P is for Siku, S is for Pola . . . no, they're all DS Plastics!

Or they were for a while! Continuing the season of occasional model railway figure posts, with one of the more esoteric and hard to find in any guise set of figures, originally issued by Siku, used by Pola and passed-on to DS Plastics in Holland where De Gryter definitely used them.

How they are believed to have been issued originally by Siku, and as such they may have had a margarine-premium type issue as well, that being where a lot of Siku's output was going at the time (1950's), but as these fleshy-tan colour they were probably issued as model railway accessories.

I've only picked a few up over the years (the above is an old auction shot), and most are damaged, they are hard to find, in part due to their age now, and the material, they will be 70+ years old now.

Equally hard to find are the painted versions, these from Jon Attwood being the only ones I think I've ever seen, although I recognise the chap with skis as one from my 'unknown' zone! Possibly given to me by Peter Evans or Adrian Little? And almost certainly actually Pola, or technically Pola-Quick, down to the fact that the colours match the catalogue images!

 

Those catalogue scans, the figures are very similar to the Layla/Kibri set, copied in Hong Kong, being semi-flat and somewhat cute in the sculpting, indeed Siku may have been behind some of that too (?), they were very busy with small/novelty plastics alongside Manurba and another one I can never remember the name of, and while the above are all a hard styrene, there are soft-ethylene versions to be found, which look very Hong Kong'y, but they aren't . . . 

 

. . . they are De Gruyter supermarket premiums from Holland, first brought to our attention by Jan Boers in Plastic Warrior magazine many years ago. Here seen, rendered as artwork, in the DS Plastics trade catalogue where/whom De Gruyter would have commissioned them from. DS having inherited a bunch of Siku tooling.

In fact, going on dates, Pola probably had to go to DS Plastics too, unless Siku had a duplicate set? Always more questions than answers when building these networks of clues from fragmentary evidence!