E is for Elgate - Spring Gift Fair 2025

As last, another image dump, but many more figural items on display, this year. With Scotland and Wales having a bigger presence in the various lines, and Paddington putting in an appearance!

 

Poured resin

 

Those non-sharpening pencil sharpeners again!

Not for the collection, but could interest someone? Christmas trees?

 

I've seen a boxing Kangaroo in the last few days, don't know if it was Elgate (didn't look), but they are a bit naff, fun for kids though, which is the main function of novelties!

 

 

 

Nothing of the 'piper' about them, just Guardsman on decorated pens!

 

Roman big 'ed!

 

Keyrings, might be one of the new soft/foamed rubbers? Rather in the style of the old Xandria keyrings from the Netherlands, but modern and made in China.

 

Metal keyrings, if I see the guardsman, I'll grab one for that novelty stash, but the rest can stay on the peg, being more bottle-opener than figural!

 

Egg-cups!

 

The resin parade again, and more egg-cups.

 

A 'Photoclip', what the novelty industry calls a place-name holder, when everybody likely to buy place-name holders have bought a set (or two!) of place-name holders! Also, selling them singly, results in a higher profit-margin per unit . . . and more packaging for a planet which just hasn't seen enough packaging yet.

 

The resin bears!

 

All, also seen before!

 

The big-heads have been replaced with rubber Leprechaun keyrings.

 

Nessie - die-cast Mazak/Zamak

 

Scottie-dogs and a bear!

Close-ups of the snow 'eggs', I think the thinner one is manufactured from poured-resin, the chubby chap may be plastic or a synthetic rubber compound?

 

Various Welsh Dragons in die-cast alloy or resin, mostly smallish, baby 'Game of Thrones' dragons (the die-casts), the larger poured-resin examples could be useful for Role Play, or fans of the Nottingham Mafia system.

 

Paddington!

 

Mostly novelty stuff and pretty ephemeral, but, that's given Elgate a decent presence in the Tag list, and covered most of what they have, which may be of interest, currently, but they're not the only purveyors of this kind of stuff, and we'll look at another soon.

E is for Elgate - Spring Gift Fair 2023

Having mentioned them the other day, in passing, and because their stuff is, if not actually rack-toys, at least within that pocket-money, novelty, touristy branch of the figural tree, I think it's time to clear the queue of the Elate pictures, call it an image dump!

 

The bulk of it is poured-resin 'touristicas' with a bit of plastic and die-cast in the mix, and the post is blurb-light, as it's all pretty self-explanatory. For some reason they've loaded in reverse again, keeps happening, but there's no narrative here so it doesn't matter . . . the Internet slowly getting worse, like everything else!

 

Small resin bears.

 

Bobble heads, no room for them in this collection, unless they are glow-in-the-dark aliens - nobody knows what aliens look like! And the guardsman would probably be allowed in, just because the novelty guardsmen is a side branch with a life of its own!

 

More resin!

 

Not so much pencil (or pen-) tops, as jackets or holders for replacement Biro-ink inserts, again poured resin, and when things like this come into the collection, I saw them off the long body and put them on bases.

 

Orks!

or Goblins?

 

 

Fairies, I know where a few of these ladies hang out, and they are very similar to the Pucator ones, which we saw here, when they were kicking around, about a decade ago.

 

Standard tourist fare, we've seen the pencil-sharpener figures (sans pencil sharpeners), at the time of the Queen's death, I bought a set of three, whilst navigating my way from the North bank to the South, avoiding the miles-long, whimpering queue of simple-minded sycophants.

 

The luck O' the Irish!

 

Snow-globes/snow-domes (and snow-eggs!) of Edinburgh Castle, Highland pipers &etc...

 

Nope!

 

Better! I think we've seen one in the collection now, and if not we've certainly seen several similar beasts, some courtesy of Chris Smith or Peter Evans.

 

There's a whole lot more to come on these, from this year's early Gift Fair, so I'll try to get them up tomorrow . . . .that's later today now!

T is for Third-Party Theory?

Following on from the previous post this one is of interest, if only for further muddying the waters of Hong Kong's contribution to toy production in the 1960's and '70's, and illustrates how impossible it is to ever fully know the whole history of that former colonies activities, and therefore proof of an eternal hole in the history of toys . . . or novelties!

 

A quick reminder of the latest recruit to the stash, courtesy of Chris Smith, and I'm only reproducing it as - not collaged - it's easier to see that the polystyrene figure has been glued to a polystyrene sheet, so effectively it had to be cut out, or rather I suspect it was broken out, deliberately or in an accident is a moot point, but an accident would have more likely broken him off at the skate.

 

I suspect he was glued to something, probably with his lady friend, which would have looked like this . . . 

. . . pair of ne'er-do-well's from Toytown! These are more often encountered as stand-alone figurines, but were, I think, sold as cake decorations, but I'm not sure, and they are one of three sets of Noddy characters I know of in 'our scales', the other two being the smaller set of polystyrene figures from Marx and the Kellogg's from Crescent polyethylene cereal premiums.

 

You sometimes find these described as Marx too, and they may be, I don't know what licence relationship Swansea had with the Estate of Enid Blyton, but it would have been a Marx UK 'thing'. This set has about eight or ten characters, while the smaller one may extend to ten or twelve (we've seen one or two here, but there's better samples of both in the collection, against a future post or two). I've also seen them credited to Codeg I think?

But here they have been glued to a Happy Birthday decorated plastic plinth, and by whom and where may never be known. However, they are almost certainly a third party, buying-in the figures and the plinths, and marrying them together, with added paper stickers, to create more attractive pieces, which looks more substantial, and can therefore be priced at a higher rate than the cost of the components, when sold separately!

These were on feeBay a couple of years ago, and seem to suggest that the third party, or one of them (?), might have been based in the UK, because the Tom figure is clearly the Gemodels original in soft polyethylene, but if Culpitt were behind these novelty decorations, they could have sent UK produce to Hong Kong to have the work done, again - we'll probably never know?

But here we have artificial foliage, UK and HK figures in two polymers, and a wire/brush-fir in a wooden barrel, all added to the same plinths and given paper labels, one Birthday themed, the other a Christmas piece, neither requiring any creativity on the part of the cake-maker, just plonk the vignette on the icing!

And then I found these, adding to the chapter on KT, with an all-Irish line-up of novelties, where, again, the right-hand Leprechaun has been glued to a thermometer! On a similar base to the above, and obviously from the tourist trade, I have no idea whether these were from the Republic or Ulster, if one, I'd favour the former, but I dare say they were seen/available for purchase on both sides of the boarder?

 

Now firstly, we have two new sculpts to add to the KT listings, which have already enjoyed a bunch of these plinthed ones, mushrooms, a smaller astronaut and the larger Diddyman, but secondly, we can see the Leprechauns here are based with smaller, chunkier bases matching their stature, while the Irish Dancer has the finer steps to her base of the other figurines in the oeuvre?

 

And, in adding a thermometer to the already found pen-holder and pencil sharpeners, it means we may well be looking for sand-timers, letter racks, money-boxes, jewellery stands/music boxes and so on. And it may be that KT were behind the larger copy of their beefeater, even if not named on the HCF set?

 

I've also added the KT tag to a couple of the earlier 'unknown' figure posts, and in doing so, you can see how help from Chris Smith, Brian Wagstaff and Adrian Little has been invaluable in revealing the KT story, with links on the KT posts revealing Brian Berke helped with the old hollow-cast cowboys who also became pencil sharpeners! Many thanks to all of them.