Luftwaffe WWII Dress Dagger with Portepee and Hangers

• Oak - Native to Europe and England, oak has been used for joinery, furniture and building since the beginning of the medieval civilisation. It is a pale yellow in colour when freshly cut and darkens with age to a mid brown colour.
  
  Oak as a furniture timber was superceded by walnut in the 17th century, and in the 18th century by mahogany,
  
  Semi-fossilised bog oak is black in colour, and is found in peat bogs where the trees have fallen and been preserved from decay by the bog. It is used for jewellery and small carved trinkets.
  
  Pollard oak is taken from an oak that has been regularly pollarded, that is the upper branches have been removed at the top of the trunk, result that new branches would appear, and over time the top would become ball-like. . When harvested and sawn, the timber displays a continuous surface of knotty circles. The timber was scarce and expensive and was used in more expensive pieces of furniture in the Regency and Victorian periods.
• Celluloid - In 1864 an American scientist by the name of Parkes mixed camphor with nitrocellulose, etc. The result was what came to be known as "celluloid", the first form of plastic, and a product for which Parkes could find no use.
  
  Some time later when the supplies of ivory for making billiard balls were becoming difficult to obtain, an inventor produced a perfect billiard ball from a mould using "celluloid".
  
  Toys, dolls and other products such as combs, cutlery handles and costume jewellery made from celluloid began appearing on the market from 1913 and continued to do so until the early 1950s by which time it was superseded by more modern products due to safety concerns because it was highly flammable and brittle product.

This item has been included into following indexes:

• edged weapons, other - daggers 270
• meat covers / food covers / dish covers - pewter 1,629