C is for Centurion

Bit of a box-ticker, this one; another Sandown September purchase, and I didn't really take enough shots for a whole post, but it's been off to storage for a while. Nevertheless a useful beast to add to the pile, not terribly rare, but interesting, and it will need comparison with the Dinky one I picked up in that Charity Shop plunder, a few years ago . . . and the various Hong Kong plackys!

Not the US Premier (Premier Products Co. / Premier Plastics), the  Palmer subsidiary, of Brooklyn, on the opposite bank from Pyro, it's actually manufactured in Japan. The box is a bit tatty, and I need to track down the correct ammunition, which I'm lead to believe was plastic, but the tank itself has been well looked after and is very clean, it will be even cleaner after a dusting!

Arguably the Centurion was the best tank ever made? While others were very good at specific times or for specific purposes, the Centurion brought together everything we'd learned about tank warfare in WWII, combining the best of both British concepts - Cruiser Tanks and Infantry Tanks - into one 'main battle tank'; fast, yet heavily armed and armoured.

It gave rise to the whole post-war Vickers family of  Centurion-Chieftain-Shir-Challenger, and it's ideas, design concepts and DNA are to be found in the M48/60, AMX30 and Leopard I, it performed well against T34, T54-55 and 62/72, and the aforementioned M48/60's in wars from Korea, through India-Pakistan and the various middle-east conflicts, and went into Angola with the South Africans, who still operate a heavily modified and upgraded version called the Oliphant, while Jordan (and possibly the genociders next door) still use the chassis for various specialised or second echelon vehicles.

Aiming at the US market with the number sign, or 'octothorpe' (Bell Labs), now known as a 'hash' (British Telecom) or 'hash tag' (Chris Messina), rather than the '№' which would have been the acceptable symbol in the UK at the time, and online it seems to be known as the Premier #144 Tank.

It has a novel firing mechanism, with breech-loading from the turret-end of the barrel, and cocking via  a leaver which leaves a rather unsightly slash through the top of the turret, while firing is achieved by pressing down on the commanders head!

Somewhere between 1:50th and 1:60th in scale, only a side-by-side with the Dinky will settle that for me, unless you know for sure? It's a mostly die-cast alloy model, with a tin-plate baseplate, and what I suspect are silicon rubber tracks of some recipe/compound, due to their lack of drying, brittleness or deformation over, what, 50-plus years?