Help with cane top

This is a cane top bought at auction complete with can can you please read the hallmark.

I think Silver - London but can’t identify the date

1898 Looks like 1898… Try to clean it gently, then upload photo.

http://www.925-1000.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=32067 It’s only a guess…

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Do the best I can, but still nothing…

It looks as if it has been overstamped at least once and possibly twice. It’s a bit too messy to identify.

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Phil, I’m counting on U & your helping hand. I won’t sleep until I solve this puzzle. You’ll have it on your conscience. :slight_smile:

Tomorrow I will try to find a list of manufacturers of such items (walking and swagger sticks, canes etc. etc.).

Ebenezer Newman?

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Henry Howell & Co Ltd (Jonathan Howell) cane manufacturer was the largest and one of the world’s most prestigious makers of fine walking sticks. Their canes are sometimes, but not always, identified by the distinctive Henry Howell Co. badge or button. This is a small (1/4” to 3/8”) brass disc inlaid into the wood of the shaft and stamped with the maker’s mark. Howell canes can also sometimes be identified by the initials HH incised on either the ferrule or the collar. Can’t see it on your photo.

This is an over-stamp, meaning it wasn’t made by the 76 Aldersgate, later Old Street, located company but bought in, which explains the absence of the marks. The company was a victim of its own success its sales exceeded its production capability.

Walking canes were as essential for the city gent as a waist coat, a vesper and a decent Albert.

My grandfather, a Londoner living at 101 Long Acre who would have been 29 when this cane top was assayed, owned four canes all by the same company. And they weren’t just canes. One is a sword stick, another is lead weighted and clearly designed for use as a defence weapon. The most interesting stick is his own design it’s a suction lever and designed for sampling beer barrel content in his father’s brewery which eventually became Watney Mann and was then Combes. Charles Lancaster, gunmakers made a cane that fired a single 10.4 cartridge. My grandfather never had one of those but apparently tried it out and decided it was flawed as the barrel end was also the ferrule and that could easily get clogged up. Horses in those days exceeding anything else on the streets between Castle and Long Acre.

CRWW

I see Phil shows the mark in a much cleaner rep than this rather well-worn example.

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Hi Bob:

This is an interesting cane. Probably made of ebony or Cocobolo wood. I seem to have inherited a small collection of them from my London forebears, (See my remarks below).
My problem with the ones I have is they are all too short. My grandfather, who bought and owned them originally was 5.10" which was a good height for a male at the end of the 19th century, but seven inches shorter than me.

They weren’t really used like a hiking stick is, but more of a swagger stick. His cousin went to WWI armed with just that, which may go a long way to explain why he never came home.

If you clean it up, Bart or Phil can probably tell you who actually made it. Howell bought it in from another maker as he had more order than his cane-top manufacturer could keep up with and he was buying in from the competition. There were three other significant makers of tops two in London and one in Birmingham. This is clearly one of the London makers by the leopard’s head mark.

Canes like this lasted until the American lounge suit and “Oxford Bags” replaced the morning coat in the postwar era. All very Bertie Wooster.

We have got steadily less elegant ever since!

Great find! Thank you for sharing.

CRWW

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