May I make this even more complicated?
Although the Canadian Parks Department have done us all a favour by making their excellent little booklet freely available, it's not the whole story. Trade marks were really important to Sheffield manufacturers and the Cutlers' Company lobbied hard to win the right to control them. The Trademarks Act of 1875 established a national system, with the Cutlers' Company looking after knives and edge tools. So they had the job of maintaining a master list of marks.
TATHS have scanned and published the 1919 edition of the master register of marks, which is a really useful reference to Sheffield at its best. (It's a free download to members or can be bought on DVD for £6 here
http://www.taths.org.uk/shop/70-dvd1.)
Here's a mark shown as belonging to Aaron Hildick and Co - not to Charles Hill!
It's worth reminding ourselves that there is nothing new about brands being traded as intellectual property, quite separate from any manufacturing capability. There are plenty of examples of old firms being bought up just for their trademarks, which then continued in use many years after their original owners had died. (For example, Marples used the long established London name of John Moseley well into the twentieth century.)
So it's possible that Hildick acquired their cannon mark and the I.D. FY motto from Charles Hill.
It's possible that Brooksbank (who are in the 1919 listing) acquired the similar cannon mark from Wilkins (who are not).
It's possible that there was some other link between Hill and Wilkins or Brooksbank and the similar marks were by arrangement - or it could have been an attempt to confuse customers that somehow got the Cutlers' Company's approval.
But this is all just my speculation - I don't know the dates and histories of these companies, or their mergers and acquisitions.
If anyone really does want to pursue this in full detail, I suspect the answers have already been found and documented by Sheffield knife collector and scholar Geoffrey Tweedale and are in his monumental "Tweedale's Directory of Sheffield Cutlery Manufacturers 1740-2013" available at
Lulu.
For anyone not wanting 740 pages/1.97kg/1600 companies, there used to be a good selection of Mr Tweedale's articles on WK Fine Tools - now sadly unavailable.
So if anyone has his book, do speak up!
