Visible glue lines are most definitely not found on any professionally made fishing rods.
It is a fault indicating poor and imprecise planing.
I've handled rods by Southwell, indeed I've owned one before now and the cane looked no darker to me. At least no darker than other rods with well-baked cane. Ted Oliver, who worked for Southwell tells me he was taught to press nodes in a vice after heating them, just as he illustrates in his own catalogues with a photograph.
I asked if this didn't cool the cane down before you had a chance to compress the node, but Ted said not. He went on to say there was never any fancy hot node press when I asked about this fabled bit of kit and that cane was heated over a flame to dispel moisture and it is this which gives both his, and Southwells, cane their dark colour.
Indeed Ted's rods
are dark and he writes most strongly in regard to how this moisture must be dispelled in a certain way so as to prevent it getting back in again.
With both Ted Oliver and Clive Young working for Southwell, both going on to found their own highly respected firms, as well as two other employees at Station Road, Croydon, there must be a fair bit of Southwell cane out there, but it seems silly to me to think that they were the only ones who knew how to heat cane and get it just right. Other makers simply must have had this skill too, particularly when you consider how big some of them were.
I feel there is far too much attribution of Southwell cane just because it is dark. I've recently sold ( to a TFF member) a rod with darker cane than any I have ever seen anywhere....and very fine it felt too...but it isn't a Southwell, it's an Aspindale!
I sometimes wonder if it would have been physically possible for Southwell to have supplied all the other rod makers he is supposed to have supplied? Yes, he may have sent built cane to all sorts of other rod makers from time to time, doubtless he supplied some to Clive Young and J B Walker, for example, but to say that any J B Walker rod that has dark cane is surely by Southwell is simply wishful thinking and assumes that nobody else could flame cane properly, which is frankly absurd.
Add to these thoughts the fact that much dark cane around today isn't actually that dark, it's just that the old varnish on it has darkened considerably since it was first applied 50 years ago and you have a situation where nothing is certain.
At the end of the day..if a cane rod feels good it probably
IS good. But I've had it conclusively proved to me by a rod builder that dark baked or flamed cane does
not have a different action to pale blonde cane.....it's all in the quality of the cane and the tapers, despite what one chap has written.
Rather off-topic, Wal, for which I apologise, but what I'm finally getting around to saying is that I don't think there is a single element that you can say is a sure sign of a Southwell.
There's transfers, of course, and white lettered writing in the Milwards style on the Captain's rods. They
are dark...but so's the varnish on them now...and no darker than other rods of that period. I have seen a couple with very tight decorative spiral whipping on the butt in black silk, but nothing that couldn't be done by someone else retrospectively, just as writing and even transfers can be. Funnilly enough it was the chap who wrote about the " dark steely cane" that was the first I heard of to make his own transfers.......