F is for Follow-up - Remembrance Sunday

Which this is, all day! Brian Burke sent me some fascinating images yesterday, by way of a follow-up to the poppy post I left up yesterday morning, while waiting for my pick-up in the early hours, for onward transport to the toy show!

I think this is a lovely poppy! This (left) is an American one, and in Brian's own words;

 

"On the right UK, from some years ago when in the UK in October, on the left USA from two years ago. Hard to find here where Veterans Day is not the same meaning as UK and Poppies are sold by Veterans of Foreign Wars members (VFW Posts)"

 

I had no idea the American did them, albeit as a minority thing? And I love the little beady centre to the poppy, and the fact that it's got a more environmentally friendly wire stalk with green paper wrap, like those bunches of mushrooms, grapes or mini-baubles you can get for Christmas trees, flower arranging, cheese-boards &etc., and which are among the oldest surviving decorations still findable.

 

So many thanks to Brian for that speedy follow-up! I also think, Australia/NZ do them as well as Canada, are any of them different to the Haig Fund/British Legion ones, they must be, even if it's only the message in the centre?

And it's funny, I 'ummed & ahrred' about my last paragraph in the previous post, but decided - with everything else going on - to leave it in the post anyway, I do wear my heart on my sleeve, as well as a poppy on my breast, and subsequent events involving Tommy Yaxley-Lennon Robinson Wanker and his Right Wing mates attacking the Cenotaph (as Madame Cruella and the tabloid press, as good as invited them to) while the 'Left Wing' Ceasefire in Palestine march behaved itself elsewhere in London at the same time, only proved I was right to do so, that I was correct in speaking out.

The Left is right, and the Right is wrong, always has been, always will be . . . all of Human History is about the slow progress (oh so slow) of the Left, of tolerance, of liberal values, of science over 'belief', and the sacrifices in all wars are for that aim of a better world, not a worse one. In the last 15-odd years, the Global establishment as been dragging us into a worse world, and a bigger war is coming. Please, this day, of all days . . . Remember them.

A

R is for Remembrance

Those who've stuck with the Blog from the start will know there have been one or two false starts with other Blogs, one of which is still lying there dead, another was Other Collectables, a blog which was imported and subsumed by this one after about a year and a half, and 20-odd posts, to which I haven't added much since, although the idea is to have other collectables from time to time, and of which this could be seen as an addition.

A collection by default, and I'm sure many households in the UK (and Canada?) have this box, tub, tin or drawer somewhere on the premises? For those who don't know about 'Poppy Day', here in the UK, and Canada I believe, we commemorate our war dead, by wearing the Haig Fund poppies for a week or two leading-up to the nearest Sunday to the 11th Hour of the 11th of November.

 

Services of remembrance are held in most churches and/or at most war memorials, on the Sunday, for those who wish to join in, while more personal tributes can be undertaken in relative privacy away from (before or after) the organised activities, and small crosses can be left, wreaths &etc., which remain up until the end of November in some cases, while two-minutes silences are held nationwide at 11 a.m. on the 11th (of the 11th Month, the time and day the armistice came into effect, at the close of the First World War), whether before or after the Sunday.

 

These are the poppies we wear, they represent the poppies which thrived on the war-broken ground of Flanders fields and the mud of no-mans-land, as they always do on construction sites and spoil-heaps, to this day.

 

But having made your contribution, and worn your poppy, two things become pressing upon its disposal, one, you must have the morality to buy a new one next year, not reuse your old one, and two, there seems something disrespectful in throwing away something which represents our own dead ancestors - so in the box, tub, tin or drawer they go!

 

This enables the above picture, which shows the evolution of the Remembrance Poppy in my lifetime, with a heavy, felted-card one on the left, a bit like blotting-paper, but it didn't immediately disintegrate when it got wet (which was quite common back then), it comes with a long-stalked and quite thick 'stem'.

 

Then four sub-versions of the current one, the flower now in impressed cartridge-paper, first with a shorter, thinner stalk, then the addition of a piece of foliage, thirdly, a side-branch/catch was added to help keep it in the button-hole, and finally the side-branch then got remanufactured in heavier plastic as they had a tendency to pull-off

 

Alongside the final version is the all paper one which has been gaining usage in the last few years, and will probably become the norm, as we try to phase unnecessary plastics out of common use.

 

Top right I have doubled-up an old sun-faded pink one, something we used to do with the old ones when we were kids, you could get two or three under the button before it started threatening to pop-off, which this was, as I shot it, I think the two pieces of foliage were one too many!

The four stalks, oldest on the left, current on the right, the message in the centre of the button changed from Haig Fund to Poppy Appeal sometime in the 1990's I think, and the whole exercise is to raise money for the British (or Canadian) Legion, a charity which supports ex-servicemen, and provides social venues open to the whole community, but specifically aimed at ex-servicemen.

The oldest and newest on the left, with two versions of the all-paper one on the right, a selection is provided at each collection stand/table (often manned by ex-servicemen or their widows), and here we have one with a sticky patch and the other to be pinned-through with the dress-makers pins provided.

Other poppies exist, I have a huge eight or ten-inch lump of polyethylene vehicle-badge somewhere, which were common for a while around the turn of the century, attached to the radiator with a cable-tie (mine was on my Cittrowaan, a BX19 GTI RocketShip!), and they are still available I think, but the famous 'reserve' of the British has rather rendered them a bit naff and/or show-off'y, and due to their cost, people assume the owners are reusing them every year - shock horror! Also, the changing design ethic of motor-vehicles means more and more of them have nowhere to locate the poppy!

They were originally silk, and hand-made by disabled veterans, and there must have been other designs over the decades between 1919'ish and the 1970's when my felted big-boy was made and procured, probably compulsorily at school! But if you chose to collect them, I'm sure you could have years of fun tracking them all down?

 

A lot of the officers wives' used to have jewelled-silver broaches from Garrards, but they knew to wear them on their dress or blouse and make sure they had a fresh Haig on their coat or jacket, and you can get the enamelled 'pins' from the sellers every year, if you are a pin-head - what pin-badge collectors call themselves!

We'll be at the Sandown Park toy fair today, and at 11 a.m., there will be two minutes silence, wherever you are, please remember them, because they died for a better world, not the intolerant fascist one Rishi and Cruella are trying to create. Not the illiterately idiotic one Truss nearly foisted on us, and not the murderously immature one, Boris and eye-test-man ran for nearly two years, but then . . . none of them have served five minutes in the forces, yet they've all gone down to Lullworth, Warminster or somewhere, to drive a tank!

PW is for Polymer Warriors!

Just a quickie, picked these up the other day as part of the 'machine-gun' lots, I missed them first time round although I was in the room I think, but I was there as a small-scale collector only and probably turned-down the free one at the door . . . shock horror!

The guys at PW have over the years managed to commission a re-run of Dulcop's tools, import Hing Fat, save the Rocco moulds, liaised with the saving of other moulds, offered other figures from time to time, published, or supported the publishing of a number of other books and guides, and - I think it's fair to say - supported the fledgling Replicants? A list which all other toy soldier magazine teams can only envy!

To commemorate the occasion of their 10th year of publishing and the putting-on of their legendary shows, they gave away one of these to each entrant to the 1995-show, back in the Queen Charlotte Hall days, just off Richmond town center, I think the door figures were red plastic, but lots of other colours/shades where run-off.

Those other colours were also available at the show, in these bags of five, but for a few silver-pieces, and as you can see mine are two dark, two mid- and one lighter green in that shade/range I call 'herb' green, which is 'errb to our French and 'urb to our US readers!

The figure is a late C19th 'colonial' era soldier, standing at attention, wearing a solar topee/pith helmet (safari helmet, salacot, sun helmet), or sola/shola topi - Indian, because it's made of shola pith!

Designed and sculpted by Peter Cole (of Replicants) for the magazine's tenth birthday, and it was intended (I think?) to go with those early Zang/Herald for Britains figures similarly posed - Sikh Indian, Highlander, 'Khaki Infantryman' and Guardsman (a few of which were also in the lot with these).

I now have a few, to make up from my previous heretical approach to the larger size, with red, bright green and purple-marbled ones being seen here in the past I think, so hopefully I'm forgiven, but I'll stand-by for corrections on the above details as it was a while ago and I wasn't paying attention at the time!

Plastic Warrior's Blog

T is for Two - Tinny-tin Tins from Tinslyvania!

Or; N is for Nostalgia - Look what I found! There's actually all sorts of stuff coming out of the woodwork, and not just from my late Mother's effects, I've started finding stuff I've not seen since it went into storage, or even things I couldn't remember having! But here's two tins, which are interesting for very different reasons, a third title could have been F is for From the Sublime to the Ridiculous!

My Grandfather's Princess Mary's Christmas Fund tin, 1914, not exactly rare, but some of the prices on feeBay, for poorer examples, suggests this is worth a half-dozen of your Herald swoppet knights, on horseback, equally, you can find copies for 15 or 20-quid! Issued to various groups and tranches of service men and women from 1914 onward, I won't bore you with the whole tale; you can read it all here - IWM.

The contents of Granddad's tin; the pipe has been used, and I guess the longer stem was his own and just kept in the tin as  a spare/fall-back? The tobacco pouch is missing, along with the photo's seen in the above link, but I know I've seen the little one of Princess Mary, and possibly the one of the King and Queen, while sorting so we will return to this as I reassemble it more fully in the future.

Indeed I know I have the bullet-pencil in my own collection (and always wondered whose 'cap badge' it was - it was sold to me by the late Eddie Audsley - vintage tool expert - as Trench-Art), the cards are in the envelope and we'll look at them in a minute, but the piece of scrap-metal is more interesting.

A direct translation of the German Brennstoft Übernahmevent is 'fuel takeover event' which I suspect transliterates to fuel cut-off valve? Something like that; fuel safety valve, and presumably came from an enemy vessel? But who's and when? 

Granddad served first on HMS London supporting the ANZAC landings in the Dardanelles ('Gallipoli'), where gunboat activity is known to have occurred, and mostly (early) German vessels re-flagged to the Ottoman's but with German crews or - at the least - German officers?

Equally there was activity in the Mediterranean in support of the Italian fleet, where again Motor Torpedo Boats and Motor Gunboats played a part on all sides, while the final hostilities of that period was Granddad's apparent participation (vessel currently unknown) in the Russian campaign of 1919, where both (all!) sides lost, captured or sank motorboats which might have been supplied by Germany, or taken from them in 1918?

And I'm only looking toward the smaller vessels as they would be most likely to have fuel cut-off valves (or their labels) easy to hand for a quick removal with a sharp implement for keepsake/trophy purposes?

The cigarette packet is quite small, now . . . I wondered if that was for space, or budget, but suspect they were often (even commonly?) smaller than the ones we are used to now, filters weren't introduced widely until after the Second World War, but it's about a half of the mass of a modern pack of filterless Camels - which this author has had cause to persevere-with, in the past, when filtered ones weren't around!

The two cards; and two points of note; firstly while the 1915 card is shown on the above Imperial War Museum link (and in the excellent primer - Tommy’s War: British Military Memorabilia 1914-1918 by Peter Doyle), neither source explains how a second (or subsequent?) card/s was/were issued/received once the recipient had been given his or her 2014 tin. Now I get that if your tin was one of the late ones, you might get a card for whichever year you received it, but how did you get a second, and why do they all seem to be '14 or '15, where are '16 and 1917 cards?

The other point is a bit darker, the dropping of 'Happy Christmas' from the later card; clearly someone pointed out, to the committee organising the fund, that it was impossible to have a happy Christmas under fire in a trench full of mud, rats and body-parts? Or on an Atlantic convoy looking for submarines which were looking for you, in an ice-storm? So the epithet was shortened to 'Victory' wishes only!

Anyway, that's the sublime, now I'll lower the tone considerably, with the ridiculous!

I found this in the garage; modern archeology -  Knickers in a Tin! I vaguely remember Mum's rather flighty Canadian friend Janet (of Perrier premium fame) giving it to her for a laugh one Christmas when we were quite little (Janet also took Playgirl magazine!), and it became a staple of my Mother's breakdown-kit, moving from car to car, and thence, eventually, to a damp garage where the conditions have faded all but the British Knickers, so I can't tell who made it, or when, but I think you can still get such stuff in Anne Summers or other adult outlets, as Stag or Hen gifts?

Realising it was to all intents and purposes gash now, I took the trusty army tin-opener to it, to finally reveal the supposed risqué contents . . .

. . . only to find slightly twee knickers, with a Union flag overprint on some indestructible faux-silk, metallic blue, granny-pants! What's left of the tin will be weighed-in with the next lot of scrap metal and the knickers have already gone to the clothing bank! More tins to come.

PW is for Replicants

I can't honestly remember when this was issued, I think it was the 20th Anniversary show at Queen Charlotte Hall in Richmond, the old venue for the annual Plastic Warrior show, but it might have been the 25th, or even earlier . . . the 10th?

Anyway, Peter Cole at Replicants who's enjoyed a close relationship with the PW crew was approached to make a figure which could be given-out with the entry ticket . . . or in lieu of an entry ticket as - and I think I'm right in saying - there's only ever been a hand stamp for those wishing to take a break from the plunder hall!

This is the chap, as issued, in a glorious blood-hiding scarlet polymer, a late 19thC colonial type, originally suggested as/for the Zulu war but suitable for painting in various uniforms; the afore-mentioned scarlet, colonial 'blues' or the later khaki and usable with Boers, Mad Mardi types or other ner'do'wells who may have objected to the rule of the Great White Queen!

The seller had several colours of pre-production prototypes or test-shots and I took one as far from the final figure as possible, although some were marbled red and green and I now wish I'd grabbed on of them as a third!

Interestingly, the figures are made of a harder plastic than the figures I'm now buying from Replicants (which are an 'Airfix' soft polyethylene) and knock together with more of a hardwood or hollow-bones sound.

Been around for some time and seen elsewhere, if not everywhere else, but the box needed ticking . . . and is now ticked!