[Arran]

Roy;
I believe that it is plain cut French walnut, but it looks like they used tinted lacquer over the sides like they did with the molding. Originally they would have covered each side panel with one sheet of veneer, and then cut that wide slot into it, but you could just replace the damaged sections with something similar for the bottom. If you are really ambitious you could use bits of the badly chipped piece from one side to patch the small chips on the other, but then again you could just chisel off the bottom portion on both sides and replace with new, which is probably what I would do since it's easy enough to replace, even a 1-1/2' long piece of walnut veneer would be more then enough to replace both sides.
Regards
Arran