I don't know if they ever issued the 2nd type with black berets [except in the bren-carrier]. but they fit! The guy running with an ammo-box is not a standard pose, but the beauty of Timpo was/is that you can switch stuff around to make new assemblies. I suspect the beret was meant to be an infantry one, but getting that dark blue right obviously would have been difficult so they ended-up giving us well-armed, dismounted 'Tankers'!
The bog-standard infantry helmet, the older types had a darker helmet and I think a couple of my new ones have the wrong helmets on...again I added the Indian head to the 'brown-gloves man'.The officer body has the tell-tale signs of going/being brittle, the washed look of the green is a classic sign that these late production figures are giving up the ghost. The base of the kneeling guy isn't looking too hot either!
Those of you who collect Timpo will know how much some of the colour variations fetch at auction, but the thing with Timpo is that they produced literally millions of figures for years and started experimenting with over-moulding quite early with the knights chest emblems, cavalry braces and - earliest of all - the horses bridle. Vast quantities were shipped to Germany where there is a bigger collecting fraternity than here, but they also shipped them all over the world and were bound to produce variations from time to time.
Case in point is the torso in the lower images which seems to have been the product of a mould-purge after trying a darker green in the webbing mould. I've only been collection these for a couple of years and with the SAS (?) berets I blogged the other day and this I'm already acquiring variants, because they aren't that rare and are probably over-valued...a knight went for £500+ the other day! Not an 1890's Britains hollow-cast, not a pre-war Elastolin Nazi with porcelain head...it was a 1970's Timpo plastic knight...
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