As I've slowly been working through Mum's estate, I've found all sorts of odds & sods which are of some use or interest to the collection, some of Mum's, some of ours (my brother or me), so more nostalgic than actually useful, and I've been chucking them in various corners of Picasa (to be honest I've lost some!), and have been trying to sort them this evening for what I thought might be two or three posts, but I've just given up trying to make sense of it with that narrow aim, and will do a few smaller posts until I've run out of stuff!
This bowl was actually in a drawer, and was a mine of useful stuff!
This lot is a mix of counters and tiddlywinks, buttons and tokens. The buttons; the main pile, are interesting in only having one hole, and will be from mattresses, where they are strung-through to hold and tension the two padded-covers against the springs. More interesting is that they all seem to be bone or ivory, which is obviously why my Mother kept them when the mattresses died!
The game counters/tokens are also bone (two larger yellow ones) or ivory, while the coins are a study in themselves!
The internet can't readily agree on what these are, when they were produced or why, and some very fanciful explanations with some very dodgy logic are to be found, particularly on the metal-detecting sites, where there seems to be the added incentive of getting thirty-quid for them rather than the 50p they're probably worth!
But museums (including the British Museum) also have an interest in trying to explain why they have some, using-up exhibition or storage space! Suffice to say, they are probably Victorian gambling tokens, aping George III 'spade' Guineas, so called because the shield resembles a spade.
I had a theory they might be connected to the TV series 'The Good Old Days', maybe as attendance tokens, and while I have to believe the Victorian moniker given them elsewhere, they mostly seem to have started turning up after 1950, and with the show starting in 1953, and with some examples clearly heavier and better made than these rather thin, tinny ones, there may be something in that?
The rest of the contents include a pair of shot markers from our old Merit pocket/travel Battleships game (white and yellow cones), two insect eyes from the Beetle Game, also Merit (blue and green dots, and 'Cootie' in the 'States), several puzzles in metal and plastic (old Christmas cracker prizes I suspect), a Christmas bauble hook (always useful) and a pair of premium animals which are the Kellogg’s rather than the Dunkin et al., ones I think?
The five dice will go with all the others (a mass close to Io's now), and the other bits are purely domestic (bread-bag tie and electrical-plug insulator/cable-clamp), I have no idea what the red widget is, but it looks useful and is plastic so will go with the modelling materials, in the drawer of round-section 'bits'!
Which leaves the rabbit? Obviously fretted, and I have a vague recollection of Mum cutting it out many years, even decades ago, but I can't remember why? It may have been a backing for something she was casting in silver, and by 'something' I mean a relief sculpt of a rabbit! Or it may have been a replacement for a shaped-puzzle piece for which I can't remember the parent puzzle, but, as a familial keepsake, it will go with all the other rabbits!
Separately, I found my brother's Airfix T-Rex's head! Most of the rest of it is in the stash somewhere, as - being an inveterate ferret - I had some idea of giving it an alternate head one day! So it may well all come together, but I think one of the legs may still be missing, and the house is cleared now? There is a Stegosaurus, similarly afflicted, by the lack of a fourth limb!
Posed (in the left shot) with a 9mm short round (Stirling SMG probably) from the sandpit in the butts at Aldershot (where Mum won the Officer's Wives shooting competition at Airborne Forces week, one year!), my brother would have been about 13 when he painted this?
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