T is for Two Toy Ambulances

Shot these two up at Sandown just over a week ago, I guess one's about 1:48th scale, the other about 1:55?

Mettoy Playcraft . . . sorry; Mettoy Playthings (!) produced this, which although not part of the large hospital play set, would nonetheless look good delivering casualties to the main entrance. A tin-plate floor holds the fly-wheel motor, which is set forward in the cab in the manner of Wells' and Brimtoy's little lorries.

If it was part of the big hospital range, it would have the same stretcher, but it doesn't, having instead a chunky thing which seems to be designed with robustness in play, rather than realism, as its starting-point.

The box cleverly allows for the selling of a police van as well, by the simple expedient of folding the ambulance flaps in first to lay the police ones over the top. As kids we were often threatened with the 'Black Maria' (pronounced Mer-Rye-Er) if proving a tad over-exuberant or disobedient, and I always wondered what it meant, a throwback to a different age - I think!

Marked HP, this is a pretty standard piece of generic push-&-go Hong Kong tat (and TAT may be the operative word!), being a VW camper-van, given ambulance stickers on white polymer, the yellow 'council' beacon-light suggests the likely nature of other versions in the range!

Cheers to Mercator Trading for letting me photograph them. Fancy new banner Adrain?!