L is for Lots of Lovely Loot!

Actually it's not much, but there are some interesting bits in amongst the box-tickers, and almost more metal than plastic, which is not a measure of how far I'm veering from the true path, but just the fact that the London show is the sort of show where some cheap metal is to be had!

Not sure if these are colonial French or British 'native' infantry, nor whether they are Indian or Arabic, or ancient/medieval, but I like to grab these semi-flats when I see them going cheap, and these were better than cheap, they were free! Adrian Little gave them to me, after I asked for a price, as they were in with something . . . err . . . much better!

 

Café Storm Coffee premium of Don Luis de Requesens (1520-1576, Wikipedia states b.1528, but admits problems with the page?) on the left, a mounted Arab from Britains 'Second Rate' subscale, pocket-money lines on the right.

 

Machine-gunners, a growing side-collection! Hollow-cast to the fore, a solid, commercial effort from home-casting mould behind him, the larger composition one is also unknown, but may be Belgian or Dutch and a Crescent gunner is behind them all.

Two shrubs, the left-hand one, more composite than composition, may be an early Faller, I've a couple of Faller trees somewhere with similar bases and construction, but with identifying stickers, or - to be accurate - glued labels. On the right is an aluminium one which could be Wend Al, but is probably Quiralu, as it was with a bunch of other Quiralu that Wend Al never covered themselves.

 

Five more metals, and most are Britians Second Rate's again (note the very different treatments of the two marching (US?) sailors), but the pilot is Crescent, and the running sailor is from B&T I think, from a Woolworth's exclusive set, post war.

 

A couple of ceremonials, one plastic and another of those Crescent sub-scale piracies from Hong Kong, [27th - probably an equally interesting Hilco plastic-from-hollow-cast - thanks Peter Evans] the other a hollow-cast and actually Crescent as far as I can tell, detail seems crisper on Crescent's figures than Britains.

 

I owe Peter Evans a small apology, I was holding two conversations at once, when he came over and gave me the red figure (another freebie!), and I glanced at it and said something along the lines of 'Thanks, I think it's from a firefighter board game like the milkman/dairy delivery one?', later I found the yellow one in a rummage tray (possibly the same seller?), and after getting them home, they are clearly spies or secret-agents of some kind, probably still board game pieces, but not firemen! I think I have the game's details somewhere in the archive, so one day the A-Z entry will have them corrected!

Between them is a rather nice 70-millimetre Nardi nativity Wise Man, from a crèche/crib set, or Presepe, he's got a swivel waist, but is otherwise not very swoppet'y!

The rest of what was only a cupped-hands'full, but all good stuff, especially with the large set we looked at yesterday. Clockwise from the top left, we have another of the soft-polyethylene versions of the Hardy (et al) G.I. flats, which I suspect are 'Euro-premiums' of some kind? A dug out canoe from Safari's Powhatan Indians set, a pack of eight Lilliput hurdles, and two of the maybe Charbens cake decoration plastic copies of the Britains' hunters, another Airfix fox-hound/beagle type and a Quiralu (?) black panther in aluminium.