P is for Population

These - as designs - are as timeless as the trees we looked at yesterday, and you can find some like this today still, although more common are the lathe-turned people, who are equally timeless and it is the lack of the finer turned objects in these samples which date it to the austerity period.

Obviously there has been machining but only to produce the mouldings and dowels everything has been bread-sliced from, there's no fine machining in evidence, nor the careful, skillful, carving which produces those distinctive, 'fluffy' erzgebirge trees?

They clearly had a bench or table router, but no lathes, a shortage of sandpaper and no/few skilled workers?

Anyway, a quick look at the peeps, text to a minimum as I've not collaged these to help them enlarge. As they are found; a pile of colour in the dismal industrialisation of Marshall's post war Europe or am I being too lyrical?

The policeman is dressed in pre-Wall/Wire attire, I think, but as that tangible 'curtain' didn't go up until 1961, it make no difference to the dating I was attempting in the previous post. He is similarly dressed to the magnetic one we saw in a 2018 PW show-report a year or so ago, which equally dates that plastic to the 1950's!

The animals are of common design, you can find similar in modern sets, but - like the vehicles - these are a bit rough and not up to the standard of modern versions, but neither are they up to the finish seen on older pre- or inter-war examples, suggesting - if nothing else - a shortage of sandpaper or fine-toothed files . . . or both?

Another shot, the lion is spoilt for choice, not that anyone seems that fussed by his roaring - all mouth and no trousers! I think the two smaller gray ones are monkeys of some type?

I had to stop some of the images down slightly and it's left the elephants a bit dark in this shot, but brought out the colours of the snake. The Elephants are cut in thicker slices and have no bases, looking at them two images above, they have a white undercoat under the grey top coat but you can still see a roughness to them absent from earlier and more modern examples, and the glossy train?

The lion and crocodile face-off while a huge anaconda glides by!

Offered from the new (newish?) Hong Kong factory's portal, but probably made in Germany, these are the modern types; the figures are a little different but they may be trying for local/domestic-Chinese sales and looking to India and other Asian markets, while you can see the trees (as the figures) are baseless, single colour and have more symmetry through a central axis, although some don't, a Dusyma trope maybe?

I asked Joe (late in the day) what size they all were and he patiently went and did more images than I could find blurb for! Suffice to say this is a reasonable sample of the figure shots which reveal they are slightly larger than I originally assumed they were, but much smaller than I'd convinced myself they might be after looking at the grain on the plywood bases!

In point of fact, they are about the same size as the modern figures we've seen before, and will see again soon; at 30-odd millimetres. The smaller ones being children.