T is for Two - Early British Plastics

Today we are looking at two pieces from companies we've looked at before, both early British plastics producers and both items; pretty new to the internet.

The first is a contribution from a blog follower (Alfred), who contacted me the other day with news that he had a 'Flying Wing' from Palitoy. I have to confess that I thought either he was mistaken (there were no photographs with the initial contact), or that he was someone trying to check my email with a bit of spam...I was - happily - wrong on both counts!

[09/09/2012 - Paul Kennedy from the West Wales Museum of Childhood has brought to my attention that this image is not opening on the click? The correct image is showing, so this is a Google/Blogger problem, and I don't think there's much I can do, but I'll try the Google-forums and see if there is a fix.]

This is the beast; marked Palitoy REGD and CAS inside a circle on one side and Made in England and CAS inside a circle on the other, it is clearly meant to be within the same series as the more common aircraft familiar to most collectors and covered here; Palitoy 'Planes not that long ago.

When Alfred first eMailed me my immediate thought was that having dated the set to 1940/41, it would upset my conclusion to find a 1950's 'Cold War' aircraft as part of the range, but I'm not an aeroplane expert and a quick Google revealed that there were Flying Wing designs in existence by 1941, namely the Northrop N-1M and N-9M, so my date is safe!

There are however some differences between this model and the other types in the series, the wheel arrangement and the actual wheel mouldings differ from the wheels used on the other examples, there is a variation in the marking, with CAS added (British Caseloid?) and no apparent aircraft type given, there is no sign of the roundel stickers used on the others - although that's no indication they weren't there once and finally; this 'plane has paint added, which I haven't seen on the other members of the series.

The pitot/canard/flange-things coming off the trailing-edge of the wing - where the (silver) paint is to be found - number six in total, while the images I found of the Northrop's show two rear-facing propellers and the post-war designs have only four extrusions, hopefully someone who follows the blog and knows a little more on flying wings than I do will be able to help explain this? What aircraft might be being depicted here? May it actually depict a craft from one of the Saturday matinee serials from the cinemas of the time or a comic character; Dan Dare, Buck Rogers or something like that?

Another early British company that has graced the blog before is Poplar, going from the sublime of their injection-moulded small-scale styrene space ships - to the ridiculous; this is a blow-moulded model coming in at about 60mm, judging by the passengers. Still in its original shrink-wrap, leading to the flash on the photographs.It seems to depict a bus which entered service long after Poplar were thought to have ceased trading, pushing forward their end date to sometime in the late 1970's?

I don't know any more about buses than I do about aircraft, but - again - a quick Google suggests that it is trying to represent either a Leyland Titan (B15) which entered service in 1978, or a Daimler Fleetline from 1979, they being the earliest flat-fronted double-deckers I could find, anyone care to add something here?

A motley queue of passengers flagging-down the bus, the wheels look quite familiar from my childhood memories of many of these larger blow-moulded garden/carpet models. Being between 45 and 54mm the pedestrians are clearly a bit small, but the 60mm soldiers we looked at some time ago from Taffy Toys (connected to Poplar through the Thomas/Pyro space ships), would go very well with this vehicle, size wise.