U is for Up The Pole!

I had an interesting 2020-2021 with one eBay seller, he had a shit lot (not a shitload, different meaning altogether!) of clearly brittle Cherilea Wild West with some Hong Kong copies of Jean thrown-in for good measure with a couple of other bits and he wanted something extreme like 48-quid BIN. I offered him £25 I think and he turned it down, about six months later I offerd him £20 and didn't get a response, then, at some point Chris Smith spotted it and I told him the tale, I don't know if he made an offer or not, I don't think he does Wild West, but then, about eighteen months after I'd first seen it, I tried again at £20.

 

He turned it down the same day and offered me something like £32 again, so I made another offer of £15, and that generated an eMail! "But you offered . . . " etc. So I explained it was mostly shite, but I was happy to pay 15-squids for the Totem pole and in the end I think we settled on £18+£2p&p? or the original offer from the best part of two years earlier!

 

Some of the amounts may not be wholly accurate it was a while-ago now, but you get the picture, hard work from someone who really hasn't a clue, but has been 'taught' by scripted day-time telly-shit that everything in his attic is worth a bloody fortune.

 

There was a bit more than in the image, and a pile of broken bits below the crop, but you can see it's only the Totem Pole which is interesting, and it's very interesting!

How it arrived! One of the reasons I wasn't willing to shovel money at the guy, everything else went in the bin as even though I tried to save some of the heads, belts etc . . . they crumbled like biscuits! Well, the HK went to charity, I think!

 

However, I managed to get it all glued-back together and it's still in one piece, although I do treat it with extra reverence, and it has its own little plastic box to live in. Not to be found in the PW Special Publication on Cherilea, I can't see who else it could be, and I don't think I've ever seen another, until Bill 'Wotan' emailed a while back . . .

. . . with the news, he'd found one too! And his is a base-varient with an integrally moulded base? And, arguably nicer colours! On his Blog, the sepia wash he uses has made it even nicer! Cherilea Toy Totem Pole with a subdued orange/grey thing going on.

 

There are signs of it being glued to a baseboard; the original window-box maybe? The three upper sections are exactly the same as mine, but the lower section is obviously quite different. Cheer to Bill for the images, have you got one of these, what base has it got? If the plug-in came second, some might have the later, heavier base with flat/right-angled sides/edges?