No. I have looked at quite a lot of censuses. I thought I'd got him in 1851, a wool comber aged 30 in Bradford, but in 1861 he's a groom, in 1871 a labourer, in 1881 an unemployed cotton warp something-or-other illegible, and his wife is a widow in 1891, so he clearly isn't the William Black who signed the notice of dissolution of partnership in 1899.
The first William Black in the deaths index in Bradford after 1899 was 47 when he died in 1935, so too young to be the ex-partner.
I was working on the hypothesis that William Black must have been related in some way to the Rev David Black, but I have checked my own tree and I already have full death and occupation information for every William Black born between 1800 and 1880, and none of them fit. I have death records for all of them. Only six died after 1899. One was a shipping insurance man in Sunderland, one an ironfounder in Newcastle-on-Tyne, one a coalmaster in Lanarkshire, one a minister in Canada, one a Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh and the sixth one emigrated to New Zealand in 1884.
