A is for Adolf...Peter Adolf

Firstly; anyone with a serious interest in Subbuteo can do no worse (indeed - no better) than visit this website;

Peter Upton's Subbuteo Tribute Pages

It is very well layed-out and about as clear to follow as such a complicated subject can be, and illustrates just about everything!

As to this post and the few that will follow over the next few days/weeks; My 'collection' of Subbuteo is really no more than a sample, based on occasional car-boot purchases and the odd figures that come-in with mixed lots of military or railway 'small scales'.

The only major purchase in support of the 'sample' was a recent buy of an early red box set, which had four of the plastic flat sets and a few other bits and pieces. These are the four sets, the two nearer the viewer being those probably sold with the set (a standard 'red' and 'blue' team) while the two white sets (for home painting, or felt-tipping!) were additional purchases, they have gold and black bases, which you probably stated when ordering  the teams (?) Peter Upton's site will have the answer, I'm just not THAT worried!!

There is a difference between the box-set supplied goalkeepers and the other two goalies, in that one pair have long sleeved jumpers the other couple have short sleeved football shirts. Little sheets of stickers have been used to place numbers on the backs of the players, while another sheet provided positional stickers for the base, none of the teams were complete and a few stickers were loose in the bag, which is how they all came to be lined-up as they are in the photo - it was my needing to sort them into something that made sense!

The positions given are;

LB = Left Back
RB = Right Back
LH = Left Half
RH = Right Half
CH = Centre Half
OL = Outside Left
OR = Outside Right
IL = Inside Left
IR = Inside Right
CF = Centre-forward

There appears to be no sticker for the goalkeeper, but he is rather obvious!

I already had some of the card figures, their goalies have the long sleeves so I assume that was the earlier pattern, with the shirt coming later. As can be seen in the photograph - the blue bases had deteriorated in the bag (as had the green one) somthing Peter comments on, this would seem to be due to a colour additive rather than the mateial, as the red and yellow bases (and the black and gold ones) seem unaffected. Although the later two may be a more stable styrene rather than the phenolic plastic of the very early ones.

It causes the base to shrink as the material leeches-out, which means the figures fall out of their widened slot, in the case of the card figures that is, the plastic figures just melt from the flange up, they've already lost their feet!

The box also contained two goals made of knotted cotton/button-thread nets in a box-matching maroon and wire posts with plastic tube sleeves. The dates of the various bits of ephemera that also came with the set don't all match the date of the set, so some of the paperwork shown here was added to the pile at a latter date. I already had the large colour fold-out poster/order from from the mid-1970's, an early B&W list and a late '80's order form, so on the ephemera front I'm well equipped! I did start trying to make a complete list of the teams available, but once I'd found Peter's site I realised it was a task akin to cleaning the Augean stables...and somebody else was already making a better job of it!

I was once involved in a mad argument on a forum with a chap who decided he was the hobbies answer to historical researching despite being an obvious newbie and having a collection best described (at the time - its improved now) as several damaged, brown-box, Airfix 1:32 stuffed under a model railway board with a Subbuteo set-up inside the track layout.

Now while he was actually refusing to believe the US price code thing on Airfix boxes (I know!), he also - as part of one of his logically-twisted diatribes - suggested no one knew the history of Subbuteo either...well, there is plenty of ephemera, several really good websites and tons of supporting evidence for the history of Subbuteo and I'll try to get a separate set of links up down by the paper/card link-list on the left-hand side of the page.