The fritillaries need to be protected from pheasants, who like to snack on them, but it's 'snacking' as only usually practised by the likes of Billy Bunter! So I cast a network of garden string over the whole patch, set at two levels to stop 'flyers' landing in the middle and 'walkers'' snucking underneath.
I'll post some of the other shots from this sequence on my Imageshack account later this evening.
These are the 30mm range, not sure they ever got the head swap, the last guy in the bottom row on the far right, is an earlier moulding with the round base. Missing poses (not necessarily ever part of the 30mm range) are; a stretcher team, the hose 'head' operator, a doctor in jacket and slacks running with a first aid kit, a nurse in whites, (all available in the 20mm set) and two seated figures (probably also available with Solido fire appliances), a baseless hose operator and a guy kneeling (from the 40mm range).
This is the 'pond rescue' vignette, which was also issued as a military set with a change of rower. Again this was also issued with a Solido die-cast vehicle, The diver seems to have been licences to/pirated by Dinky Toys here in the UK, possibly through the French Dinky arm?
Staff Cars - The middle row are all Pyro (issued in the UK by Kleeware in threes in a service station set), showing the difference between the two designs with the coupe on the left, the booted (trunked) saloon in the middle and a civil colour-variant on the right.
Jeeps - With so many made, I will cover Jeeps and Land-Rovers on another occasion, but here are a few to be getting on with. Rear row, left to right; Tudor Rose, Manurba and Airfix. Middle; Lido large size with towed equipment. Front row - the real subject of the post - Pyro, Kleeware, Merit, Lido small size and Marx.
The four 'similar' jeeps, I say similar as close inspection reveals three different mouldings. On the left the Pyro original with the Kleeware produced casting (from the same mould) next to it. Due to the vagaries of import tax in the late 1940's-1950's, it was cheaper to ship the moulds over for a month or so than it was to import finished product, and a lot of mould sharing went on. Also some of the UK companies at the time were set up by the same guys who owned the US companies so natural affinity/group ownership played a part in the - sometimes hard to follow - duplication.
Undersides of all four, the first two have just had the trade-mark stamp changed in the mould while the Merit one is quite different. The Lido one is clearly scaled down all round and of lesser surface quality.
A bunch of advancing poses and the bazooka team, they are mostly a generic 'Combat Infantry' in style, somewhere between the Second World War and the mid-1960's, and you can see the Holger Eriksson ancestry straight away. The khaki-green ones are the most common, with sand coming a close second, the loader is just a colour variant produced when the green is run into an injector previously running the primer-brown used by a lot of the AWI/7YW figures. The black figures are the least common, being - I suspect - a late batch, while the grey are usually re-moulds from Harlow, especially if they are all shiny and clean!
Mortar and MG with crew and a couple of fighting poses. The MG is clearly modelled on something like the French Hotchkiss while the SMG's look like the Yugoslavian M56, a copy of the German MP40 with 'banana magazine, so a right old mix...but more on origins below!.
The two artillery gunners, one has a small round ideal for 25lbr's while the other guy is packing some heavy shite. Both guns here are Hong Kong products. Like all Spencer Smith, these were designed primarily for war gaming, accuracy of detail and/or moulding was never an issue.
I am not a war-gamer, I used to fight micro-tanks with a schoolmate 33 years ago, but not now, however I have all the stuff needed in 'The Collection', so thought it'd be a bit of a hoot to set up a little scenario from the Terrance Wise (I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy!!) school of how to do it! here the boys are rushing across a road 'dans la bocage', as they slowly encircle a small village.
While in this shot the mortar line provides suppressive fire-support with 2" 'personal' and 3" 'Infantry' mortars.
Ooh...Tudor Rose appear on the scene, dont'cha love 'em, No? Wrong blog mate, move along please, keep browsing, move along - nothing to see here!! Ammo re-supply squad wait for orders while something vaguely resembling a 25lbr fires in support of the assault.
Tudor Rose armoured car providing a bit of a stiffener for the guys holding the crossroads, wagons are from various sources and the hedges are all Merit (J & L Randall).
Comparison between Starlux (on the left) and Reisler (3rd from the left), the Spencer Smith figure is a little below the 30mm of the other two. I gave the Hotchkiss it's correct crew! They - perversely - are too small!!
Origins; Mr Smith almost certainly didn't have permission to copy the HE figures in the way he did, and it's probably only the fact that by the time Spencer Smith flourished (late 1960's - mid 70's) Holgar Eriksson was so well known and well regarded he didn't care, also he (H.E.) was known to avoid the limelight and a court/piracy case would have entailed publicity, I don't know?
The best is the Churchill tank, ignoring the dodgy turret, it's a nice model and fits in well with the only other high-street player of the time; Airfix. Detail is - especially on the suspension/running gear - a bit 'surface' or cosmetic but it does it for me.
The amphibious Jeep is too big and too ugly, so moving on...is that an AEC armoured car? I think it might think it is!!! Hey cumon! They were TOYS! And who's going to turn down a whole squadron of AEC's at pocket-money prices? Damage to aerials and windscreens is almost total after all these years, but the odd whole one turns up from time to time. The three that suffer are the Jeep, Carrier and 'amphijeep'.
The Jeep with gun and limber, a bit fictional on the artillery, while the ambulance is based on the Bedford MWD. Again the red cross is thermo-printed, but the cream roof is painted in household gloss! Likewise the rear gun (in the photo) has had the cream paint treatment, the hint of silver you will see in close-up (click on the image) was added by the war-gamer from the collection of whom this vehicle came. It has adhered to the cream underneath and won't fully come off.
My favourite Tudor Rose and one of my favourite pieces within the whole collection is the twin Bofors portee on a CMP chassis, all the early plastics guys (and Lone*Star in die-cast metal) did a twin Bofors, and they were all much copied/pirated.
Comparison shot between the Esci Churchill IV with AMRCR and the Tudor Rose Churchill Mk ? As this model almost certainly pre-dates the Airfix one, and definitely came before the Hasegawa Mk III and Esci offering, one wonders what the sculptor and toolmaker were using as reference material? There is an almost hybrid III/IV aspect to the turret, other than that it's almost the same size, and made a cheap troop/regiment when little else was available.
With the Churchill as a sizer, we have a Sherman on the left, this is marked "Made in England" but with no makers mark, I suspect it's a late production Kleeware (plastic colour as much as anything?), Kleeman - the parent company - having been bought by Rosedale/Tudor Rose.
The Plane is marked Tudor Rose, I've been told the cowboy 'walkers' are as well, but the bloke who told me was only an expert on early space, Dr. Who and Del Prado, so I stand to be corrected, they are unmarked. The staff car is unmarked, but identical to one of the two Pyro cars (licence plate; BV 4672, the other being a coupe with ducks tail; licence plate; DP 7189) so should be Kleeware or Merit, and again that yellowy-olive is a bit of a giveaway, however I've included it here as it has another version of thermo-printed Allied star.
Tudor Rose gun-line firing in support of the assault on the village as infantry tanks move off their FUP's. Crewed by Spencer Smith, this was the height of sophistication for a late 1950's - early 60's child's battle-gaming, all you needed was the imagination seemingly lacking in today's "can we have a set in shirt-sleeves to add to the 4 sorry; 500+ sets we've already been given since 1997" generation...
Churchill in fire support covered by a resin farmhouse (15mm) while the portee waits patiently for the last Messerschmitt in the Reich, or at least the last Messerschmitt with fuel!!
This is the top rose bed, wall-climbers interspersed with fruit trees, the boss likes to keep it free of flowering plants (I tried to leave a couple of established flowering weeds in as eye candy - but they came out while I wasn't looking!) but it still needs a bit of a tart-up after the long winter months.
Three hours later, I use a small hand/potting fork, as I like to cover the whole bed without digging up dormant stuff underneath, if you dig a bed like this with a garden fork you can damage roots and bring up opportunistic seeds. You can still get couch-grass out, by following the runners and pulling gently. Finally I edge-up with a tool like an old sheep shearer and flick the soil back from the lawn edge.
Graham - who comes half a day a week to tackle a big job, finishing-off the veg. patch, since this was taken we have got the early spuds, main crop and Onions/Shallots in, as well as planting out the broad-bean seedlings I planted back in Feb.