Tongues Of Many Lands

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 140, 10 March 1938, Page 5

Tongues Of Many Lands

Buyers From All Over The World Spend £12,000,000 At Fur Sales

JN the little side-street teashops which cluster about Garlick Hill, in the heart of the City of London, the tongues of many lands have been engaged in urgent bargaining.

|7oR the last four weeks the world's fur dealers have arrived in London for the opening of the great winter auctions of every kind of pelt of which luxury-loving women ever dreamed, writes a correspondent of the "Daily Mail.” Centre of the world’s biggest fur market is Beaver House. Garlick Hill, where the auctions of the Hudson’s Bay Company have already begun. From 10 o’clock every morning until six at night streams of keen-eyed men with the power to spend fortunes flow in and out of Beaver House. They retire to little tea-shops to haggle over private deals in every language except English. , . The auctioning in the hall is done bv one man, who needs six alert assistants at bis side to gather in the bids signalled by scarcely perceptible nods or the movement of a pencil. Unemotional Buyers. PRENC'H. Russian, German, Italian, American . . . the buyers, in their white linen coats, sit stolid, unemotional, as if they were watching some boring play. Beforehand they have tramped through storerooms piled to the ceilings with neatly-stacked rows

of fox pelts, wolf skins, sealskins and mole pelts. Furs are fetching good prices in the auctions, and they tell me that retail prices will be higher by the spring, be writes. About £12,000,000 changes hands every year in the fur auctions, lour times every year the pelts of the world’s trappers pour into Loudon. Judging Skins. TpOR the guidance of women buying 1 furs, this is how the experts judge skins. They scrutinise the underside of a pelt. If it is brittle, the animal has been killed out of season, and the skin will lack fats necessary to give it long wear. They squeeze the pelt in their hands to judge the density of the fur. In matching two skins, they blow into the hair of each to judge the depth of the hairs. In buying silver-fox furs, the experts see that the tail has a tip of pronounced white and that the hairs of the pelt are well silvered.