Hurrumph! Fussa-russa! . . . you can see where Brwreakshit came from!
"Practically
unbreakable", actually quite frangible! Although - to be fair - you
don't see these with the same damage you can find on playworn Elastolin or Lineol, but that may be because once they start to go, they go all
the way, quickly?
The work of Brent, these are the smaller -
54mm - figures and dated by the gas-mask cases on their chests, take us back to
the early years of the war; to the BEF and Home Guard, but presumably after the
war-privation of materials had come into effect?
I assume the fluffy padding in the Stretcher Bearers set is a modern
addition, they would have been sewn onto card-inserts or set in wood-wool or
something, the farm (coming next) had a slotted card but with a much deeper
box.
The 'Group'
set has slightly random contents with two duplicates (grenade thrower and
advancing with respirator on), while missing two poses.
There were eight poses in total, I don't
have the grenade thrower yet, and actually don't have all these now (swapsies),
but within the sample you can see colour variations and the size/pose
differences you'd expect from oven-dried [inedible] 'dough' figures!
Five of the poses in close-up; note the
colour variations of the ready/sentry challenging guy (bottom right), weapon
barrels are provided by small panel-pins, the head used to give the idea of a
muzzle or flash-eliminator, I've never encountered Brent badly damaged-enough to reveal whether or not there is a
whole wire armature, but I suspect not?
Three more; clearly there is an armature
for the machine-gun, which is less Vicker's
own and more Bugsy Malone's
splurge-gun! The prone figure is similar to several hollow-cast shooters, but
not connected to the 'unknown' early-British plastic prone figure I've had a
stab at attributing in the past.
Also missing from my collection (and manythanks to Adrian Little for letting me shoot his, from/and also the boxed sets
above), the stretcher is a simple affair of cartridge paper wrapped round a
couple of stiff wire 'handles', the casualty seems to have been involved in the
same incident as Timpo's swoppet,
maybe they banged heads getting out of little Johnny's biscuit-tin!
Differences between two examples of the
same pose, I thought the shorter pack was down to a misplaced thumb or finger
catching the top and squishing it down a bit! But in fact it's shorter at the
bottom end, so different cavities, or separate moulds, these may have been
produced with hand-clamp type tools?
Despite their crudity of manufacture, they
are OK figures, and with no lead available, you'd be happy to find these under
the tree at Christmas; if you were a toy soldier fan . . . did anyone do
composition footballers?
I also have two of the 60mm versions (upper
shot), we have to assume they did all eight combat poses in both sizes, but I
don't know about the stretcher teams, nor do I know if one line replaced the
other, or if they ran alongside each-other?
The lower shots compare one of Adrian's Brent 60mm's (left of each picture) with
an unknown figure (stylistically different, they're probably not a third Brent line) marked 'British' (we will
look at them in a separate post), who is closer to 80mm and has lost his rifle
tip.
This lot was in the recent Vectis sale, I don't know if Brent produced the 'egg-box' papier
mâché dug-out/bunker, but it's a beautiful thing, and god knows how it
has survived in that condition! If you return to the top, you'll see there are
various lines mentioned along the top of the box, maybe Chris's ceremonial
Guardsman is among them?
2 comments:
I do like these Brent figures got a few in both sizes.
The big unknown figure does remind me of the Li-Lo plastic figure.
That's a bloody good point Chris . . . sculptor rather than company maybe? But there is a definite resemblance!
h
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