Green silk, wide inters, milky white agate butt ring. No transfers at all and hand-written.
It's most definitely not Walker's own writing and it is too confident a hand to be Jim Bruce's I think, though the style is correct. It might be his hand ..perhaps the first of the day when he was fresh to the task. I would have expected one of his rods to have both transfers though...the wrap-around gold James one and the diamond shaped 'built to endure' transfer next to it.
I see a well known collector wishing the seller good luck with the auction...I knew it was him the minute he wrote of high eBay fees...
...perhaps he thinks it IS a Walker built rod, but it most definitely isn't Walker's handwriting for at least 5 reasons. I suppose it's best not to go into those reasons here on an open forum and I'm not a hand-writing expert, but I have worked with a few of them and I'm confident that Walker didn't do that writing...neither is he likely to write B.James on a rod he made himself....so it's not quite the Holy Grail.Even Walker himself wrote that identifying such early rods was most difficult but what a chap does with his money is his business. Whatever it goes for I doubt it'll see the bankside again soon.......
In truth, without those missing transfers do we even know it's a B.James rod?
