E is for Elastolene . . . Geddit?

Not Elastolin; those filthy enemy toys only still available from Yorkville's Importhaus. Oh; no, no, no . . . these are good British toys, British made by plucky Brit's in stand-alone British Britain don't-yer-know!

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?