I always assumed; that cats were a real scarcity in years of old, blame the angler or cellist or perhaps very common but gutless felines with an inability to digest or mouse hunt adorning many long shanked antique hooks (without an eye or spade). Hooks had micro barbed shanks produced by some swift force from a bladed instrument? seemingly not from that link which I find curious considering the tackle elders had the ability to make a large barb behind the point. The purpose being as an anchor for the twisted leader to hold while the glue set.
The silk worm, silk glands vividly dissected are a real eye watering eye opener!
Hooks.
Much stick has been given to the Redditch hookmakers and how they failed to take on the chemically sharpened, microbarbed Far East hook revolution of the early 1980s, but something said to me in the mid 1970s by a then late-middle-aged lady, one the hook girls at the Partridge of Redditch Mount Pleasant works, who had worked for many years at Allcocks and Milwards before she finally joined Partridge, "Barbs, dear? Oh, we could do them lots smaller, but the trade never wanted them.", might cast some light...
PS - the above was borne out in 1984 or 1985 when my pal Kevin (of Horton and Blackwater and some other waters) and his girlfriend were living with me at my home near Windsor after returning penniless from a long and very successful India trip in my footsteps that I had helped them with. At the end of a summer weekend away in Dorset they returned with an old suitcase full of boxes of old hooks that they had bought from a tackleshop down there that was clearing old store-room stock as it slowly closed down.
In the suitcase were boxes of hooks - 100s, Grosses (244) - of many patterns by a long-gone Redditch firm, Albert Smith.
I had the fly patterns (no use to Kev').
Many of them made for the Canadian market.
Ferociously sharp and with tiny barbs. Perfect temper. I've caught salmon to 29 pounds and sea-trout to over 30 (one of them on a fine wire size-12 double) with the hooks in the years since.
Superb hooks.
What we missed...