History of Venner Shipley – an update!

Our history can be definitively traced back to 1947, when Harold Venner purchased a patent attorney practice from the widow of one “Siegmund Sokal”. Little was known about Mr. Sokal and it has generally been accepted that the origins of the firm go back to the 1930s, when Mr. Sokal was thought to have established his practice.

However, naturalisation records for 1923, released in 2024 by the UK National Archives, have shed new light on Mr. Sokal, showing that the history of our firm goes back much further than originally thought.

Siegmund (formerly Zygmunt) Sokal applied for and was granted British citizenship in 1923. His naturalisation application describes him as a “Polish citizen (previously Austrian subject)”. He was born in Lwow (Lemberg) Galicia in 1871. Lwow is a city that has long been at the centre of Polish and Eastern European history. It has been described as “the spiritual capital of the Polish lands”, but over time it has been part of many different kingdoms and empires. At the time of Siegmund’s birth, it was under Austrian control, but is now known as Lviv, a city in western Ukraine.

Siegmund Sokal was educated in Lwow, but also attended the highly regarded Technical University in Vienna between 1889 and 1890. He was a mechanical and electrical engineer from June 1894 to April 1898, then a technical assistant to a patent agent in Vienna between 1899 and 1901. He came to England in August 1901 and became a technical assistant to the well-known patent firms Boult, Wade and Tennant and then Abel & Imray.

He started practising on his own account as a Chartered Patent Agent in January 1910.

His practice covered a vast range of technical subject matter including photography, aircraft, lathes, dyes and sewing machines, and he built up a significant portfolio of German and other European clients.

Siegmund died in 1945 and his widow offered the practice for sale. In the immediate postwar years, this did not seem to the profession at large to represent a great business opportunity, but Harold Venner saw the potential, and a firm practising under the name ‘Venner’ was born.