been the early 1960's. They did a lot of business re-building the French machine tool industry which had been "exported" to Germany during the war and my father often worked in Paris - where he spoke French with a very Sheffield accent.
I remember it being a magical but rather scary place when I was a child and the very international life my father seemed to live when British precision engineering was still very highly regarded everywhere. He worked in Spain, Czechoslovakia, and the Far East. Surface Grinding was the Company's peculiarity and I believe that, in their time they were the best.
He always said the unions did for Snow (he was a working-class Conservative to his roots) and during the 1970s the company had a bad time meeting its orders with increasingly poor relations between the management and unions. Finally, the paternalistic Snow family sold out to the Elliot Machine Tool Group and efforts were made to introduce NC control systems.
My father enjoyed an exceptional engineering training at Davy United in the 1930s, and, at the end of his life, he kept a workshop at the back of his garage where he made models of machine tools and spare parts for his cars. He was a lovely man and died in 2000 of motor neurone disease. Snows was the highlight of his working life and I think life there in the early years must have been wonderful and the loss of it all is a great sadness."

"I worked at Snows as a mechanical designer for 12 years up to the factory closure when production was moved to either Newalls (Peterborough) or to (I think) Keighly in, I think, around 1981.From the ashes of Snows arose 'Mons' (turn Snow up-side-down to see why) a group of ex-fitters from Snow who continued to work in part of the Snows premises.
When I was there Jack Snow was around for a very short while - when Elliott has already taken over - John Noble was still around, but I think in a non-executive position. Jim Earnshaw was chief designer at the time (and an excellent one, too) with Arnold Thompson as the Technical/Works Director until its closure -  and Sid Little as an excellent fitter. During my time the unions certainly were a problem and this, together with the need to introduce NC controls and the rationalisation of businesses into larger groups finally caused Snow to wind up.
I can remember Stan Lilley, lan Pidd of sales, John Roberts from Purchasing and Alan Shipman who was the Works Manager for a time."
The photographs below of the works were taken in October 1933 (click on them to download a high-resolution copy) and show a busy factory with a range of machines in production. On a wall to the left is a calendar, and by blowing the original photograph up (it must have been taken on a 10" x 8" glass plate) it was possible to deduce both month and year..