M is for Masudaya's Multi-Material Minis

An old-school name who's predominantly tin-plate stuff fills the books on such things, not least Tashen's 1000 Robots, Space Ships & Other Tin Toys, New Cavendish's Future Toys (from the past!) and probably Chronicle Book's Yesterday's Toys, but they don't credit many of the makers in that one!

But these are modern, Masudaya (Modern Toys), harking back to their past, and surviving where most of their contemporaries (not just in Japan, but the big US and German Tin-plate names have all gone), these smaller-scale space toys were very tempting, but I only photographed them!

 

The general shape of the ship is very recognisable if you've caught old tin-plate space toys in passing, but I think the periscope 'technician' is rather daft, not only would a periscope in space be about as much use as star-drive on a submarine, but the operator would be shredded by space-dust? The 1950's was a different planet!

 

However . . . there's a figure! And a spaceman in near-NASA garb, so there's that!

 

Described as 'Adult Collectors Items' NOT toys and NOT for children under 14, I think they'd make the best Christmas-stocking toys, it's exactly what you want to find Santa's left you at 4am!

 

This was with the above, and again, the 'racing' spaceships were an old trope, with an exposed pilot taking everything space has to offer; radiation, space-dust and extreme temperatures! I actually saw a third at Sandown (these were shot on Adrian's stall), and it was on a mate's stand, but I didn't think to shoot it.

 

Google reveals there's at least half-a-dozen in the line, and they are about one-quarter the size of the vintage originals they are referencing? Tin and plastic, the whole underside of this rocket racer is plastic, where it was tin on the originals. Fun things!

Phfffff! is for Whatever!

I thought I ought to have a post before midnight, just to get the ton up before the end of February, and looking around I can't see anything jumping out at me which doesn't require more effort than the few minutes available, so against the fact I might not beat the midnight news after work, here's a shot from the 'seen elsewhere' folder as I listen to Lady Muck (Sarah Montague) on the Lunchtime news, whittering-on about Hairy Bikers, Police Rapists and anything else which doesn't require looking in depth at either of our, or the US's, two main political parties or anything happening in Gaza, while Putler threatens nuclear-annihilation . . . Again!!

 

The Blue Box WWII Russians, complete, and completed, I think I'm right in saying, by a donation from Chris Smith, a while ago, as they've gone to storage in the meantime, seen elsewhere, awhile back too!

Also, and for no particular reason - other than it needed doing, of course (hee-hee) - I've edited, rearranged, and added some catalogue/archive stuff to the Airfix Tarzan page which some of you may remember, can be found here!

G is for Grendon Underwood . . .

. . . a place I actually know quite well, and it's a half-horse hamlet, which in the 1960's would have quite literally been in the middle of nowhere, like all those villages in the greenery between London and Birmingham!

 

I'm absolutely positive this set, or one very similar from the same maker has been shown on the blog already, as an 'unknown', but I just can't find it anywhere, but neither is it waiting to go, in Picasa, so I don't know?

Grendon Valley Toys from Ornamental Alloys, sounds grand, and it gets two new entries in the Tag List, but I suspect it was a bloke in a shed, with his mate who had a mate who could print stuff?!! I may be totally wrong, but I have a vision of pots of lead going soft over a camping stove, while the wife spends her Sunday afternoons painting tigers!

 

I've definitely shot a similar set (it might have been five animals and no natives, though?), and I'm sure I blurbed it with the usual 'probably from Schneider moulds, or those supplied by Agasee, or someone like that, commercially sold as a sideline, maybe at Christmastime?

 

Anyway, the whole point was to ID the previous set, which I can't find, so it is what it is; a minor-make, producing a commercial product from home-casting moulds, in the years immediately after WWII, I would imagine? Thanks to Mercator Trading for letting me shoot it (the original, and missing one).

 

Added 12-03-2024 - While thanks are due to David Fisher, who let me shoot this one on his stall the other day.

R is for Railway Station, Passengers & Servicemen

But not those servicemen! Here's a coincidence, Jon Attwood sent this in his last lot of images, so it might have been later in the queue, but then John Rafferty (who I know dips into the blog now and again) happened, the other day, to mention 'Toy Shop', by Peter Blake, the well-known artist, famous for all sorts of things, but especially, among the younger of us, for his Beatles' album cover 'St Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which happened to have the same set!

We saw my card a while ago, when it finally surfaced from storage, before retuning thence, and I thought it might be missing a bit, well, it was missing the title 'bar' for some odd reason? In fact, it had had most of the picture cut off! So here it is in it's entirety, thanks Jon!

 

While the same set has been on display at the Tate, on and off since 1970! Left-of-centre in the upper-middle pane, with the Hong Kong knock-off cereal-premium racing cars below it! John had actually spotted the ABC copies of Britains Swoppet knights in the pane below, while an odd Marx Disney set is to be seen top right,  with three ducks (Donald, Daisy and one of the cousins?), the Red Queen and Captain Hook on the far right? Cheers to John!

L is for Lego's Dirty Little Secret

One of the drums I keep beating, one of the windmills I will continue to tilt-at, is the theft by Lego of the Hilary Page design of the Kiddycraft Mini Bricks, a scaled down version of his pre-war self-locking bricks.

So - as we shall see in a second - when I saw this German language version of one of the first sets we had as kids, the stand-alone 'pre-fab' garage, I had to get it up here.

 

One of the 'excuses' Lego have used for the similarity of their product in recent years has been that they 'improved' the product with the addition of the rods and tubes at the centre-points between the studs, to 'jam' the bricks together, and as those huge propagandist tomes from Dorling Kindersly have had to address the plagiarism, that's the line that's been taken, to explain the fact that the one is a copy of the other!

But here we have a set, admittedly early, and European, yet manufactured some time after the brand had become popular outside Denmark, and sometime before they lost the court-case brought by Kiddycraft in the UK, in which the rods between the studs are absent. These are a direct copy of the UK bricks, with the exception of the weight-balanced door, and the two specialist receiving bricks, but by then Airfix had similar bricks in their Betta Builder!

 

So, when Jørgen Vig Knudstorp said in 2009 "On January 28, 1958 the LEGO (R) Group patented the LEGO (R) brick with its now well-known tubes inside..." He was being a bit disingenuous, as the Kiddycraft design was the one which had gone International in '56! What we have here, are Hilary Page's self-locking 'Kiddybricks', stolen by Ole Kirk Christensen and exploited by his son, Godtfred.

And the thing is, the later tubes/rods were an innovation, or 'novel addition', they did not change the outward appearance, nor the function of the bricks, very important in Patent Law. The very patents Lego would use for years against all-comers including Tyco, and it was not until the courts protected Mega Bloks, after these facts started to gain wider recognition, that things changed and some began to realise Lego are just another 'evil empire'!

The early products were made from cellulose-acetate, which tends to warp over time, and while you can use hot water or a hair-dryer to restore shape, there's often associated shrinkage, so the bricks and components no longer interact with others, or the modern product. Not a problem on Kiddycraft's original urea-formaldehyde bricks, nor Airfix's polystyrene or Blue Box's polyethylene ones.

 

Other Points

Apparently 'Award-winning' journalist Erin Blakemore writes "LEGO says Kiddicraft told the company it was fine to use the design, but in 1981 they formally bought the rights to Kiddicraft bricks from their inventor’s descendants.", and while the "but" is telling, she fails to mention that they had already, by that point, lost a UK court case and been fined a large amount of money (for the day), neither a fine nor a subsequent IP purchase would have been necessary, if they had that permission.

 

And they bought from Hestair-Kiddycraft (to save their arses), not the 'decendents', his widow had, by then, sold her stake in the Kiddycraft company to Hestair.

 

On the Brick Fetish (and other) website/s, the story is told that "Although Hilary and Oreline visited Ole and Godtfred in 1949, and perhaps, even left drawings and samples, Page was never aware that Lego produced a version of his brick.", yet while it is true Hilary (who would commit suicide a few years later) never knew the depth of the deception, not even Lego have ever claimed that there was a meeting. Indeed, with their mawkishly-sentimental animated history of the product (which you can find on YouTube), they claim he found the bricks (made - in the video - to resemble the much later Tri-Ang 'Pennybricks') at a trade fair.

The idea seems to come from a Daily Wail article by Adrian Lithgow, back in 1987, and the truth is likely that the trade-fair exhibitor, from which the bricks were stolen by Ole, was probably Hilary or someone from Kiddycraft?

 

While Miniland states "Along with the new [injection moulding] machine, Ole received several sample parts showing its capabilities. Among these were samples of a toy brick made by Injection Moulders, Ltd, of London. It was Hilary Fisher Page’s Kiddicraft brick. Interlego A.G. v. Tyco Industries [1989] 1 A.C. 217. During cross-examination, Godtfred indicated that He and Ole had received Kiddicraft samples, which served as the basis of the original Automatic Binding Brick.", ie, no trade fair, let alone no meeting?

 

However it happened, it was theft, straight-up, pure & simple thievery, piracy, plagiarism. 

Without the Star Wars franchise (which can't have been cheap), Lego would have gone under in 2004, and in producing figures with lightsabres and ray guns, not to mention 'star fighters', they broke their own golden 'no war toys' rule, except . . . they had already broken it with the knights & castles, the Wild West and the pirates & Red/Blue-coat soldiers, so, even within their own mythos, Lego are a bit crap!

And the above all matters; had they paid for a licence, Hilary Page may not have felt the need to kill himself (over something else), and yet, without a licence fee payable, they remain the most expensive bricks on the market, by a country mile!

J is for Jet-O-Car!

Bit of a rarity here, it is mentioned in the multi-authored 'Blast Off' (ISBN 1-56971-576-9, 2001, pp.117; and the index in that - otherwise excellent - book is shite, I think they added some pages and never updated the index!), and only shot at the show, it was way outside my budget, and it sold before I had a chance to photograph it (about an hour before the doors opened!), but fortunately the new owner let me fire of a few quick shots.

The Poplar Plastics via Thomas Toys, pulp-era, dime-store type Jet-O-Car, a sprung-loaded beast, ready to spill shards of shattered polystyrene down all the skirting-boards in three colours of brittle polymer! Which is probably why it's so rare now!

 

Loosely similar to the Pyro Rocket Car, but with the addition of a clear-plastic canopy and the aerodynamic rear wheel-well/fairings, the mechanism is similar to the Airfix racing car we saw here (well, if we didn't, it's in the queue!) a while back.

 

It's unmarked, which calls into question a few of the 'Kleeware/Tudor Rose?' items, as this metallic blue plastic keeps cropping up, and with both widespread mould-sharing, and copying, it's never as clear as some would like? It's very much a case of if you don't have a maker's mark, or the box, it's unknown, even if you're pretty sure?

P is for Preliminary Plunder Post

One of those Bucket-list/grail items you don't really contemplate ever getting, do to its rarity, it's likely cost, and its peripheral position in the oeuvre, but nevertheless, I picked one up cheap'ish, clean'ish and complete on Saturday so let's have a look at it!

 

There wasn't the hype surrounding Superheroes over here, that there has been since at least the last War, if not earlier, over where they were invented, and indeed they were rather frowned-upon in some circles, here, but, by the 1970's they were more obvious, and more embeded in the cultural landscape, with both the comics imported (or printed here under licence?) and the various TV shows being broadcast, followed by the big movie; Superman [I] so a few UK-specific toys were created, among which was this from Charbens.

 

Interestingly, I seem to recall reading somewhere, that some comic cross-pollination occurred in earlier decades, due the use of unsold stock, crossing the Pond in either/both direction/s, as ballast in empty or lightly laden tramp-steamers or other vessels, but I'm not sure of the veracity of that particular urban myth, it may pertain more to publishers remaindered or 'pulping' overstock in general, and included or not, comics?

 

On the back we have advertising for the other set, of which we have seen Dracula courtesy of Peter Evans, and from the Dorset/Marlborough/Plastic from the Past era, in a sort of fibrous or mildly foamed polymer, so only two to find, one of which is Frankenstein's Monster, not, as stated, 'Frankenstein'!

 

Dating from 1977, one wonders if these are Prindus (Prison Industries) output, the polystyrene mouldings are a bit flashy, and the polyethylene bases could be old, surviving stock - vast qualities could have been carried/passed-on in a few small sacks/cartons, to whichever Civil Service team set-up Prindus?

 

The seller was adamant I should paint them, but I will probably keep them as they are. The paints, similar to those issued by Airifx in their Battlefront line (and other 'starter' kits), are long-dried-up! Also, a cheap brush is probably missing from one of those slots in the tray?

 

We also looked at a contemporary advert from a retailer's catalogue, of the footballers and Euro-babes from the same range! And the plastic colour, perticularly of Superman (and some of the Euro-babes) ties-in with my hardplastic Greco-Romans from 'Charbens', which I also mused might be Prindus production.

News Views etc . . . Sandown Park!

Almost forgot, and probably won’t post for a day or two, as a result, but it's the first Sandown Park toy fair of the season tomorrow, so shake-out the cobwebs and get yourself down to the UK's best show, and see if you can find a 'grail item' or a bargain!

"They're going Ape for toys over at Esher, Surrey, tomorrow!"

(MPC PotA 60mm 'styrene playset figures)

D is for Driving Test

Not sure how a couple of these images will show, but you'll get the gist if you're not already familiar with the set, which I thought we'd looked at here at Small Scale World, but we haven't, or I can't find it, it may have been in One Inch Warrior magazine, and it may not have been my penmanship or photography on that occasion, while today Jon Atwood has helped with images!

This was me a couple of years ago, combining some loose bits with the stuff that had been accruing in the attic (card box) and the master collection from storage in a Really Usefull Box Co's 35litre 'Euro-Box' which takes A4 suspension files one way and foolscap the other, a brilliant design, which accounts for them going from a little company, you could ring up and order factory-seconds from, delivered to your door from the Midlands, to a multinational with a second factory in the US, who now tell you your nearest stockist on the phone and explain politely that they no longer do deliveries, and no longer do factory seconds!

The railway stuff is all in the little 4x5½" self-sealing bags, upon which the Driving Test game sits, with everything else Jenga'd on top! You can see how the 'Banner/Bell' artillery are about to be brought together at '1' and the ark/circus animals at '2', but it's the Driving Test we're looking at today, and I'm just going to load the rest of the images and text them up as they land?

 

1970's catalogue image, and we have cool dudes with longish hair and polo necked jumpers! The game is fun, and it does work, there's a hidden pantograph underneath, the two sectioned, sprung arms of which manipulate a magnet in response to physical commands given through the 'gear stick'. With practice, you can even get the car or motorcycle to point forwards (or in the 'direction of travel') at all times.

Late 1950's or - more likely 1960's box, and she's ready to go to the nunnery, he's dressed for a day at the office . . . it was a different world, and I was there! I think my most embarrassing sartorial experience of that era, was the pink velvet cummerbund I had to wear as a page-boy at Aunty Christine's wedding, it hung around in my chest of drawers for years, although I don't know what happened to it, it sort of disappeared around 1980!

This is from feeBay and I have a feeling that while the motorcycles and cars are plastic (with small staple/paperclip type wire inserts of ferrous metal, to give the magnet a 'hook'), the rest may actually be bought-in from Mastermodels (BJ Ward/Wardie, seen earlier in this series, and who will be in the round-up at the end too), which would go a little further to explaining some of the cross-fertilization?

 

Particularly if the ideas-men and buyers from the 'toy division' weren't aware of what the railway guys were doing, or if they hadn't been told about Collis Plastics likely efforts for both companies, in the railway sizes? Conjecture, not gospel! None of these figure-sculpts were carried-over to the model railway range.

The board, over the years they have been issued painted and unpainted and, apart from the possibly part-metal set above (the metal items would have been non-magnetic Zamac/Mazak, so wouldn't get picked-up by the magnet), they were - commonly - all plastic components, and are simpler copies of Mastermodels, again suggesting a 'firewall' on information exchange between the toy guys and the railway guys at Randall's?

I used to think these were also Merit, I have a few, but this faux-Blue Box set turned-up on evilBay, sans cars, and proved me wrong! A Hong Kong copy, was there anything between the war and 1970 they didn't have a stab at reproducing?

 

Obviously, the original idea is to get round a set course and/or park in the plastic garage (fixed to the board), without knocking into any pedestrians or street-furniture, or leaving the marked roadways! Many thanks to Jon for images, and Ed Burg has, coincidentally, been showing the contents of a similar-concept, but table/carpet Marx set on his Blog over the last week or so.

E is for Eye-Candy - Best of the Rest

After I'd done the first two posts/shots (posts below this one) I had a sort-out, and this is the rest of the odd's and stand-alone's, here at the moment, and an eclectic bunch they are too, but mostly bigger than the previous 'mini' Bots.

The large red one, to the left, is a huge blow-moulded, thick-walled, hollow PVC lump, possibly Japanese rather than Hong Kong, and probably 1970's, but unmarked, with plug-in PVC arms and ariels/helmet-guns. The other one, to the right, is one of the Arco-Mattel bendies, with plug-in 'ethylene weapons and a Hong Kong sticker on one foot. The other red one, between them, is unmarked apart from a 'C1' on one foot, and probably quite modern?

Four eraser-types (x2 silver, orange and yellow) which may have missed previous posts on the subject are front centre, while the right hand green one is another M.U.S.C.L.E. (also Mattel), giving us a scaler with the previous post's image. The other green one is actually more of an action-figure, in polystyrene, with a self-tapping screw in his back holding all the moving parts together.

The other articulated droid also has a screw in his back and moving components, and is a Manta Force Karnoid from Bluebird Toys, some - probably not this one - via Tomy.  While the yellow individual on the far left is more humanoid, but his head is all 'mecha', so if it's not a robot, it's an android of some kind. The best reason AI will have for keeping some of us alive, is to provide them with headless, locomotive bodies!

 

As a Brucey-bonus, and apart from the green one above, the only other 'styrene ones I have here at the moment, these are modern, marked China and obviously come in different colour-schemes, I don't know how many sculpts there are, but they are more like the previous 'minis' in size.

E is for Eye-Candy - Fantastic Plastic

These are the other bag, all rigid polyethylene, 'propylene or nylon/rayon low-friction bearing type plastics, and like the previous lot, novelty items, of the Christmas cracker/capsule-prize variety. The pink Dinobot is a Power Rangers knock-off.

 

Apparently, approximately twice as common as the soft, squidgy ones, it's NOT scientific! The large green one bears a resemblance to the Voltron ones we've seen here once or twice, he . . . it's also a parachute toy, as is the fat, dumpy, green one, front left. The green one front middle is marked Rigo China.

 

The two oxide red ones are similar to the Arco ones, but a bit smaller and different sculpts, but could well be from the same factory/sculptor/team of sculptors? While the blue one back left is a plug-together 'swoppet', missing an arm and marked ANT with a pictogram of an ant! The orange one with a base was known to be Ace Acme in the 'States.

E is for Eye-Candy - Rubber Suits

Just a quickie, having a sort the other night and photographed all the minor-sample, droid-mecha-auto-tranformer-battle suit, small bots which have come in over the last few months, these are all soft, PVC-like or eraser-rubber, technically - mixed elastomers!

The three larger erasers we've seen before here, while the two taller blue ones are interesting for being my First marked 'Korea'. The sucker-bot is about half the size of the Lik Be (LB, because it can't realistically be anything else) ones, and the checked-chap in pale blue is a M.U.S.C.L.E from Mattel via-Japan, and the small blue one with the big exposed brain is another Japanese Kaiju type mini.

 

The rest (green, silver, orange and sucker) are Hong Kong's finest, with the green one being an apparent conversion, from the straight pantographing of a parachute toy licensed from He Man, I think, by removing the shroud-line hooks.

 

Added within the hour; the sucker-bot has a full set of M.K. and T-in-a-circle marks for Mei Kee, (also and since around 2016/17 credited to one of two Tai Hing's on Moonbase, I can't remember why) and is actually about 2/3rds of the size of the LB ones, not 1/2 as I said above - I'm shit at judging by eye!

 

There's loads of this mini-stuff in the stash, and one day I'll try to make more sense of it all!

L is for Late Layabouts Languishing in Limbo!

As well as lots of old Charity shop stuff, there's also a lot of toy show/toy fair stuff, which will probably be broken-down into box-tickers, or thematic posts now, and a few Shelfies which seem to have missed previous round-ups, including these, most of which are from the Autumn/Christmas just-gone, despite the fact we did have several 'shelfie' posts from both my Camera and Brian Berke's? But there you are, they hide from me!

This is actually from 2021, so a real hider! It was, then, the latest iteration of the rather generic and poorly-detailed/sculpted 30mm'ish figures Mark, the Man of Tin, has such success, and apparent delight with, in turning them into spacemen, monsters, Napoleonics and colonial thin-red-lines, among other things!

 

We've had various shelfies of these, over the years, since they started appearing, not long after this Blog was born, and Poundland, Poundstreatcher, the defuct Poundworld Plus and 99P Stores (along with others), have all carried them, often in more than one packaging, while Amazon has carried dozens of generics and phantom-branded stuff, tubbed, carded, bagged, blistered and clam-shelled!

 

Which is why I only shelfie them, I have samples of various sizes, in dozens of colours, and they will be findable, mint, on evilBay for decades to come, as ex-stock, if you really need them in packaging! 

I hate this shite, I phuqing hate it with a vengeance, and to be fair to my sensibilities, I hated the big-head/bobble-head/nodding crap of our childhoods, and I hated the Corinthian cricketers and footballers of the 1990/2000's, it's awful stuff. I think it's an extension of clown-phobia?

 

I even hate the 'Nutty Mads' from Marx . . . "Let's apply teenage, 50's surf-culture to World War Two murderers, shall we? Make them look silly! The Butchers of Nanking will look harmless after we've given them some racially-profiled extremities!", said no sane person, ever. Garbage!

"Yeah, but the kids like them", go the supine, brain-dead, left-of-bell-curve parents! Because unethical, immoral, capitalist Toymen, who have a greater love of money than the future mental well-being of the human race, have sold them the concept, while you were getting drunk and watching porn, to blot-out current-affairs and drown the misery of your existence, you dullards!

Deep breath Hugh, take a moment, and then see if you can find some nice dinosaurs . . .

Self-branded/in-house from B&M, I think these are the latest from HGL (Grossman) or HTI (Halsall), repacked for B&M, and at less than the price of a single larger Schleich or Papo, a bloody bargain! Who wouldn't like this under the Tree on Christmas morning?

 

These - Wenno - might be a phantom brand (also for B&M) or an actual brand mark for a China toy maker (I haven't seen them at the trade-fairs?), but they seem to be newish sculpts (albeit, maybe copies of other makers) and relatively well done for the price-point, which, again, beats the big-names hands down, and I thought the giraffe was particularly well done, compared to the rack-toy giraffes of our youth!

 

 

 

We're on safer ground with Teamsters, having seen them several times before, an imported sub-branding of HTI, covering a variety of die-cast or 'toy car' lines, and I wouldn't buy any of these, new, but they will help ID loose dinosaurs at some point in the future! Also shot in B&M.

And finally a similar set, in B&M packaging, really a generic, but helping to pinpoint an origin for some of the many teeny dinosaurs, if no better candidate comes forward in the future.

P is for Perfectly Planned Paint Patterns for Plastic Premiums

As seen elsewhere, the colour sheet for collectors who were collecting the French Mokarex coffee premium, medieval chess set. I don't know whether you got it at your coffee supplier, it was included with early issues of the coffee, or you had to mail away for it?

 

Not that rare, nor are their similar competitor next door, Café Storm (Mouscron, Belgium), but often over-priced, using the 'Polystyrene is brittle' argument, but lots of people collected them straight into display cabinets, 'granny drawers' or biscuit tins/cigar boxes, and they do turn up all the time, in good to mint condition . . . the thing to do is look out for bulk lots going cheap.

H is for How They Come In - Charity Shop Backlog - 2022, 2 of 2

All the two's! Clearing the backlog of stuff down in Picasa's 1960, except for 2023! Slightly more interesting stuff for the purists than the last post, but it all has its place, and I make no apologies for any of it, unless I apologise first!

A rather nice two-headed dragon, I don't know who it's by, and it went to storage ages ago, but I think it's the same line as the black one we saw recently with the two different wing arrangements, so someone like Toy major maybe?

 

Another of the Jada die-casts, again I'm not sure of the franchise (so far all their offerings have been licensed) but it could be Roblox or Blockworld or whatever they are called, I liked it, despite its chipped nose, as it reminds me of the morphing-cubes robot in the water world scenes of Interstellar, the movie!

 

Seen before I think, some things do tend to get more than one outing now I'm shooting stuff for other platforms, my latest Fontanini on his chunk of Carrara Marble, and a bigger one at about 100/120-mil.

 

 

Nappies in various sizes, the one on the right is the fun one, it's a well [home-] painted slush-cast tourist statuette! The other small one is a 'figure painters' whitemetal figure, I don't know the maker while the ceramic is a fairing type, which was going for a couple of quid rather than some Meissen/Worcester type, but a fun addition to the growing side-collection of naughty Mediterranean (remember the rules of French Warfare) corporals!

This was a 50p jobbie, and worth the read, probably collected articles from a history magazine or periodical or something, not exactly in-depth, and not revealing anything which isn't in AJP Taylor or Liddle Heart, but maybe a tad-less jingoistic.

 

This wasn't that hard to pin down, the artist being revealed as Eija Seras, a Canada-based Finnish artist of the 1960-70's, but the base mark with the 'H' seems wrong (the 'E' is as she did it), so it may be a maiden or married name from one end of her period of productivity? If you google her, you find lots of chess-set pieces, this doesn't seem to be one of them, so just a touristy piece.

"Seras produced a range of Inuit figurines, hand sculpted from terracotta clay, in the late 1960s through the 1970s based on her four years living at the U.S. Air Force base in Goose Bay, Labrador in the mid 60s . The artist was awarded the Canadian Design of Merit citation in 1974 by the National Design Council of Canada for her native figures"

 

'How they came in'! I forgot to load this picture in order, and if I slot it in now I'll have to rewrite the blurbs on the other two, and I'm intrinsically idle, so that's a big, fat no! I seem to recall they were a couple of quid each, from the BHF in Farnborough. Really showing the superiority of plastic in certain situations, as seen by those, back then, who couldn't foresee the pollution problem careering down the tracks.