Interesting vintage sporran (Ebay find)

[OC Richard]

I was intrigued by this sporran that recently came up on Ebay, here are the auction photos:



I'm a veteran sporran-watcher and I was able to make educated guesses about some things.

Yet there were things that were puzzling.

First, the cantle. The "chased" design looked like the work of Frederick Narborough (Birmingham) 1850-1962 or Dalman & Narborough after 1962 due to a name change.

Their work is familiar to pipers because they provided silver bagpipe mounts to a number of different bagpipe makers.

The front of the cantle looked like an ordinary modern Evening Dress style.

However the back has a hinge mechanism sort of like the familar "Culloden" sporrans.

The back of the body looked oddly pale as if it had been pipeclayed.

The front of the body looked like it had the crude aftermarket addition of a rabbit pelt.

The cantle alone was enough to justify the $80 price, whether the cantle was nickel-silver or Sterling silver (FN and D&N made both).

So today the sporran arrived! And a couple of my guesses were right, a couple wrong.

Indeed the cantle was by FN, hallmarked Sterling Silver, quite lovely. The date stamp indicates 1967.

The construction of the cantle was new to me: it has the ordinary sort of front plate, with threaded posts for small hex-nuts, but there is also a second plate, a back plate, onto which is soldered the hinges. The leather is sandwiched in between these two plates.

The leather body, front and back, is supple natural buckskin. You can see where three tassels were originally attached to the front.

I was hoping that the rabbit fur would be merely basted in place. Sadly, the entire piece of fur is glued to the whole front of the buckskin sporran body. Thus the leather body is a total loss.

I've sent these photos to Margaret Morrison who I hope can make a new leather body for this lovely cantle.