C is for Car Race!

My main purchase at the recent antique toy fair, up in London (report and bits forthcoming), was this little board game. Photo-dates say I bought it at Sandown, which makes more sense! A late Edwardian or early Elizabethan one, credited to a Geographia Ltd., the cars are pre-war I think, so probably the former, but all the board-game books are back in storage! I'm pretty-sure this is in one of them.

 

The board is almost mint, but the boxy nature of the box has attracted distress over the years with crushing, a large blob of paint (or liquid paper correction fluid?) and various nicks in the maroon paper foil-wrap.

A piece of tissue-paper, which I suspect is original, keeps two faux ivory dice in the tumbler and sets of hazard/penalty cards are part of the play mechanism. I think the rules were in the lid of the box, but I can't remember, and they may have been a separate sheet, which may have been absent? If they were in the lid, I forgot to shoot them!

 

I also forgot to shoot the whole board (I'll scan it for the eventual A-Z post), which was a map of the British Isles, and from the presence of the tissue paper and the state of the board and the paint on the cars, it would seem that while the box has suffered over the years, the whole has never been played-with? I think the cars are die-cast alloy, but they are so clean you can't tell if they mightn't be a lead/pewter?

 

And it's worth a thought that the aero-versions of the engines which powered these open-topped, roaring death-traps, would go on to equip both side's aircraft, in the Battle of Britain! Maybe that was the prophecy fulfilled; he didn't need to wake The Knights of the Round Table, Merlin worked his magic in the Spitfire and Hurricane.