B is for Bell

And so to a mates house with two other friends for a chin-wag and an all-day breakfast in the local cafe, one of our number bringing a few items from his private collection for a bit of a 'show and tell', among which was this beauty.

I don't know how many of you remember the Jig-Toy puzzles I covered way back at the start of this blog (Here), but one of the companies was called Bell and they had a distinctive logo. Bell went on to leave/sell/donate their puzzle moulds to Merit, whether they ever left this mould to Merit is another question...probably never to be answered!

A near mint (given it's likely to be between 50 and 70+ years old?) boxed set of British soldiers in an early plastic which could be a styrene polymer or a cellulose acetate or even one of the phenolic compounds, it was hard to tell and there wasn't much smell to go-on as they had travelled some distance that morning and been properly aired, not to mention - the almost total paint coverage meaning there was little to release a smell from. [See note below...]


Although there is nothing to indicate such an act on the packaging, I wonder if they were issued as part of a war-bond drive or other fund-raiser, as the lack of poses and crude detail when other better soldiers were readily available in metal and composition (pre-war) or metal and plastic (post war) would suggest a tight window of saleability between the late 1930's and late 1940's...making this among the earliest sets of British plastics composition figures.

They are around 70mm and somewhat reminiscent of the products in composition made by Brent or - more specifically; Zang (for Timpo) and when he first got them out that's what I thought they were - a set of Zang standing infantry!

Having now obtained a scruffy one for my own collection, I can confirm that while they look plastic, they are actually a pumice-based 'Elastolene / Timpolene' type composition, tag list changed to reflect that!