CANES

From Egyptian dancers, using curved canes with rattled at the end to the Morris dancers in England, known for the ‘attack' tap, more playful than pugnacious, it is this play fighting with canes that reminds many of fencing - itself thought of as a kind of dance... As Wayne Curtis puts it, ‘The Victorian walking stick was the Swiss Army Knife of the pre-automotive era: something useful, easily carried, and able to provoke small wonderment when shown off, and useful as weaponry in certain circumstances.'... In British schools, we are generally taught history from a British and European point of view. In studying an account of the world, the teachers often leave whole civilisations and continents, including Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas, a mystery. Only when these civilisations or peoples came under the influence of Europeans do we learn of their existence.