I hope that people don't think posts like this one are designed to 'show-off', at the end of the day this blog is about collecting toy and model soldiers and figures, based on my collection, and I feel it's as interesting to see how a collection develops as it is to give chapter-and-verse on a specific maker, range or set.
I hope it gives people thinking of starting a collection the idea that everything counts and you don't need to spend a fortune tracking down otherwise mass-produced
Airfix, Britains, Timpo, or
Marx (because 'demand' has pushed-up the prices) when there is so much other stuff out there!
As it happens; there is nothing really special in the next six pictures, but there are a few nice pieces or interesting pieces and a few oddments that have joined the slow-build mountain of plastic, vinyl, silicon, paper, card, metal, rubber, ceramic, resin and wooden crap that constitutes my eclectic horde; 'Quality Crap' - as I'm always telling John, Paul and Adrian (who replaced George and the other one - that's a bad Merseyside beat-combo joke there!).
James Opie has posited the question both on his web-site and in his books - and I paraphrase; "How many different toy and model figures have been made?"...well allowing for copies/piracies and knock -off's but ignoring paint and colour variations I'm sure it's well over a million, add those two variables and a collection of 'one-of-everything' would probably require room for 4?, 5?, 6 million figures?
Here are 0.00001% of them!...
This little lot came from a chap on the East Coast who got in touch with me back at the start of the month, I won't name him as he has said he'll look out for more and a contact like that is to be treasured not shared! Especially as the Car Boot sales round here have been picked clean for a decade, and if there is a nugget to be found it gets dug by Messrs. Harding, Harris or Lewarne at Oh-six-stupid-o'clock in the morning...I think they use miners lamps and a couple of big shoulders! He will get a full acknowledgement in future books!
This is a typical bag or box of mixed, played-with ex-childhood stuff, random in it's acquiring and bundled together for sale when childhood things are 'put-away'. Of note (numbers in red above) were;
1 - A couple of the FFL/Arabs currently under the microscope in
Plastic Warrior magazine (but you know that as you're subscribing - aren't you?!), minor damage to the rifle will be fixed.
2 - Above the numeral is a 'nice-paint'
Cherilea US Cavalry officer and an equally good horse, sadly missing it's tail, but worth keeping until a better one turns up, and I should be able to photograph it with the damage hidden by camera-angle at some point in the future! Below the numeral are a couple of good (and one damaged)
Cherilea ancients.
3 - A Robot bubble-gum dispenser/capsule type figurine.
4 - Two wagons marked '
HONG KONG' but seemingly perfect copies of the
Tudor*Rose covered-wagon, is that where the moulds ended-up?
Speaking of Hong Kong; the modern mark is always '
CHINA' and a lot of the production is undertaken on the mainland but this stuff will always be '
HK' to me! A pound each and I photographed them in
Asda's car-park and gave the vehicles to a lad throwing a tantrum in the back of his dad's car! Don't worry - his father was there, I wouldn't advocate approaching children you don't know in public with a handful of toys!
Close-ups of some of the
Funtasic figures; the fireman is quite a good pose, the policemen on the left is awful, he's holding that automatic pistol like he's at a handbag fight - "OOH - Get Her!"! But I like the other one; "Ma'am, could you walk along the curb-line for me please? Don't put you arms out or up, don't look down, don't deviate from the line..."
Last week the
Dr. Who Adventures magazine gave us another 'army' but there were two new poses, they will appear separately in the next few months, sure as eggs-is-eggs, so to be looked-out for. More firemen from
HTI and the Knights originally sold by
Supreme/SP Toys (or
Accoutrements?) now in
Halsall packaging.
Mimi sent us Martenitsa this March and they are interesting in that they are reverse colours, around 35/40mm and new to the collection! Also of note - not that clear in the photograph - is the girl in the right-hand pair has some silver-ribbon detailing by way of an apron.
Finally my haul at the London Toy Soldier Show a week ago, I'm keeping the main shot small as some of the bits were bought with the express purpose of future Blog posts, something that is new to the way the collection builds. Again of note;
1 - A plaster tree; semi-flat/reliefe sculpt which was in two pieces, but the break was clean and a quick glue has returned it to its original state. it's Plaster-of-Paris so not a fish-tank ornament? Possibly a fair-grownd piece from the mid-20C? Below which is a bag of the
Aoshima (was it? or
Tamiya?) Samurai, they were a bit broken-up but all the pieces were in the bag and with my brothers bits I should be able to get a decent sample.
2 - A nice Roman and some
Starlux bits below that, including a Giraffe and two of the early-based firemen missing from the post the other day.
3 - Another Roman, this one is marked
RP (for
Res Plastics), but is too bulky for a
Kinder egg, so actual
RP issued production?
4 - Left is a push-and-go racehorse and jockey from HK, right is a huge fantasy thing and above are four French Algerian/Moroccan Tirailleurs (?) which I was informed are early
Jean, I'd always thought they were one of the minor French makers?
The insets are; above - what I found on the floor at the end of the show and below - a
Charbens wagon from Steve Vickers who trades under the same name on evilBay and always has something nice or unusual on his stall.
Finally; Speaking of 'future books' as I did above - my fellow conspirator and I had our first proper editorial meeting this week and three books are now 'in the pipeline', subject matter still under wraps! But with me off to Andover for six months on Tuesday, it will be a while before there is major movement on those, however a framework is appearing out of the gloom!
These four are all the artillery elements from one of the more sought after sets of WHW (Winterhilfswerk) Tokens from the flag days (Heilpflanzen Des WHW) held every two weeks or so during the latter stages of the Nazi regime. The set is not that rare and I will come back to them another day as I have most of the set now in the storage unit, however it is sought by both figure collectors and WHW/Militaria collectors so there is a greater demand for it.
On the right is another item from the set Wouter sent above, in the same silver-grey polystyrene, the others are from a rarer set issued exclusively by the Gau (local authority) of Berlin (in about 1943 if memory serves - I'll get the details right when we come back to them in the future). They seem to have been issued twice, once unpainted in the same silvery-grey plastic and once painted in 'base' coloured plastic to match the figure depicted, in this case police units of the civil and NASDP/Nasi party.
Some others that I happened to have on the hard-drive, these (along with rest of the previous shot) were all purchased at Beltring about three years ago, there was an English dealer asking 15/20 quid each for some pretty tatty WHW's, but plenty of Dutch, Belgian and German dealers had them for a pound or two.
The best plane ever built; a Hawker Harrier VTOL 'Jump-jet' from Toy Mark under guard in a farmyard somewhere in the Sauerland, that's it really...it's a Harrier (the prototype was called a Kestrel or something? Ptarmigan? Pheasant? Foxbat! No...that was OpFor!), by Hawker Aviation (actually this one's probably meant to be by MacDonald Douglas!), the best 'plane ever built (except for Concord, the SR71...) under guard (he's asleep), in a picture (it's fake - it's a toy!)...by ToyMark - box ticked.
This little lot came from a chap on the East Coast who got in touch with me back at the start of the month, I won't name him as he has said he'll look out for more and a contact like that is to be treasured not shared! Especially as the Car Boot sales round here have been picked clean for a decade, and if there is a nugget to be found it gets dug by Messrs. Harding, Harris or Lewarne at Oh-six-stupid-o'clock in the morning...I think they use miners lamps and a couple of big shoulders! He will get a full acknowledgement in future books!
Speaking of Hong Kong; the modern mark is always 'CHINA' and a lot of the production is undertaken on the mainland but this stuff will always be 'HK' to me! A pound each and I photographed them in Asda's car-park and gave the vehicles to a lad throwing a tantrum in the back of his dad's car! Don't worry - his father was there, I wouldn't advocate approaching children you don't know in public with a handful of toys!
Close-ups of some of the Funtasic figures; the fireman is quite a good pose, the policemen on the left is awful, he's holding that automatic pistol like he's at a handbag fight - "OOH - Get Her!"! But I like the other one; "Ma'am, could you walk along the curb-line for me please? Don't put you arms out or up, don't look down, don't deviate from the line..."
Last week the Dr. Who Adventures magazine gave us another 'army' but there were two new poses, they will appear separately in the next few months, sure as eggs-is-eggs, so to be looked-out for. More firemen from HTI and the Knights originally sold by Supreme/SP Toys (or Accoutrements?) now in Halsall packaging.
Mimi sent us Martenitsa this March and they are interesting in that they are reverse colours, around 35/40mm and new to the collection! Also of note - not that clear in the photograph - is the girl in the right-hand pair has some silver-ribbon detailing by way of an apron.
Finally my haul at the London Toy Soldier Show a week ago, I'm keeping the main shot small as some of the bits were bought with the express purpose of future Blog posts, something that is new to the way the collection builds. Again of note;
I had to remove a lot of yellowing glue-stains with very gentle scraping of the bodywork using a new scalpel blade, then put everything back together with a modern non-staining liquid poly-cement and er...that was it! Luckily the canopy was not too bad, and I've held it in place with one of these non-invasive aqueous liquids railway and car modellers use to create window glazing, and apart from a set of transfers - still to be found - was going to leave it like this.
These are the Marx 50mm set, made in their HK factories from polystyrene and hard to get in this condition, there is a pose missing, but short of going and looking at Kent Sprecher's Toy Soldier HQ I can't tell you which one!...It is there!
Marx also did a set of 54mm Pirates and the top shot shows two painted - probably from the USA, three unpainted - probably from Swansea and two remoulds (bottom left shot) from Mexico or HK? They were also given the 'Warriors or the World' (WoW) treatment, with polystyrene and individual names.
These are the big boys, with 60mm ring-hand figures from MPC, the shot includes a couple of the accessories they did for the hands, with - below them - a couple of the baseless or mini-based Pirates from Tim-Mee, I don't know if these are US production or if they were made in the factory they had in Europe, as far as I know only the GI's were produced over here but who knows with these things?
The top shot shows the Charbens Pirates, I'm not sure how many were in the full set but it will likely be 6 or 8, so; one or three to find...see mystery below! The other shot shows the Hong Kong pirates of recent years, first issued in Hing Fat packaging, they have since appeared elsewhere under other monikers, sometimes as sub-piracies in a poorer quality, these are HF originals and are one of each pose as far as I'm aware.
So to the mystery, the three poses above were thought by me to be Charbens...but the Charbens set turned-up looking very different, the one on the left has a markedly different base, while the one on the right is much smaller than the other two. Meanwhile the creamy-white and black paint seems pretty consistent on all three.
