Vintage Lawrie & Other Sporrans, Patent No 174,788, & W.E. Scott

[HighlandPark]

I started a thread on vintage sporrans on the Dunsire Bagpipe forum a couple of days ago. OC Richard suggested that X-Marks-the-Scot members may also be interested. With some changes based on responses from Dunsire here is the thread for this forum:

I recently picked up a vintage dress R.G. Lawrie Ltd. sporran from a UK antiques seller. It's of the standard sealskin type but with the more atypical, if not more vintage-looking, etched cones holding the 'club' tassles in lieu of the balls and fringed tassles we usually see. It is embossed R.G. Lawrie on the back and strap, plus has the ubiquitous patent number found on so many sporrans, 714788. Here are a few images of the sporran:













This sporran was formerly owned by an Merchant Navy Officer who was stationed in Japan from the 1950s to the 1970s. While I was cleaning the sporran I found a green-crusted copper 10 Yen coin which I cleaned up a little. A couple of Dunsire members, including one from Japan, indicated that the date of the coin is 1952. Here are some images:





For those interested in how to decipher Japanese characters into dates, here's how Leong from the Dunsire forum did it:

First 2 characters - the Showa era i.e. starting in 1926 (Emperor Hirohito)
3rd char - numeral 2
4th char - numeral 10
5th char - numeral 7
6th char - I think it means "year"

So, this should date the coin as being minted in the 27th year of Showa - 1952.

Back to the topic at hand, here are some images of similar and identical sporrans with the same patent number, 174788. Those in this group are embossed with Lawrie (including the first one which is nearly identical to mine):







These are the non-Lawrie sporrans (same patent number), some stamped Hugh MacPherson, J.McPherson (?), and others no-name (the first one is nearly identical to mine but unbranded):







Here is an advertisement (from OC Richard?) of some sporrans that mirror examples from above, including mine:



So, I will now assume that, while my sporran is stamped R.G. Lawrie it was probably not made by Lawrie. What about the patent number 174788? While doing some digging I came across a copy of the actual patent here. The patent holder was/is a Willam Elder Scott. For an easier look at the patent here it is below in jpg format:






So, from what we now know the date of these sporrans is from the 1950s onwards, they are likely made by one manufacturer and then branded, and that the name of the patent holder is Willam Elder Scott. However, who was he and who did he work for? OC Richard dug this up as WE Scott & Son Company, which is still doing worldwide business. Here's a screen capture of the website:



The words on the page pretty much answer the question of who's been flooding the market with unbranded but quality "Made in Scotland" sporrans over the past decades. I suppose WE's contribution to sporran design is one of the more significant developments over the years; pretty well every 'contemporary' cantled sporran out there seems to utilize a variant of this style of closure.

OC Richard will likely chime in here with some images and info from his vintage Lawrie catalogue.

[MacGumerait]

Highland Park , great find ! I like the cones on the tassels , very nice vintage sporran . Also , very nice vintage specimens in your pics .

Here's an example of an EW1 given to me new back in 1970 .

Cheers , Mike

[HighlandPark]

Highland Park , great find ! I like the cones on the tassels , very nice vintage sporran . Also , very nice vintage specimens in your pics .

Here's an example of an EW1 given to me new back in 1970 .

Cheers , Mike

Very nice, Mike! I suspect that the red leather trim on my sporran was once a vibrantly red as yours. Whether with the balls or cones, this style of dress sporran with the red trim is my favourite. It took me a couple of years to find mine.