H is for How They Come In - Sunday Surprise!

The 'phone went last Sunday, not too early, but I was veging on my bed in the extraordinary heat we had last week, Adrian was passing and had a 'few bits' for me, he's be about five minutes . . . so I flung some flip-flops on and wandered down to the road . . .

. . . to take delivery of these! I'd mentioned to him that I was after some more Bata (pronounced Barter, not Batter - I know because they had an interview with one of the UK Work's foremen on the World Service the other day (try 'Eye-Witness History')) and he kindly found these within the month! There are four OK and four with minor damage (missing extremities) which is pretty par-for-the-course with these early rubber figures now.

Technically they are Czech (or Czechoslovakian) figure production, but there's every possibility the moulds did the rounds of each Bata factory, so British ones may be British-made? One of the things I learnt from the recently broadcast interview was that in some parts of Africa bata has become the generic term for shoes, so common was the brand locally in the mid-20th Century!

To the Bata Adrian had added a bunch of mini/micro aeroplanes, a couple of mounted Rocco guardsmen and a few Hong Kong bits. We will return to the small pile of mounted Wild West in RTM in a week or two, well; few days now!

However the caveman joined his mates for a quick photo-shoot, I suspect these are by/from LP/Lucky Toys (now known to be - LB (LP) - Lik Be) as they have similar codes to the other figures from the range (excepting the spacemen) and in a similar format to their 'Funimals', but I haven't - as yet - identified the dinosaurs I [also] suspect they should be accompanied by?

They may - of course - be gum-ball machine or capsule-prizes though; due to their small size (50mm), which would make them stand-alone 'novelties'.