About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

U is for more Unknown Flats

Some more flats for you to look at, some from the 'Unknown Military - Foot' box and some from the 'Unknown Civilian, Farm & Animals' box. Some will be premiums of some kind, one I know but am confused!!!

First - because I got the photo's loaded in reverse - is the odds and ends with an Airfix Marine for scale, the one on the far left is a favourite as he has more than a passing resemblance to a Gurkha Bugler. The second might be Spanish? [Scratch that, I've just noticed the HK running down his leg in the enlargement (click on the photo.) so he's a Christmas Cracker toy at a guess!] Third is I think recent and the last could be Spanish again or Portuguese, also; I think that's factory paint?

The top row here were sold to me as Built-Rite, however the quality of the lower sample (who also have larger bases) would suggest that they are the originals, so any ideas which is which and who copied them? The standard and plastic type of the figures on the top row, while poorer than the lower sample, is better/different from that which you would expect from Hong Kong?

I hope these will be recognised by an American reader/collector, they are bigger than most European stuff and have the colours (Colors!) of a lot of the dime-store farm stuff in fully-round.

Again the top row are a different sample, with thinner lozenged bases, while the lower group have big oblong ones. This time however the quality of sculp is the same.

I'd really love to discover that these are Winterhilfswerk (WHW) figures! If not from a National Issue then one of the Gau, however I fear they are just post war premiums, but in a pale blue (the photograph doesn't do them justice and has bleached them out), anyone know where from? When? They are not in Peter Konrad's book.

Finally, there are two sets of six of these faux-ivory, ink-stained vessels, with vacuum-formed bases, I think maybe a board game Circa 1950/55, but others have said - without knowing which/when - breakfast cereal? They could just as easily be decorative, or some sort of card-game counter/marker? [They might be place-setting card-holders?]

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