About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

H is for Hollow-cast Highland Heroes

A couple of mysterious figures here, both painted in the same way, same colours, as Gordon Highlanders, both made of the same shade of the same very tinny or brittle, red polystyrene, both semi-flat (demi-ronde), both have very thin, oblong bases, but both completely different sizes. And both probably from hand-held, hollow-cast moulds, converted to injection-tools.

Child Soldier; Doll's House Accessories; Early British Toy Soldiers; Early Plastic Toy Soldiers; Ex Hollow Cast; Gordon Highlanders; Highland Toy Figure; Highland Toy Figures; Highlanders; Polystyrene Figures; Scots Highlanders; Scots Soldier; Scots Soldiers; Scots Troops; Scottish Highlanders; Scottish Infantry; Small Scale World; smallscaleworld.blogspot.com; Toy Toy Soldier; Unknown Toy Figures; Unknown Toy Soldiers;
However; for all their similarities (identicallities!) there are some very striking differences, in addition to the size, are the facts that the second (smaller) figure, is almost childlike, with a'toy' gun and he has a huge red plum water-falling off his Busby, absent from the first (who's headdress is more like a Guard's Bearskin), he has more - the look of a Doll's House accessory? While the first figure - as well as having a 'bearskin' on his bonce - is lacking a sporan?

Using Joplin's The Great Book of Hollow-cast Figures (which also contains solids and composition) as a guide; Nobel make a 40mm one who's close to the figure on the left, but his legs are more at ease to this chap's at attention, there's nothing else close.

The one on the right ('Baldrick'!) is similar to a pose by Fry in hollow-cast, but it's more of a passing resemblance than the same tool, and while there are a couple of others in the Unidentified section, nothing really looks like this chap?

Can anyone add anything; they came separately, years apart.

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