F is for Firemen

A quick round-up of a few small-scale chaps, but probably not small enough for war-gamers to get excited about I'm afraid. I haven't got them in front of me to measure (this post has been in edit since February!) but they are all in that 35/40mm bracket of figures designed for 1:48, 50 or 64th scale die-cast toy vehicles.

I think these are mostly different generations of Corgi, the figure went in the hydraulic-arm basket of a Simon Snorkel fire appliance with the older ones to the left of the line-up, the yellow-helmeted guy though may be from a piracy, or a redesign of the basket?

The last one (similar but different to the Jimson sculpt) has details (base and base mark) in common with production from both Blue Box and Rado Industries, but could be neither and is probably from a Hong Kong or Japanese (Yonezawa tin-plate snorkel?) copy of the Corgi model, but who by? Both the last figure and yellow-helmet are polyethylene, the rest PVC of different densities.

Dinky went with a hard polystyrene, and their basket guy gets a metal clip which is often missing and the breathing-gear on the second chap from the left really dates this set! These guys were copied in a larger scale by The Lucky Toys for several different fire trucks (AEC, Bedford, US type and Land Rover F/C) and also imported in Clifford Toys branding.

 

Spot-On had a hose guy, also in hard styrene, he normally comes with a heavy plinth base, a slighter oblong one, or - as in my case - neither! A hose could be plugged-on to the back-end of the sculpt, which helped the baseless ones stand-up and two were issued with a meddling kid (Tommy Spot) in each boxed set (Land Rover and fire trailer)