M is for Minor 'Euro-Makes'!

Actually I'm going to tack a major on at the end, whom we've already revisited once in this occasional series, entering it's third month with at least 12 posts still to come, plus a combined comparison/round-up post at the end. And today, some of the European makers we haven't yet looked at.

From a 1970's Vollmer catalogue, are these wagons, which I think missed the wagon posts a few years ago, they look to be Preiser, but the horses are the smoother, simpler ones more commonly associated with the Roscopf wagons or some Hong Kong copies. Indeed, I think I've mentioned before, that I'm not sure what the relationship is between the three or four (Noch seem to have carried other people's product before they embarked on their own, now Preiser-equalling, range), so I can't add much beyond that the similarities are obvious?

 

While this is the 2000 Walther's (Terminal Hobby Shop) catalogue, and we see what are clearly Preiser, in a 'simple paint', we actually saw this earlier in the post series, but I scanned it again!

 

Not sure if these are from Merten or Preiser, (they have the arm'y/leg'y look of Merten?) but again a rolling-stock and trackway manufacturer, getting 'simple-paint' samples from another maker, to enhance their catalogue with a basic set, it's all part of the 'brand-loyalty' work, isn't it? Add a couple of Pola buildings, a level-crossing, some track plans, Heki trees . . . and 'Fleischmann' people!

 

This - the Jouef figures - is a personal embarrassment, as I think it's their third mention on the Blog, over the sixteen years, with the Mettoy Playcraft scans appearing at one point, and yet, despite seeing them go to storage, I still haven't photographed them, but they did appear in One Inch Warrior magazine, I think, in black & white, which doesn't do justice to the loud and leery paint job, of the Playcraft - ironically a Tri-Ang rival from the same Line's empire!

 

I have since found slightly better painted ones (in shade, not the two-colour stab-and-hope scheme), which may be Jouef origianls, from whose catalogue these scans are added to the previous shots! And playcraft sold them from the Jouef bags, so they were only ever nominally Playcraft! Also, didn't Hornby experiment with passengers pre-glued to platform sections at one point? Instant Stations!

From the same Walther's catalogue, this was, I think, the beginning of what has in recent years become a line to rival Preiser, and we have seen one or two here, a Bierfest stand springs to mind, and I will one day do the rude sets, of which I have several and they should have been in the 'Adult' naughty-post before Christmas, but they are in storage.

 

Noch were originally another prefabricated building/scenic's firm, like Pola, Vollmer or Wiad, and like them had a couple of simple figures kicking around the pages of their catalogues, in boats or something, from time to time, but in the last quarter-century have developed a range to rival Preiser, even as Priser swallowed-up Elastolin and Merten to stay ahead!

I don't know much about these, except that they are probably lead or whitemetal, possibly composition, and as listed in this old catalogue? Klinebahn (literally 'small way'), and in sets of six matching the lead of early Märklin, or the sets of Preiser, Merten and those above.

 

And, having just mentioned them, our third visit to Märklin in this railway-figure 'season', and no, we are not going to start investigating O, G, S, 1, BIG or any other gauge, that can be for another day, or for the A-Z pages! But I wanted to post this set of composition figures and - specifically - the interactive or 'working' guard, as it's just so cool! All in O-gauge.

 

The catalogue mentions the 1937 Grand Prix of Paris, on the cover, but seems to be actually the 1949 issue, as they started to recover from the national madness of national socialism.

F is for Follow-up - Khaki Runnings!

I managed to grab the Battle Space, at the weekend after all, so managed a quick shoot of the closest Model Power  'twins' and took one of the military locomotive pool while I was at it!

Mobile missiles; both utilising their maker's flat-car, both spring-loaded and both having the large elevation tap-wheels, but otherwise quite different, the Model Power is err . . . underpowered, but as it's a polystyrene model, it would break quickly under the power of the Tri-Ang launcher which packs a serious, pre-H&S punch!

To which end, the Triang-Hornby missile is a rubber-tipped affair in softer polyethylene to take the strain, it also looks more like a Tallboy or Grand Slam (aerial bombs) than the Model Power's Honest John lines. "It'll 'av someone's eye out"!

Tank transporters; the earlier British one being a bogie well-wagon (that is a lower cargo 'well' between the raised twin-bogie (truck)-mountings) which reduces the height of the center of gravity, while Model Power utilise a clip-on set of chocks with a standard flat-car.

In fact, in the West, tanks are chained down with between four and eight chains which are screw-tightened, you only have to watch a few 'funny' tank-fail videos to understand the current Russian failings in Ukraine; while we winch-on and tie down, they rev-up and mount like dogs on heat and drive off, losing the thing at the next roundabout if it didn't fall-off on loading, or crush its own lorry!

Exploding cars; mechanisms were actually quite different (I didn't have time or space for more detailed shots this time, and while both have the look of North American 'reefer' wagons, Model Power go with a 50ft one, we Brits matched our road wagon limit with a  40-footer! Rememeber also HO is also scaled smaller (1:86/90) than OO (1:76/72), so the British model looks a bit 'chunkier'!

I have an old 1970's Walther's or two, and among the pages and pages of transfers for home-builders, mostly for reefers or passenger stock, are quite a few military ones, so you could with the two Q-Cars, this pair and a few kits, build a long, but visually rather boring (if more realistic) logistics train, but you'd need to glue these two shut first!

The loco's; we've seen the two main brands before, but of interest is the one down the front left, which is a clockwork 'cheapie' from Playcraft via Jouef of France. not specifically military, it happens to be the right colour, and adds variety to my fleet!

We loved our 'starter set' clockwork's when we were kids, and used to run them on a figure-eight inside our electrified double-oval, if we were quick we could get four trains moving at once without a crash . . . we weren't always lucky - figure-8's have a crossroad!

It's one of those quirks of toy history that at one point you had OO-guage train sets/lines from/branded-to Tri-Ang, Rovex and Mettoy Playcraft . . . all ultimately Lines Brothers! I should also mention the track, which happens to still be around despite having long lost its usefulness.

It's a sort of resinated or 'Bakelite' treated card (like the ties in old plugs which hold the cable tight), obviously for power-insulation, with the shiny (non-ferrous) rail fasteners (chairs or tie-plates) riveted through the card every forth sleeper (tie), I did have a brand name for it, well . . . it's somewhere in the archive, Hammant & Morgan maybe (our transformer was theirs), Hamblings, or early Hannants? One of the mail-order catalogues in the archive has/lists something which fits the description anyway!

It was the home-fitted rail on our train-set which was bought 2nd hand by Mum at Persons Auctions here in Fleet (long-gone, along with County Tractors and First Inertia), and somehow she managed to hide it (about 6ft x 8ft) from us until Christmas morning, I'm hoping, when I lift the boards in the loft, in the next few weeks, that I may find it's still there with its household gloss 'landscaping', but it may have gone years ago? It was old, crumbly, early (1960's) chipboard.

N is for New Novelties - Chris's Parcel II

It's really only by collecting everything that you can get the 'bigger (or best) picture' and to that end I have all sorts of junk, crud and novelty crap in the pile, and some not so crap novelties, thus I am always happy when other people send the Blog junk, crud or novelties, and whether of crap or quality! Here's some of the more esoteric stuff in Chris's most recent parcel.

I can't for the life of me remember who these are attributed to, but I know I've posted their A-Z entry, so I'll look them up when I'm up the Library to post this and put the brand in these brackets; here (Ace Acme - same poses but colour variations and a new green)!

They were capsule toys and tend to turn-up in ones or two's, although I think one of the US dealers was selling them by the handful back in the 1990's, and I hope I have both new colour variants and a new pose in this trio.

These were also a welcome addition to the vaults, I have a few already, and I know they are Christmas Cracker inserts, but there are three new poses here (there's a whole post coming) and a matching, larger-scaled Chinasaur who is new to me, and extends the 'story' of these otherwise unremarkable, unattributed mini'mals.

This is fun despite not being a figure at all really, rather a graphic representation of a . . . err . . . penguin? But he comes after this post (yes- the title was diabolical!) the other day and is probably the 1970's grandparent of the newer, all polyethylene ones, having a steel-bar axle for ethylene wheels with a styrene body.

I vaguely remember posting a link to these a few years ago, some memories of a mail-order catalogue's scans . . . or screen-caps from a .pdf? Anyway, here they are in all their flat, floppy glory . . . fridge magnets!

AND - continuing the running trope in Plastic Warrior magazine recently - the 'orange force' are all left-handed, left-hooking, left paws! Due to their all having being mirror-flipped vertically at the printers! Brilliant!

Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub!

How cool are these? Cool enough for firefighting school; that's how! Pencil tops of Trumpton firemen (they were definitely firemen, not firefighters in those days!) and I'm not sure they are among the six named in the ditty, being the station commander and his boss? I'll check with Youtube, there's bound to be a clip there? Later . . . Captain Flack on the left and Barney McGrew on the right!

I recognised the way the trees were attached to their bases as being the same as the trackside accessories from the old Mettoy Playcraft plastic-railways of our childhood, and knowing there were Hong Kong copies of it (our childhood track (all village-fête buys) was more HK silver than Playcraft red!) I looked them up in Bill B's catalogue, and sure enough, here they are; from Rays Ltd., (Wah Hing Industrial Mansion) of Kowloon - another one nailed!

The scale is more G-gauge ('Big') than anything else, which is, the Rays' stuff; the Playcraft rolling-stock was all smaller, aping Brio. And looking at the inner set's track (black), this would appear to be more compatible with Big Train or Timpo's Wild West trains than the Playcraft stuff? But the outer track (blue) does seem to have the Playcraft wheel-channel system/design. I think Tomy had a similar system?

Cheers to Chris, all found a happy home here now! Coming next - some other highlights.

W is for Wheelimals!

A real Box-ticker today, you may well have seen these on evilBay and wondered at their parentage, unless you already know what they are in which case there may be something more interesting here tomorrow!

Tri-ang. That's the box-ticking element done! Seriously; it's just to get them in the tag-list, I think they were also associated with Minic and Mettoy and possibly later under the Playcraft label, so they're all going on the bottom. I call them 'wheelimals' for want of a better title as they follow a tradition going right back to early hand-crafted wooden toys; of being attached to 'carpet' wheels.

Images:
Left; Vectis I think (link)
Right; old low-res feeBay image

The toys they accompany are 'big box' type 'Christmas & Birthday' toys, the ark being nearly three feet long and solidly built of ply-wood with metal door hinges, the roof opens to get the animals out for play and to store them in the meantime or inbetweentimes!

The lorry being more of a garden toy, in tin-plate with large solid-rubber tyres, and a hinged rear-door/ramp.

I believe there was a Farm Lorry version of the truck toy, coming with a five or six-inch figure of a farmer which looks exactly like a Marx cowboy; a sort of reversed Seth Adams pose, striding with a double-barrelled shotgun instead of the rifle, and a distinctly US style 'cowboy' hat! But he may have come with the smaller (two-axle?) horse-box toy that included the two giant Britains horses?

Elephants and Rhinos, one of which has been got-at by poachers! Although; the sad truth is that both animals are at risk of extinction, not just in our lifetimes, but within a decade or so at the current rate of predation.

Sheep.

Lions and Tigers, two lions in Noah's Ark may have raised a few small 'c' conservative eyebrows in the past, but hey, if they loved each other and considered themselves a couple, why not!

Camel

Considering their core purpose is for use as hard-wearing playthings for younger children or older infants; they are surprisingly well sculpted toys, they lose a bit in the leg department, but even then the outsides of the feet, hooves or toes are well executed.

Sets - known or suspected;

Tri-ang Circus Van (Tin Plate)
Tri-ang Noah's Ark (Ply-wood)

Horse Box?
Farm Truck?

Wheelimals - known or suspected;
Donkey
Dromedary
Camel
Elephant
Giraffe
Hippopotamus
Lion
Panda
Bear
Rhinoceros
Sheep Tiger

Cow?
Pig?

S is for Surgical Solids . . . Euwe!

or...W is for Ward 10

When we looked at the tin-plate ambulance the other day I mentioned that it would fit well with the Hospital, forgetting that I had this languishing in 'edit' from the bulk upload in January (there's still 23 posts back there/then!), and following a spike in traffic the other day realised that the other two are vaguely get-at'able (see last image) so let's have a shuftie . . .

This was described as the 'surgical set', and came from PW's show in 2012, I've seen the hospital (Emergency Ward 10) a few times on feebleBay, in various states, and I suppose the instructions divide the contents into 'groups' as the accessories are different colours, but it may just be how the seller sold them to me?

As befitting a surgery, everything is sanitised in white; with a surgeon and several nursing staff, a patient and various pieces of equipment. I don't think it's complete, as there should- presumably - be stands or trolleys of some kind for the gas/air tanks, and I've previously seen a drip-line and bottle hanging-off the stand, that is present.

The operating table/autopsy slab is fully adjustable in three planes; tipping back-to-front, revolving and capable of raising and lowering, here shown at full extent.

A close-up with the winding mechanism closed-down.

The figures: the surgeon is baseless and I think he's meant to lean over the patient but I can't seem to get him to stand up; he look's as if he's falling backwards out of the window!

None of these are named, but there was a small boxed set (also by Mettoy) of painted figures from Emergency Ward 10 with names on each plinth-like base for four characters, a stethoscope and a bed with patient; covered in Plastic Warrior a while ago now, it also turns-up on feeBay occasionally

The accessories: the light-fitting has a sucker to be attached to the tin-plate roof of the surgery, the bucket has a moving handle. Note the trolley-table is marked Hong Kong as are some other pieces, which helps explain the difference in sculpting between this set and the not shown characters who are visibly 'early British' in the platicity!

 

I'd bought two other 'sets' at the previous autumn's Birmingham show (2011) from the same seller, but they went straight into storage, so we'll have to look at them properly another time, but you can see the ward set comes with red accessories, the maternity set having pale blue pieces, but both also have white things and the wheelchair is pink, hence my suspicion that they aren't necessarily specific (or complete) sets.

Other accessories were in green and there were red nylon scraps for blankets, while more pink items exist - sinks/wash basins.

T is for Two Toy Ambulances

Shot these two up at Sandown just over a week ago, I guess one's about 1:48th scale, the other about 1:55?

Mettoy Playcraft . . . sorry; Mettoy Playthings (!) produced this, which although not part of the large hospital play set, would nonetheless look good delivering casualties to the main entrance. A tin-plate floor holds the fly-wheel motor, which is set forward in the cab in the manner of Wells' and Brimtoy's little lorries.

If it was part of the big hospital range, it would have the same stretcher, but it doesn't, having instead a chunky thing which seems to be designed with robustness in play, rather than realism, as its starting-point.

The box cleverly allows for the selling of a police van as well, by the simple expedient of folding the ambulance flaps in first to lay the police ones over the top. As kids we were often threatened with the 'Black Maria' (pronounced Mer-Rye-Er) if proving a tad over-exuberant or disobedient, and I always wondered what it meant, a throwback to a different age - I think!

Marked HP, this is a pretty standard piece of generic push-&-go Hong Kong tat (and TAT may be the operative word!), being a VW camper-van, given ambulance stickers on white polymer, the yellow 'council' beacon-light suggests the likely nature of other versions in the range!

Cheers to Mercator Trading for letting me photograph them. Fancy new banner Adrain?!

R is for Return...to Corgi

Quick follow-up post with a few bits that have either come in, been added to or been identified since I did my Corgi round-up a year or two ago. The chap who posted the negativity about those posts elsewhere on the Wibbly Wobbly Way ( (c) JGW, 1990-something!) was offered the chance to prove his point/contribute but has not taken up the offer, hey-ho, plenty of gobshites in the hobby; I'm probably considered one myself!

This nondescript Hong Kong looking thing has been in the 'Unknown' box for the longest time and is a Corgi issue, from the Chevrolet 'Impala' Kennel Wagon (No, 486), and came with a copy of the Poodle from the circus, a duplicate of the policeman's Alsatian and the little seated grey and white thing we looked at last time.

I mentioned when we looked at the Circus animals that the vinyl elephant was also issued as a styrene kit, and here (on the left/above in all shots) is the factory assembled version, issued with those vehicles that had previously contained the vinyl one.

You can see from the bird's eye view that he is thinner but otherwise pretty much the same, it would seem that in order to prepare a new tool for the polystyrene moulding, they simply cut the old vinyl one down the centre-line, leaving him with a dieted girth and the requirement of new/re-cut trunk and tail! The hollow one also has a loss of detail to skin-folds etc...another sign of copying.

Speaking of kits: George Nixon kindly identified these for us in Plastic Warrior magazine's Issue 159. They come from Set 610; Police and GPO Telephone Boxes (yes - another 'Tardis' to find!), and have been bugging me for years - I thought they were from car kits, but apart from Airfix's 1:32 scale kits, I couldn't think who might have included a British Bobby!

P is for Playcraft

I looked at one of the two sets of figures from Playcraft/Jouef right back ta the start of the blog, intending to show the other a few weeks later...and never did! They are now in storage, but I got a couple of catalogues from Jan Komarome who used to be a sales rep. for Tri-ang-Pedigree in South Afrika the other day, so to help anyone ID them until I get the figures up here (year or two?) these are the scans...

I can say that the painting on my samples is as poor as the ones in the link, but the colours aren't quite as lairy. Supplied by Jouef for Mettoy, the Rail Staff aren't in these catalogues and I notice a code change (simplification) as the range grows. Thanks Jan.

M is for Mini-trucks, Part 1 - Cab designs and overview

This set of 7 posts (following) was born out of the catalogue page the the boys over at Moonbase let me use the other week (month?!), and the fact that some time ago (over a year and a half) I said I'd do a thing on the mini-trucks from Hong Kong that were born out of the Kleeware trucks that were themselves apparently copies of the Dinky original of the post-war Humber.

Along the way it ties up a couple of other loose-ends...

Bottom right shows the two larger scale Banner trucks, I've looked at before, they were also produced in the UK by Kleeware (from borrowed moulds), next to them is the small scale Pyro/Kleeware lorry.

At the top are a Pyro cab unit (or 'Semi', or...see 'comments' the other day!!) in army green next to a Wannatoys red one.

Sandwiched between them all are a Cheerio pick-up truck apparently from the UK and the Wannatoys cab again to compare.

These mostly generic 1950's Lorry Cab Designs all have some features in common, such as the divider down the bonnet (hood) or the cab-roof lights, or the military 6x6 truck type wheel-arch headlights.

Alongside them ran metal vehicles of similar design and these are all from a Mettoy Playcraft (later; Corgi) catalogue of unknown age. The lower engines look very 'Denis' in execution, my local Lorry builder, they used to test-drive the chassis round Fleet when we were kids.

One of the loose ends; the upper shot shows the Triang Mettoy Breakdown Lorry, it is as you can tell the same vehicle as the two military ones in the original Littlewoods ad. Below it is the Lone*Star Cab Design.

The Matchbox take on the Humber lacked the sentry-holes and detail of the Dinky version and was not a copy, while the Dinky Lorry begot all the others!! I think?

The Humber was the Post-war (WWII) replacement for the plethora of 15cwt (UK) and 3/4-ton (US) trucks in service by the end of it. It would also provide the chassis for the wheeled APC immortalised in Northern Ireland as the PIG.

Kleeware (top left) to modern Christmas cracker toy (bottom right), these are the little beasts we look at in the 6 posts below this one.

C is for Cricket (Board Games)

Well, a volcano and high pollution levels caused by extraordinarily nice weather have led to ideal if lung-irritating playing conditions at the more commonly ‘wet’ end of the season for cricket (foreign readers - don’t worry, I’m not going to get technical!). It must be remembered that some seasons during my younger days were wet from beginning to end…

This is the offering from Capri, a marketing division of Mettoy-Playcraft (Corgi, Triang et al.) selling (and finishing?) Board games originating with DRG Packaging, one of the large Pulp Mills on the banks of the Thames Estuary and a major player in world paper, card etc…
You may remember that when we looked at the Soldiers of the World premiums we encountered Bowaters, another Thames-side Pulp Mill, who had connections to Waddington’s who ended up owning Subbuteo, from whence the figures in this set come.

The inference being that these big multi-national paper corporations, as well as pulping and processing wood on a global level, along with supplying paper and card, raw and cut, also drove product itself, in order to shift the material they were in the business of making. They seem to have had close connections with toy and breakfast cereal companies, sometimes because they were already supplying board games or cereal boxes, sometimes because they were all members of larger over-arching multinational ‘portfolios’, the various subsidiaries and divisions of which were bought and sold like sweets in the playground…still are, look at the recent histories or either Corgi or Airfix!

So, is this set DRG, or a Subbuteo subsidiary, or a Waddington ‘Budget Brand’ or one of the DRG executives having a punt with a company innovation grant? I don’t know, all I can say with some certainty is that Mettoy-Playcraft’s involvement would have been sought rather than brought, and would of consisted of sell-through for a slice of the take.

The trouble with research into this period is that from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s, company history is very fluid. At the end of the 70’s through to ’82-ish, you get the toy industry crash that saw 70% (?) of all household-name brands, sold, lost or amalgamated, and then Thatcherite-Reganomic bean-counters moved into the surviving boardrooms, and chucked out the company archives as being either irrelevant to the new materials, new business models (TV, Movie and Cartoon tie-ins) or new corporate relationships or because saving the archive meant ‘spending money on a storage unit we don’t need to pat for’. The Toy archives of the better European museums can tell you more about the Toy Industry in 1907 than they can for 1970!

We’re very lucky that the Corgi die-cast archive fell into good hands, as did chunks of the Frank Hornby/Binns road stuff, while lots of the Airfix and Britains archive material has been sold at auction in recent years, but for most Marques, we’re rather stumbling around in the dark, getting clues from the box sides of cricket games…

As for Capri, these are also known to me as containing figures;

- Conquer Everest, (4 (?) figures, previously or later (?) issued by Merit with 6 figures)
D 403 - Knockout Cricket (1976, same figures as Subbuteo)
- Championship! (4 (?) plastic or 6 card show jumpers)
- Olympics (12 figures, 25/30mm, 1 each of three poses in four colours)

Toward the end of Subbuteo’s pre-Hasbro life, this set appeared, clearly some sort of a one-man band working out of a lock-up in Surrey, RDA Marketing used the same figures as Capri with added Subbuteo sun-screens, a further list of Subbuteo products were offered as mail-aways, I suspect they were ‘helping’ Subbuteo clear old stock, whether they knew it or not, and based in Horsell, Surrey, they were quite near the home of Subbuteo, and round the corner from the PW Editor!

I found a website that details two box-types, but without Internet here I can’t check the significance...was one issue signed by a famous cricketer or had less extras or something maybe? Perhaps someone could find the page and post a link in the comments section after I’ve up-loaded this? As I remember the web-page, there is a small following for this specific game, so it must be quite playable?

I love the little stick-on Union-Jack; as if this set would have originated anywhere else, or - for that matter - export in large numbers to anywhere else…er…except India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the West Indies, South Africa…I feel a Monty Python sketch coming on…”What have the Romans ever done…”!

Wicketz product listing;

? - Wicketz (1988, contains the same figures as Subbuteo cricket games)
1 - Catalogue
2 - Self Assembly Scoreboard in Black
3 - Self Assembly Figures to Paint
4 - Set of 2 Rollers and 6 Deck Chairs
5 - Scorebook
6 - Sets 2-5 complete

Ariel, who’s address was in Poland Street, London (lots of corporate HQ’s), so probably another ‘Generic’ brand - in the loosest sense of the word - and probably also connected to the pulping mills along the Thames corridor, went with their own figures, but a close look suggests they were sculpted by the same guy who worked the Subbuteo cricketers, in this case almost certainly the world renowned Charles Stadden, who was known to work with both Waddington’s and Subbuteo, sculpted many other games pieces, and is responsible for most of the figurines still found on Sports trophies today, indeed his likely involvement strengthens the ties to the pulpers through Waddington’s?

Other Ariel stuff with figures;

- The Gillette Cup (cricket game, 13 figures in six poses)
- Soccer Boss (160 players in three colours?)
- Zoo Quest (6 player figures)

Comparisons of the various Board Game figures, top are Subbuteo fielders with their ball catcher bases and bowlers and batsmen with gradated bases. Middle shows the Subbuteo figures at the front with the unpainted Capri versions at the back sandwiching the Wicketz figures in the middle, they don’t all get all poses and while Wicketz have gradations on the batsmen, the Capri set have all smooth bases, relying totally on the board for playing mechanism. The Bottom shot has the Ariel ‘Gillette’ set.

Other Subbuteo items, the watchers and roller-man came as a double set mail-away for Wicketz, these are - to my knowledge - the only accessories Subbuteo made that weren’t designed for the Football range which was their ‘Bread & Butter’ (they also made Rugby and Hockey sets)

The stretcher teams are from the football range, but would also be seen at cricket matches, there are three versions, the early ones at the rear having some similarities with the early Airfix Combat Group set (Stadden again!?), front left finds a redesign with the old stretcher case (no red stripes on blanket) and new bearers and the modern team (green bases, right), ready for action and part of a larger set of pitch-side figures including a mounted policeman.

Bottom left shows plastic ‘flats’ for bowlers, with whom you could flick the ball at your opponent’s ‘bat on a stick’. These mirror the original footballers, who were cardboard flats, and the new ‘photo-realistic’ flats that Hasbro use with the rump of Subbuteo to date.

A few other cricketer models, I’ll deal with the bottom left shot first as the others are all the same. We have the two quite common Peter Pan Playthings poses, these are common not because the game sold particularly well (although it might have) but because they are 60mm vinyl and have a high survivability factor. Unlike the little styrene guy between them, probably from a 1950’s board game, to find one with the ball catcher intact is probably a minor miracle! I can see him tuning up severed at the ankles in 50p bags, but as this example, very uncommon. The game he came from is unknown to me.

31st January 2018 -He's now known to be from the  Toogood & Jones / Balyna board game Discbat Cricket Game. 

The other three shots show both early and late UK and Hong Kong versions of the Culpitts cake decorations in approximately 45mm. The Hong Kong production is vinyl again, but mine have been chewed…you start just getting the cake off the feet and before you know it you’ve had a left arm and a cricket bat for tea! The right-hand pair in both the bowler and batsman photographs shows two distinct sculpts, both undoubtedly from Gemodels. Although on the left of each shot, the vinyl figures would have come out last and may still be found in older cake shops if you’re lucky.

The image top left shows what your sick-green cake would look like if Mum invested in the whole grouping, sadly some Mums hated their kids so much they’d save money by not buying the wicket or wicket-keeper, so both items are rarer, that’s before you take into account the size of the wicket and its likelihood of getting lost.

However when I say rarer, I mean in comparison to the other two poses, as all cake decoration production seems to far outstrip demand, mint sets, bagged or lose, turn up all the time, cake decorating shops don’t tend to last long so mint product ends up as clearance, and out-painters often end up with the stuff, as do catering wholesalers, and the only Gemodels stuff I consider rare is/are the Fairy Tale figures and the Scenics – although the model railway world is hiding tons of Gemodels trees!

Oh - You know I said I wouldn’t get technical…well, now that China (and apparently; the US university circuit) are learning Cricket, I’d better explain the rules for those foreign visitors who fancy a go;

There are two teams, one ‘out’ in the outfield, the other; in, each player in the ‘in’ team ‘goes in’ until he is ‘got out’ when he comes back in and another man goes out to be got out, sometimes you get a man left not-out. When all of the in players is got out (except for the one who's not-out), the team that was out goes in and the team that was in goes out and tries to get the team coming in, out! At some point they all stop for tea, even if it’s lunch-time. Simple, makes Baseball look like Brain surgery and American Football sound like rocket science!

[Can’t remember where I stole that from but it’s been around for a while]

T is for Trees

Clive over at the Hinton Hunter (link to right) covered the Merit trees the other day, so I thought I'd cover the originators and clones. Which is which is as often with early plastics, a moot point!

We start with the most likely candidate for original tree of this stacking clip-together design, the Faller fir tree. Faller started making papier-mache trees - I think - before the war, or very soon after, I don't know exactly when they first produced this plastic version (self seal bag on right) and it differs from the Marx/Merit design in having a separate base and trunk. I have a complete bag somewhere but like too many things it's lost in the heap and will have to be shown next time I do Trees or Faller!

The Marx set came in hard or soft plastic and was probably a copy of the Merit rather than vise-versa, manufactured in one of the Blue Box plants that seem to have produced most of the Miniature Masterpiece range. You would get a bag making six models in most of the larger play-sets.

Playcraft had most of their stuff made for them by Jouef, these trees however follow the Faller pattern and came in various colours, the Minitank trees again have the Faller Trunk arrangement but are soft plastic.

Some other firs, all but those in the second bag from the right on the bottom row follow the same design as the above. Best to click on the image to see the few notes attached to those I have a vague clue on.