You honestly never know what you’ll find when you’re browsing the flea-market.

I picked up this neat little walking stick about a week ago!

Normally I don’t buy walking sticks, but I do find them fascinating. For the longest time, walking sticks of one variety or another were popular all over the world, from China to Chile, England to America, Europe to Ecuador! A tradition dating back literally thousands of years, people carrying walking sticks has been done for all kinds of reasons – fashion, infirmity, self-defense, to complete an outfit, to make a statement, to fend off attack, or to assist in traversing rough terrain.

Walking sticks were at their height of popularity in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s, when people were traveling and moving around more than ever.

A typical walking stick is comprised of three or four parts:

The Handle

The handle is the grip at the top of the walking stick. It’s either a curved crook, a T-shaped ‘derby’ handle, or else some kind of knob or grip. This can be as elaborate or as simple as you like – topped with brass, sterling silver, ivory, bone, glass, pearl, or even solid gold – if your pocketbook can stretch that far!

The Collar

The collar is the area directly beneath the handle. This serves a mostly decorative function, and is designed to make the transition between the handle to the body of the stick more pleasing. Collars were usually brass, silver, or gold. Sometimes, they were engraved with things like dates, names, dedications or inscriptions, if, for example, the stick was a gift or presentation, or if the owner wished to identify it in the event of loss.

The Shaft

The main body of a walking stick is known as the shaft. It can be made of almost anything! Wood, bamboo, rattan, bone, glass, or even ivory!

The Ferrule

The ferrule is the spot at the very bottom of the walking stick. Today, most ferrules are made of rubber or leather, but in times past, ferrules were often made of sterling silver, brass, or steel. The point of the ferrule is to protect the base of the shaft from contact with the ground. Constant striking and scraping would damage a stick very easily, and cause the shaft to crack, split, or shatter! To stop this, the ferrule took the impact of any strikes against the ground, and prevented the stick’s base from wearing out. If or when a ferrule wore out – it was easily replaced – without damaging the stick itself.

The Stick I Found at the Market

So what about this stick? What’s the story behind that?

Well, as I said, I picked it up at the market – cheap – because the handle was badly damaged. It was cracked and worn out, and had been broken at some point. It had been replaced at one point with a new walking stick header or topper, but this was only crudely attached – and came off easily – as you can see.

That being the case – why did I buy it?

Well, I was interested in it for a number of reasons…

One – the body or shaft was of an unusual material – it may not be immediately obvious – but it’s actually made – not from wood – but from bamboo! You might notice that the stick is not fully straight – it curves and bends slightly, due to the nature of the bamboo when it was growing – which makes the stick a little quirky!

Two – the stick had a silver handle – and I liked that. I’ve always liked silver, and that attracted me to it. But lots of walking sticks have silver handles – so what? Well – this led me to the third part of the stick which I liked…

Three – the collar! This was what really interested me in the stick – not the handle, not the fact it was broken, not the bamboo – but the collar. The reason I was so interested in it was because the collar (and presumably the original handle, at one point) featured all kinds of Chinese motifs on it, which I thought was really cute! Wrapped around the top of the stick was a silver collar – roughly an inch and a half wide – and it was festooned with trees, palms, and figures dressed in old, Chinese attire, and little Oriental-style buildings in the background in hills and streams…and I thought – it’s adorable! And so topical – for fairly obvious reasons!

So after solid haggling, I got it half-price, and walked off with it, swinging it through the air for fun.

Fixing the Handle

Despite my best efforts, repairing the – by now – at least twice-previously-repaired handle – was just not going to be easy. And yet – also surprisingly easy – all at the same time.

The original handle was just a flat plate across the top of the collar – this much I could tell just from looking at the stick – there was no attachment point for anything more elaborate like a crosspiece or a chunk of ivory, etc. This had been replaced at some point by a dome-top, which was all dinged up from use – striking against things and so on. This was wobbly and loose, and when I got it home, it eventually fell off altogether when the stick was unbalanced and hit the floor!

That was when I realised just how badly the replacement repair had been made! The replacement knob was just cheap, silver hollow-ware – basically a shell of paper-thin silver which had been stuck on the top of the stick – and stuck badly, too, if one good knock was all it took to break it off! And when I mean the silver was paper-thin, I mean literally paper thin – you could rip it in half with your fingers – and it was completely hollow underneath, to boot. All in all, a completely useless repair for a part of the stick which is designed to take the full weight of the user.

Fortunately, my little mishap did not damage the reason why I bought the stick in the first place – the beautiful silver collar.

Repairing the Damage

The real challenge came with repairing the top of the stick – and this proved to be surprisingly easy to do. I found some silver of a suitable shape, size and thickness in the box of broken silver scraps which I keep aside whenever I buy antiques. In digging through it, I found a large, sterling silver cufflink with a broken toggle. I broke the toggle off with a pair of pliers, and placed it over the damaged spot on the top of the stick – it matched up perfectly!

Mixing up some epoxy, I filled the gap left by the broken handle, with enough glue to completely flood any gaps, so that we wouldn’t have another cave-in. The overflow from this gap-filling would be sufficient to seat the new handle-topper over the damaged area, and make the stick resemble, more or less, what it would’ve looked like when it was new, back in the 1800s. It was just a matter of sticking it down, and adjusting the positioning so that the rim of the new header lined up with the uppermost rim of the decorative silver collar.

Some slight misalignment was inevitable (because of the aged nature of the materials involved, and the previous damage to the handle), but I’d say it was 99% successful! I found a suitable place to stand the stick upright, and left it alone overnight to cure.

Come morning – the stick was good as new!

The diameter of the old cufflink which I used as a handle-topper is SLIGHTLY wider than the width of the collar-top at its widest point. This means that now, the handle flares out ever-so-slightly, and tapers down towards the collar – which is a really nice effect. Plus, it allows you to hang the stick easily between your fingers without having to actually grip it.

The slightly off-kilter nature of the repair matches with the battered look of the collar underneath, and doesn’t make it look like anybody was trying too hard to be perfect with a flawless repair that would be jarring with the overall appearance of the stick. Last but not least – being able to use silver – a proper, solid piece of silver – to fix the handle meant that both the collar, and the handle were now made of solid silver which was not going to break off, crack, rip off or drop off anytime soon – and the stick should be good to go for another 150-odd years!

What do we Know about this Stick?

A stick like this is certainly no modern manufactured geriatric support aid. Oh no. Definitely not.

A stick like this has age, has use, and has been around the block more than a few dozen times!

Looking closely at the stick, there are several indicators of age, and also, of country or region of origin.

On top of that there’s the silver collar. It’s festooned and decorated with all kinds of Asian themes – people in robes with Asian features, Asian-style buildings and flora, and just a whole ‘Oriental’ vibe. This overt Oriental decoration points to it being made in Asia (if the shaft material alone didn’t suggest that!) – and most likely for export to the West.

The collar has no hallmarks on it – Asian silver in those days was rarely marked – and when it was, they wouldn’t have bothered with something as insignificant and small as a walking-stick handle! On top of that, there’s all kinds of minor damage to the stick. For example – the shaft has loads of cracks in it from where the bamboo has dried out (I filled and clamped some of these with glue, to improve the structural integrity of the stick) – and the silver collar has all kinds of little dings and chips from where it’s been handled – again – not something you can easily fake.

Last but not least – is the length of the ferrule.

The ferrule is the cap at the bottom of the stick, remember? And this can be used in dating the stick.

Later sticks, those made in the late 1800s and into the 1900s, typically had shorter, less substantial ferrules, while earlier sticks from the 1700s and earlier 1800s, had longer, more substantial ferrules.

Why?

Well – it was because of the state of the roads and transport at the time! Paved roads is something we take for granted today, but for most of history, very few roads – in town, and especially in the country – were ever paved. And if they were, they were paved with cobblestones or similar, which were hard-wearing, to the point of destruction! Because of this, earlier walking sticks needed thicker, longer ferrules to guard against the scraping and chipping on cobbles or bluestone pavers, and to protect against mud, ooze, dirt and water, which could rot the base of the walking stick. To stop this from happening, sticks were made with thicker-based ferrules with longer shafts covering more of the walking stick to give extra protection.

As paving improved and roads became less hazardous, walking stick ferrules became smaller and smaller, since less of the shaft had to be protected from mud, water and grime now, and the hard wear on the tip was less likely.

Since this stick has quite a substantial ferrule (nearly two inches!) it had to be an older one, since a more modern stick would only be about half an inch, to an inch at most.

All in all – a beautiful antique, and one with a fascinating past which we can only guess at.