Thanks Jim, It does seem that the formation of The Hollow Blade Company... and with it The Sword Blade Bank were subsidiary to the Sword Makers of Shotley Bridge but entirely separated by some sort of legal wizardry!... This allowed the Banking arm to operate in very murky waters indeed and with the South Seas Company (later implicated and of the South Seas Bubble fiasco) who were up to their necks in the slavery business. Many would argue that the slave trade financed in part the Industrial Revolution in the UK..
The upshot being that the big names simply used the Swordmakers credentials in pulling in finance and other names for their own grandisement.
See
https://books.google.com.om/books?id...20bank&f=false
The thrust of this segment of my input suggests that the naming of the company and its association with the Shotley Bridge sword makers was irrelevant except for the prestigious linkage with certain branches of Royalty and influential business names and of no substance to do with blade production whatsoever. It therefor largely represents a degree of importance in the general smoke screen when unraveling this puzzle along with
the blade in the hat story and
the mercury in the hollow blade. The biggest flanneling escapade may yet turn out to be the entire story of the Hollow blade as quite unfounded and that no hollow blades of the Colichemarde form ever got made at Shotley Bridge.