S is for Some More Bloody Desert Rats!

The trouble with doing a thematic 'mini season' even one which jumps between theatres and nationalities is that you start to get a 'writer's block' on suitable titles, and having failed to start the blurb on this post twice because I couldn't come up with a humorous, alliterative or otherwise mildly erudite title, I gave up! It's just some more bloody 8th army! Charben's this time . . .

. . . and I'm missing the flamethrower. To be fair these seem harder to find than some of the others, and with brittleness become a factor on most of them now, particularly the chalky early British production of Timpo, Lone Star and these, the long, sticky-out bit of the flamethrower has probably rendered good ones few & far between.

But I'm relatively new to this large-scale malarkey (as I like to keep reminding you-know-who), and a flamethrower will come. It's like the Hilco 8th Army/ANZAC's, I've seen them, but they were outside my budget - stupidly I don't think I photographed them when I had the chance!

There seem to have been three generations, following (or followed by?) Timpo's set in the first instance with a change from/to black or brown weapons and a further issue in green plastic which may be supposed to be the 'Forgotten 14th'?

And following-on from the other day's comments - these chaps are definitely wearing 'footy-bags' rather than the shorts stipulated-for in Kings Regulations, Clothing, Troops, For the use of!

Yellow-tan on the left and greenies on the right, the Vickers MG is another of the family of mouldings with the ammunition feeding into the trigger mechanism - as earlier hollow-cast MG's had been more accurate (exception below!) - this has to be a case of lazy cloning by sculptors, the question is - who's came first; Timpo, Lone Star or Charbens? Both Timpo's water-cooled Browning (which lead to all the Kahki Infantry clones) from the ex-hollow cast US G.I's/W. German solids, and their later Swoppet Vickers were more correct.

I have late unpainted (or Woolworth's?) figures in the green and the grenade thrower seems to have the same leachate (is that even a word?)/leached deposit as the much later Matchbox figures would suffer from; some polyethylene Bergan/Beton were also afflicted with the same phenomena.

I have very few hollow-casts, good examples are way outside my budget, but along with a Crescent (or Timpo?) sailor, the Timpo launderer and the odd knight, cowboy or guardsman (I got two nice ceremonial hollow-casts at the last Sandown Park show), I picked this slush-cast lump of playfulness up at some point. It fires matches, or fishing-line weights, or gravel or inky-paper blots . . . bargain!