U is for Uniform Info!

The title of a favorite page in the old Military Modelling magazine (which I believe has recently announced it's demise?), but absolutely fitting to this post.

I have found among my mothers possessions all sorts of things she never mentioned, one of which was this, which I initially assumed was Great Aunt Nina's (my mother's GA, I'm not sure what her relation to me is, great aunt once removed, great-great aunt?), better known as Helena Hall, an artist/designer who worked with Eric and Gordon Gill and others of that late Arts & Craft/ early Modernist movement in Sussex, but it's not really her style (I have a lot of her work from my Mother's late cousin Betty (of odd jobs in occupied Vietnam!)), so I suspect it's actually the work of John Henry Sheren Hall, one of my Grandfather's brothers.

He was a known naive artist (also of Suffolk) but these are quite different from his pastels and watercolours, so, because I'm not sure, and know nothing else about it, I'm just putting them up here for the figure modellers and painters, as they are clearly studies from the 1900-30's (some clues suggest pre-WWI and no later that 1922 - the amalgamation of the two Life Guard's regiments?) of uniforms, mostly colonial-ceremonial, but one or two fit WWI era regular barrack/parade-dress.

There are other things in the sketch book, none signed, which we will look at another day, and the book itself is tiny, an imperial size closest to modern A6 or A7 (or 'policeman's notebook') which made it easy to crop them all at the A4 setting, and is a 36 leaf George Rowney 'Cartridge Ring Bound' (No.7268) undated, but it might help date them.

The sketches are all pen & ink with some having added colour, probably watercolour, or thinned gouache? I hope you enjoy; I think they are rather lovely.

12th Lancers

7th Dragoon Guards (left), 60th (Royal American) Regiment of Foot (right)?

60th was AKA the Kings Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC)

Generic Line Infantry officer

Gordon Highlanders (left), 17th lancers (right)

8th Hussars (left), Gordon Highlanders (right)

Generic Infantry of the line private (left) - a popular pose at the time?

42nd Highlanders 'The Black Watch' (right)

 

I would say these two are better sketches - anatomically - than the rest and may be taken from statues, cigarette cards or something similar?

2nd Life Guards (left) - stable dress? 13th Hussars (right)

The 13th amalgamated with the 18th 'Royal' Hussars after WWI

Field Artillery (left), unknown Guardsman and mascot (right)

The artilleryman's uniform suggests either pre-WWI or Mesopotamian campaign?

 

Again these are superior draftsmanship and may be static studies against the from-life sketches of the majority, his legs and shoulders are distinctive in the majority of the drawings, here they look more 'professional'?

Horse Guards (left), 1st life Guards (right)

16th Lancers

2nd Life Guards

Unknown . . . infantry mess-dress?

Ditto

17th Lancers (left), Royal Canadian Dragoons (right)

Typical - most interesting sketch . . . no notes!

Got to be ANZAC?

Or Southern African units/native 'horse'/militias?

Coldstream Guards (left), RHA (right)

These two are still with us pretty-much unchanged.

P is for Premium Pirates

All change, all change, this is the end of the line!

And I failed! I've had to combine two posts and cancel a third! But it's still been the best ITLAPD so far, indeed I suspect I'll never match it! I've thirty two minutes to blurb-up six images and post them, so all a bit of a rush-job here!

Phoskitos (Spanish chocolate medallions like slices of 'Swiss-roll') premiums of pirates, each is a novelty with some form of action and there seem to be only five to collect

Her trick is a moving arm, to swash her buckle with a large cutlass!

While he is a bobbly-jiggler on a sprung ball-socket! The catch on the back of the barrel . . .

. . . enables a hiding pirate to pop-up when required!

While these chaps (from the Internet) seem to be a swivel-waist and a rowing-action chap who's more in common with the ferryman Charon than a pirate?

Two pictures were too short for a separate post, they would have worked as a series of three! Italian Kinder egg rival Dolci Preziosi produced these as a tie-in with the Pirates of the Caribbean movie!

Ahaaaaaaarrrr me-harties, that's yer lot, oi'l edet the mess lat'errrrr!

P è per Pirati dall'Italia!

So to Canè (Canine = 'dog') and their set; 1474 Pirates! I've wanted these for a while, and needed them on the card to get the 'ship' (read blob of vac-form!), so when I saw one going cheap (They're not that rare, but prices have risen a bit in recent years) I grabbed it with ITLAPD in mind.

Annoyingly, the set only has five poses which is a bit dim of them? Also - given the previous post - orange is worse that yellow to photograph . . . against just about any other colour!

The vac-formed ship replaces a simpler trench which the other sets in this line got, and is manufactured in the same way as Atlantic's, - maybe the same source - with the decoration screen printed onto the sheet before forming, so it gets further distorted (having been distorted as a design trying to anticipate the final shape), especially if it's slightly miss-registered!

The five new chaps, they are copies of the old Fontanini sculpts, almost certainly with permission and have a lot of the signature elements of sculptor Elio Simonetti who worked for Canè while at Fontanini.

We've seen the others before, the pale-blue variation of 'peg-leg' is manufactured from a soft eraser-rubber like material, and the 'Captain' above him is actually a musketeer; the foppish-chap on the other end of the row would also make a good musketeer!

So when you read "–PIRATES is only set that had 5 poses ,been one a “woman”?(pose with hands in heaps and not facial hair ) " you know you've come to the font of all shite! Shite which was translated from the facts in the book being plagiarised!! How many hands? How many heaps? Are they heaps of shite? They're not facial hair! Hahahahahaha! Actually the musketeers only have five poses too, but that makes for ten contemporary figures!

The ship! For imaginative play with younger owners it has some value, but really it's a leery-painted, blobby, simplified model of a wreak!

Yes; I took far too many photographs!

I also crewed it with the still-unknown, but probably cereal premium, might be Quaker, 1:76th scale pirates and they look quite at home!

I - obviously - took them off the card; as I say they aren't that rare, and as it was an earlier one with staples it was very easy, but I then had to clean five or six decades of grime of the card, which I did with a pre-prepared 'wipe', which can be seen on the right after it had done its job!

Which gave me a half-decent card to scan.

Right - that all took longer than necessary; I'd taken far too many photographs . . . I may not get all three remaining posts out, but one can be held back as it was supposed to lead in to a 'mini-season' the next day on another subject altogether, which I definitely haven't got time for at the moment, but there will be two quick posts before midnight, once I've fixed a pizza!

R is for Return - to 'Probably' Redbox?

I mentioned back in 2017 that I'd seen two versions of these some better-fed than others! And that is one reason they remain 'probably' Redbox, the other being that the only commitment to an absolute "Redbox" come from someone who A) I wouldn't trust to give me a weather-report if he'd just stuck his arm out of the window and B) he didn't make clear (or know) which lot he was dealing with?

These are the smaller ones, and have three different base-marks, rowed from the top;

• ·         CHINA
• ·         CHINA 1003
• ·         MADE IN CHINA

As you can see from the figure middle left, the figures are available in both colours, but all poses seem to be mark-specific, so the suggestion - for whatever reason - is that the marks are all on the same tool.

Apologies for the poor photography, but yellow-on-green is another of those colour-combinations I forget to remember don't work! The different marks caused me to look again at the larger ones (which we've seen before here once or twice) and found that they too have different markings!

These, in yellow or blue (so far!) are marked with a plain CHINA, but others are more interesting . . .

. . . these have the same CHINA mark, but an additional letter underneath which in this case and from the left read; I, C, K, D, E & H. There is an additional polymer colour too; silver, and duplicates tie the three colours to all poses with the letter-codes, but no un-coded silvers have turned up (so far!). With 12 (or 14?) poses we could be looking at a sequence going up to L or N?

Yes, Yellow's not much better on black! The chap on the far left came-in recently in a mixed lot and seems to be one of the figures from the mould-your-own plaster fort kit/set I shelfied years ago and thought I'd put on the blog, but I can't find it (it did go to Plastic Warrior) so I've just (16.23) added it below!

As to the others, it's all still speculation, but I think the smaller ones are true fakes, trying to be the 'believed to be Redbox', while those larger ones had at least two contracts, one with the letter-codes, one without. Toy Major often have - usually longer - codes on the stuff they market to the Industry, so they might be in the frame, while Redbox might have used the plain CHINA ones, but the only piratey thing I've seen from them is the ship I shelfied in TKMaxx and that had action figures!

Those 4M pirates, the pose I've found may be a copy (reversed pose, detail loss), or the box art may have a reversed image of a master/test-shot? There are eight poses in the image, and if they were two tools, may only come in one colour each . . . do you have any and what color are yours?

We'll know for next year, I've just bought a mint-one, half-price on feebleBay! And I'll work on . . . or work-on working on, on . . . the 'believed' to be Redbox, to finalise the codes of the larger, and the number of poses, colours and origins of all, hopefully for next year, too.

T is for Piratical Two - Resin Rascals

A notification of a few typo's in the second post today were awaiting me when I finally surfaced this morning - cheers Paul! But nothing has had a final check in 'preview', due to the time constraints and busy weekend, however I managed by 2am to get stuff scheduled 'till 1.30pm today (ten minutes time!), so this is aiming for 2pm/14:00hrs, and along with the other six will probably slip-back, but hopefully I'll get them all done before midnight, so keep popping-back! I'll deal with typo's tomorrow!

This is another post with stuff pulled from the Intro, and deals with the growing pile of poured resin, which I used to have a dim view of; like poured whitemetal it's a cheap technology , however - and unlike hot lead - hasn't become so expensive only executives can indulge in collecting it!

One of my great bugbears (as you will know) is dimwitted stupidity, and you do get it among eBay sellers, particularly those who are not from the hobby! Someone was selling these, they obviously had a stock box full, but had listed three (including the lady-pirate in yellow jacket) as a single lot, while they also had single figure/multiple stock listings, and there was a pair with a more-than-one listing, too, but not including the missing figure!

"Fair-enough" I hear you say; "trying different sales-models to shift them"? But the prices were also all over the place, and the listings were mixed-in with hundreds of lots of household tat and old clothes you had to trawl through! It was far cheaper to get the three (the only one listing the lady pirate) and wait for the other to turn-up cheaper another day . . .

. . . so I paid for the three and waited, what then turned-up was a three without the lady pirate! I was going to give the seller grief, but couldn't be arsed to start a fight with someone who just hadn't thought!

I then spent a few months looking out for the missing figure without much enthusiasm, only to forget it. But when I put all the pirates away the other month and expanded their boxes, there she was! Possibly from Peter Evans at some point (he's helped greatly in the growth of the resin pile!), or from a charity shop, or mixed lot?

Anyway, the point is; four of a known four? Above, by a circuitous route!

Packaging matches other single gift-bag resins seen in The Works (and seen here at Small Scale World); fairies, wild & woodland animals, Christmas stuff (?), but not under Alator as far as I can recall? And it's typical tourist fare isn't it, could be from any gift-shop, from any seaside-town, anywhere/when?

Meanwhile, this had come in, and got itself included in the - previously mention here - Faceplant group discussion on Chinese resin, it's a plain/blank mailer for a set of 12 resin pirates, we have looked at before as part sets. Missing figure from the tray is the rather svelte pirate, top-left in the following image;

Which gives this line-up as a running total with alternate bases and the odd paint shade variation. The point is; if the Chinese can supply this for seaside's, for Turkey, as ceremonials (there are knights to look at another day), why don't we do it here!

They should be cheaper and we wouldn't be propping-up a fascist dictatorship busy with a 'final solution' to it's Uyghurs, or bullying it's neighbours? And it ought then to be even cheaper? It wouldn't be of course, capitalism would price-match to the imports!

MPC is for Mint Plastic Corsairs . . . Ring-hand Reissues

Someone posted these on a Faceplant group a while ago, at the same time as mine were in the post! Someone is re-issuing the old MPC ring-hand pirates, and two or three evilBay sellers are shifting them, at reasonable rates in several colours, as complete runners, straight out of the moulding machine!

Four poses and 11 accessories making ten assemblies; the treasure chest is two parts. I bought the blue as I thought they'd photograph easier, but they have red, yellow and . . . black or grey?

The Captains got the treasure, his No.2 is taking the cat-o-nine-tails to some poor unfortunate, pirate 1 is definitely digging, and the ugly brute (first mate?) is spoiling for a fight! I suggested on the Faceplant thread that they were as clean as the originals, but I think - upon reflection - they are a bit flashier, but it's not so bad and can be easily removed with a sharp blade.

A good 60mm+, a bit big for some, but I have a 'day' to feed here, annually, so I'll take them whatever the size . . . or material!

An old one, cleaned-up and trying on the wardrobe! I think the 'club' is meant to be a marlin spike or 'fid' and should be more tapered, but I stand to be corrected, as I've said before I might be an Admiral's grandson, but nautical I 'aint!

R is for Remaining Resin Rowdy Released

Another search over is the missing Puckator pirate, although you may remember I found him a while ago (March 2019) sorting other stuff and when taking everything up to the storage unit a few months ago, I finally broke him free, to give me a full set, loose.

I don't know if you can remember when we looked at them in some depth (2012) but I was worried about how he would be buried in his block, with or without resin rope (as the box scan suggested), but he wasn't, and the anchor was quite a substantial piece, moulded against his shin, so - in the end - he's one of the least likely of the six to damage!

I made him a rope out of that thick thread people use to make little pictures; cross-stitch? Although I realised afterward I should have tried to match the blue shank wrapped round his torso? As I've found a whole box of those threads in hundreds of colours, I will do so sometime.

Going over old ground here I think; [checks old post] No, I described the water treatment, but showed the dry-digging which did more damage! Anyway; this is the gypsum block after removal of a shrink-wrapped sheet of polythene film.

As I said last time, stiff nail-brush, running water, work slowly so the plaster clears the u-bend! FIND THE BASE . . . once you know where the base is it's much easier to free the figure without damaging him.

And then find the back and work round the finer details, a toothbrush comes into its own at this point!

Puckator pirates . . . the full set, released from their - pretty crude - unprocessed gypsum-plaster graves! Smallish (35mm) but nice sculpts, and if you've followed ITLAPD here for any time you'll know there are plenty of similar sized figures in each scale, indeed - a few years from now, we'll maybe have so few new ones (or new old ones) to track down we may have an ITLAPD-year of size-posts!

F is for Finally Finished Finding Festering Feted Filibuster Fellows!

Another perennial on ITLAPD is the Supreme pirates, and while I've had no problems getting a decent sample of the living pirates, the undead were taking forever to track down, however in a big lot I finally tracked down the missing two poses.

And this is all six with duplicates (no I can't remember what I was thinking - maybe colour variations which were drowned-out by the flash?), I think the yellow one and the purple one are the elusive pair . . . I know I was up to four last time we looked at them!

While, as I say, the 'living' pirates are really quite common and appear in various paint-schemes, so I just keep adding them! If you hold a blunderbuss like that, you are going to burn you hand!

Knives; nasty wounds! Note the guy shading his eyes - lower pose has another dagger in his belt, these two are 'tooled-up'!

The other two; I think the ones with coloured bases must have come-out first (with the undead), and then when they dropped the undead (?), they just kept pushing out the normal ones?

D is for Die-Cast Desperadoes

Off to Spain now, where poor old Play Me churned out a family of reasonably classy, novelty, antiqued-finish, pencil-sharpeners for the tourist and stationary industries, unwittingly launching a thousand Hong Kong (now China) copies, clones and piracies . . . but not - as far as I know - actual pirates, however Play Me had given us two!

The standard seller was a small box with cannon only, but a larger window-box existed, rather in the style of Britains naval Gun, for which these two zamak/mazac figures were designed, at approximately 50mm, they are a tad small, but I'd imagine being small was a bonus on the cramped gun-decks of mid-millennia sailing vessels?

Here compared with one of those Hong Kong copies, the HK one is particularly clean and rather shiny! there's not much in it to be honest and I thought I'd shot more HK ones, I thought I'd shot the Britains ones and I know I have a scan I now just can't find [see below!], so we'll turn to these again at some point!

I have only the one Spanish cannon-ball (no HK's), but I imagine there were five-to-ten or even twelve in a mint set? Oh, how this stuff used to rattle-round a Hoover until the steel-curved brush-roots caught it, jammed, and the drive-band made that funny-smell and melted!

A comparison with two Lone Star 'Metallion' pirates (Long John [silver] and Captain Blood, issued by Hubley and others elsewhere, some as copies), which were in the same box, also die-casts, they have a silver-finish rather than the copper-effect of the Play Me chaps.

It was on the desktop - Doh! So all my searches in Picasa and the 'finished' & 'waiting' folders were a waste of time!

This is - I believe - the same Spencer we saw here; Spencer Gifts - and still going(Northern 'States and Canada), although someone affiliated to the PSTSM took my image (without asking - ten for one, that's the rule, m'K!) and has been telling everyone it's an 'English' company (not British mind, so I'd like to see his 'empirical' evidence!) for the last two or three years . . . despite the dollar prices! You can't make this stuff up, but I have other plans for him, another day.

Note - it's closer to the Britains cannon, but with a more complicated ratchet affair on the right-hand side of the body. Also, from the description, although as useless as the Britains ones at sharpening pencils, it fires percussion caps, which - back in the day - were hardened brass-alloy and made a real bang. Now you would use those red, yellow or gold plastic ones.

And speaking of the Britains cannon, I hadn't got round to shooting the loose examples (so a return is guaranteed), but this was in the folder with the Spencer scan, so we'll stick it here for the fun of it! I think I'm right in saying this is the less common of three variants, the ones with a white-block carriage being more common, but having two different barrels? Like I say we'll return to them with all the answers another day.

V is for Variations on a Theme!

The reason I didn't spend much time on the early group shot of Hing Fat (or pre-Hing Fat) in the Intro' post, was because we've looked at them before more than once, and because I had these come-in a while later;

These are very-much 'unknown' and possibly quite recent/contemporary, they are the 'Hing Fat' poses; eight, and both slightly smaller and manufactured from a PVC vinyl, or substitute of the same and - as you can see - factory-painted.

Now, it's lazy to mutter pantograph in this case, as soft rubberised polymers always shrink more than the harder polyethylenes/'styrenes, so they could be from the same tool, contracted from Hing Fat for a play-set or something - cake dec's?

Now, it seems to me that I should probably have another guy with purple trousers and one less (or one more) in green/yellow, to make a full set . . . at a 20 or 22-count; the rest is just too neat! But it could still be coincidence, so I will keep a look-out for them and see if a consistency becomes apparent after more have appeared?

P is for Plastoy's Polymer Pirates

The title says it all, here's three pics, next post . . . NO! I may be rattling through these easy ones but I can manage a bit of blurb! As well as two more for the small scale Papo, I got the whole set of Plastoy at some point . . . a while ago! Photo' says beginning of March?

Same tropes as the Safari set; skeleton- check! Pirate chick - check! Treasure chest - check! Ten pieces - Check! One wonders who came first . . . I suspect these Plastoy guys, they're hard to find now, while Safari are still retail? Slightly more playful sculpts and the skeleton could just be asleep!

Quick comparison with a couple of Fontanini who turned-up at some point, not much in it which can't be blamed on the bases of the Italians and they're all in the same semi-gloss, but the Fontanini are more serious looking!

My favorite, an African (or Afro-Caribbean?), one foot firmly planted on a plunder box, a determined look on his face and a parrot one suspects is trained to fly at anyone who so much as looks at the box!