L is for Lesser & Pavey

Shot these at the Gift Fair the other day, these are tin-plate and resin piles of shite, the sort of thing you find in 'boutique' shops, garden centres and TKMaxx, bought, put on a shelf for 30, 40 years, knocked-off by the odd cat or grandchild, then dumped in a skip by the executors or sent to a charity shop, who, if it's obviously damaged, dump it in a skip!

 

The tank is a sort of Italio-British Panzer II! While the helicopter is a mishmash of several, but the Jeep and Land Rover were quite good.

 

There were civil items too, quite a few, but I concentrated on the military stuff, you'll be familiar-enough with this stuff, from the 'smarter' end of your high-street! And it's another box ticked - Lesser & Pavey.

 

Website;

https://www.leonardo.co.uk/

T is for Two - Peterkin

When we looked at the Peterkin's I both purchased and shelfied in a garden centre near Borden, back in the autumn, I mused that there must be cats, if - as there were - they had a set of dogs, and sure enough, in another garden centre I found the 'missing' cats, and a set of birds, so grabbed both!

 

Cats on the left, birds on the right!

 

The birds can stay in their bag, they look OK and it's reminded me I should pop-up to Birdworld and see what they've got in their gift shop, it must be 50-plus years since I was last there! 

 

The cats are a bit disappointing to be fair, a bit lacklustre, particularly the tabby-cats, although half an effort has gone into the grey, but the two gingers are very poor, while I'm not sure what species the one in the top left corner is supposed to be, but, still, cats is cats!, and under the poor decoration (the Calico is the best, I think), they are characterful sculpts!

I is for Illumin' . . . with a Moomin!

I shouldn't be allowed, I know! Just a quickie here, I grabbed this in Waterstone's back in August as it was the last one, and went back a few times hoping they'd get a re-stock, and I could get others, but when eventually they did get some more, it was just a bunch of these, so generic early 'book' Moomin rather than later colour-coded TV character Moomin!

 

 

 

More of a nightlight than a torch, it would help you find key-holes in the dark!

Labelled Temptation Gifts

E is for Encanto

This is another 'we buy this shit so you don't have to' piece, and I knew straight away what it was, but it was pennies in TKMaxx, so I bought it to prove the point.

 

Like those arch-shaped 'Mini Busy Book' ones a couple of years ago, this 'Tattle Tale' is barely half the contents of the original Busy Book set, but repackaged as a smaller effort, with an even more juvenile 'early reader' board-book. Three of the principal characters and a supporting one.

 

I've tried to find the other figures in similar books, more with the earlier arched ones, and it seems there were probably two tools per original set, and only the one is used on these re-hashes, so you're never going to track down all the figures with these smaller sets, and over time, the other 4/8 items from the original sets will become less common.

F is for Follow-up - Starmen and Sticklepins

So, I went back for the third spaceman bauble, and have picked up a couple more hedgepigs in the last week or so, I think when I finally get the tree up again it will promptly collapse under the weight of its decorative load!

The new one is in the middle, giving a decent idea of the size difference between them, plastic on the left (fourth colourway now) and two blown-glass traditional.

 

He's a Gisela Graham, so should be available in most of the larger garden centres, mine came from the Edwins in Woking, on the Guildford road. Gisela Graham are also responsible for the rocket, which I rejected earlier in the season, and rather regret getting now, so it's probably going to charity, for next year.

 

Wrapped in the moment, and rushing about, I didn't see or remember from the previous viewing, that the jewels are glued-on appliquéing, as are the resin fins, which aren't even straight, and have poor glitter flocking, so all a bit cheap and tacky, but it's there, if it presses your buttons! The body is blow-glass, and it's sort of half Wallace & Gromit, half Tin-Tin and all kids colouring book, circa 1975!

 

I've also given home to three more hedgehogs! And my maths was out in the previous post, I had eight, and added four, now here's another three, making fifteen, or five per turn, six or seven on view at any given moment - we turn the tree regularly so it never gets boring! With an albino (from Alderney!) on the left!

A is for A Starman Came Calling . . . With Several of His Mates!

Would you believe our blow-moulded friend from Christmas's past is back again in a third (or fourth?) guise, but there's more this year! First found in Primark (checks Tags, it is four!) in blue, then a pearlescent one turned up from Asda, before a red one came unbranded from a charity shop, now we have a surrealistically decorated one, from . . . Poundland I think, or Morrisons, I've forgotten?

 

The electric blue gloves and boots are a bit speculative, but with Musk, Bezos and Branson regularly exercising their penis extensions now, corporate logos and uniforms are making themselves felt on the launch ramps! And that looks like a Morrisons price-label!

Previous three can be found here, a group shot in a year or two, and what colour will we find next, or where?

This then came-in, and it's a proper blown-glass one, an unbranded generic from TKMaxx, also more realistically painted, with silver standing-in for the white of the original moon-shot suits, but, they are baubles, and silver is sort of metallic-white!

 

Another glass one, which I left on the self, and rather regret doing so now, I sort of felt it was a bit mawkish, with the star being held, but it's a bloody Christmas bauble isn't it, and I was probably being a bit stuck-up, so I may see if I can get one in a day or two! Can't honestly remember where I saw it, possibly the big Longacres garden centre in Bagshot, or Haskins near Birdworld on the Bordon road?

 

And then, as a seasonal Brucey-bonus, this joined the stash this evening, picked-up by chance in a gift-shop in Farnham, well, OK, maybe not purely by chance, what else was I looking for in a gift shop, in Farnham! A 'Space Exploration' pencil from Suck UK, with topper AND clinger!
 

The rocket will join all the other mini/micro space-ships and Anderson stuff, while the figure is a fun piece, who, though skilful sculpting, loses little in the positioning of the pencil's shaft-tunnel, for want of a better word! All spacey/Christmassy and out there now!

 

And . . . I'd better do a quick shout-out for the London Toy Soldier Show, tomorrow in Camden, last show in the calender, and, therefore, the last show for several months, I'll be there!

F is for Follow-up - Q is for Question Time - Sheep Joins Pig!

I'm sure the pig was a question time, but it might have been in a show report or contribution post and I forgot to Tag it unknown, however, I can't find it on the Blog now? I have shot it again below, but. sure of its existence on the Blog, I've concentrated on the addition, a sheep!

So this is the beast, it's very similar to the pig, in the crudity of it's sculpting and moulding, but still very naturalistic lines, 'Sculptural' is I think the term? A three part tool, with a large belly-block beneath two body halves the over the top split-line having been heavily fettled, the belly line less so, and the colouring the same yellowish-gray and charcoal/black, applied on the same neutral plastic.
 

The two together with a BMC figure for scale (they announced three new colourway pirate sets for later in the month, earlier today!), you can see scale in on the bigger side, and I wonder if they went with a tin-plate farm-truck or trailer, maybe even a railway wagon, but that's unlikely? Whatever, answers on a postcard if you have one . . . answer or postcard!

An hour or so later - I hadn't published it! This came from Adrian a couple of months ago, and I shot it, with Britains sizer, but never got round to the planned Question Time post, so, anyway, here it is, in better detail than the above, still looking for info on both though!

A is for Also Avon Again - Astrobot Astrigent-Amphora!

 

 

Captain Bubbles, reporting for duty, Sah!

(He'd be a good foil for those blow-moulded, lenticular-eyed doozers!)

I is for Interesting Invertebrates or Insects

There were lots of Insects in Mr Attwood's parcel, so an unscheduled insect overview ensues now, another much ignored corner of the Small Scale World 'archive collection', there are lots in store, a few in the growing 'next overview' folder, and many downloads of sets to help ID them all one day for the A-Z pages, while there are good websites out there, for those who want to search for themselves, the STS Animal Wiki being the first place to start.

Spiders, this - like the cheetahs - was another one I had to re-shoot, as I found smaller spiders lurking under other things after I thought I'd found them all! A mix of the novelty/joke type and more realistic species identifiers, the stripped one on the left, for instance? But none are branded, with a smattering of CHINA marks, they will all need further research!

 

Big beetles; the khaki/dun and grey & white ones are from a set, while the two real biggies are probably (like the two big spiders) counter-top pick-me-ups, there is a consistency of marks/undersides within the contents of these five images, which suggest the majority of them are from two sets which should be easy'ish to ID one day.

 

Colony insects with a wingless ant facing-off against all his winged bred'rin! A couple of houseflies have snuck in under the 'wing' qualifier, but I'm not too sure on either of them, both larger than the usual novelty/joke flies, they have some bee/wasp qualities, and the red-eyed horror (a green-bottle, or green-arsed fly!) is more bee than fly!

 

Creepy, crawly critters (ooh, that would have been a better post title!), we have seen similar centi-milli-peades, but as we saw then, they all vary, and we may have seen the catapillar, or something similar, but I think most of these are new to stash?

 

With the exception of the little dragonfly, these all seem to be from the same set, with two issues of the devil's coachman and centi-milli-pede! The coachmen are both damaged, which makes them look more different!

 

Closing with scorpions, I've listened, all-night, to someone who's been stung by a scorpion, not an experience I ever want to repeat! The large damaged one (happily retained as 'first sample') seems to have always had two less legs, but scorpions do come in 6 and 8-leg (or 8 and 10-leg if counting front gloves) types.

The medium-sized one goes with the two medium-sized beetles in the second image, and the smallie goes with the chaps and chapesses in the previous image!

As always, many thanks to Jon for all these, they will be better sorted one day, and all have a place in the collection!

T is for They're Only Robots!

I know, I know! It's not Christmas yet, but everything else is out of the way over here (they've still got 'Thanksgiving' over there), so we can begin to get in the spirit, can't we? It's not like I've put a tree up or anything, and, b't . . . THEY'RE ROBOTS! Remember we had that trio of heavy, resin lumps of Robot, Christmas tree decoration from Poundland a year or two ago, well, check these plastic puppies out!

In Homebase now! And they are ridiculously cheap at a Pound, or even 90p each, I can't remember, but it was pin-money! They are only blow-moulded plastic, and normally I try only to buy glass ornaments (tradition), but we had that blow-moulded astronaut from Primark a few years ago, so why not, especially 'cos they're ROBOTS!

 

There's three! There's three of them, and did I say: they're ROBOTS!

F is for Fruity!

Not figural in any way, but as we've just had a few eraser-posts and regularly cover other novelties here at Small Scale World, I thought we could tick this box on the way through!

 

Little fruity erasers, with fruity-smells! The larger one is actually a rather smoothed-off tangerine soap I've currently got next to the sink! Japan, no brand known, box-ticked, and I think these might have been a donation (in which case they will be credited somewhere on the Bog), but they may have come in a junk lot from an online-auction?
 

I is for Inflation!

For those Brwreakshiteers who wanted to take us back to the heady days of the 1970's, here is a lesson on the sunlit-uplands of post oil crisis inflation!

Basset-Lowke 'The Waterloo Cannons'

Daily Telegraph Magazine (Sunday Supplement)

No.469 October 26th 1973

Basset-Lowke 'The Waterloo Cannons'

Sunday Times Magazine (Sunday Supplement)

November 17th 1974

 

In less than fourteen months, they went up nearly 25%! That's how it was when we were begging to join the EEC, which De Gualle had tried to keep us out of (The UK's applications to join in 1963 and 1967 were vetoed by the President of France).

 

Basset-Lowke, an old railway modelling name often used by its various owners for oddities which don't belong in the standard lines! Lovely looking guns and just the sort of thing to turn-up in a charity shop, or auction job-lot. Possibly a bit big at around 60 or 70mm compatible? Anyone know them?

AFV is for Absolutely Feckin' Vast!

Well, they're not THAT big, but pretty-much the next size-up is Action Man/GI Joe, so they are about as big as I'm ever going to go! We're talking Tudor Rose here, although we've previously seen one of them marked-up as Kleeware, and I'm pretty sure I've seen the same SPG (an M55) under Ideal branding in the 'States?

 

There was a lot of Tudor Rose showing at PW's show a fortnight or so ago, and some of it got a second outing at Sandown Park the following weekend, and I did buy some, but that was all civilian and will be seen in those forthcoming show-reports, in the meantime, this truck came in a while ago now . . .

 

. . . and I shot this quick shot; at an odd angle, seen elsewhere I think, to show off the Blue Box box of Blue Box BB boxes, which Chris had sent in one of his lots, along with a Blue Box four-inch figure, or just under, he's actually 95mm. Well, you'd need a military escort for that load, it's almost a cupboard-full of Blue Box toys!

 

Then these big babies came-in, not that long ago, and while they did go through to storage at the time, I found them the other day while looking for something else, and knowing the truck was still in the flat thought "Well, OK, we can cobble something together here I think!" As you can see they are almost as grubby as the truck, so cleaning as well as photographing was the order of the day.

The M55 got a spray with TFR (traffic film remover) watered-down at about 50/50, and then a drying with kitchen-paper, and I took the opportunity to strip it down to its constituent parts . . . I meant to do a 'parts-shot' for all of them, but kept getting too-keen to reassemble them after I had a pile of dry parts, so forgot to do the others!

 

Apart from the wear to the 'fighting compartment' deck, it came up pretty mint, but I knew it would as the underside looked like it was made yesterday, so it was mostly surface dust. I also re-cut the tab of the firing 'pin' and the furred edges of its receiving slot, as they had had enough play, in the past, to round-off slightly, making it hard to fire without a two-handed faff!

All back together and it's looking like the beast it was, briefly in the 1950'60's, The shells which just sit in the rack on the engine deck were mostly missing; there was only one! And it may be missing stickers (see below), but it's a 1950's beach/garden toy survivor, so I think it's looking good!

The 25lbr, as it's described when you see it in its box (there's one on feebleBay as I write), doesn't look much like a 25lbr! And is a very different beast altogether, not least that while the SPG is 100% soft polyethylene, this is mostly hard 'kit' polystyrene, this to hold a more powerful firing mechanism with metal trigger, securely in the moulding, by having it sealed round the trigger and spring. Wheels are 'ethylene though, with steel axles. It's actually a breach-loader, with a pull-back slotted-tray to take the shell, as the trigger is cocked.

The two, together with their ammunition, there's a bagful for the 25lbr, but only the one for the M55 . . . sniff! However, I can report - after extensive testing against the end of the bed - that both will take each other's rounds, the 25lbr's are snug in the SPG's barrel but fire efficiently, while the smaller rounds of the M55 roll-about a bit in the breach tray of the howitzer which could affect accuracy over garden ranges!

The Jeep completed the trio, and we're back to all-polystyrene, with the exception of two steel axles. Not the best rendition of a jeep, but not the worst either, it gets the 'look' right, but is a bit boxy or square, and lacks the rear quarter-bumpers/fenders/foot-steps, which help with the distinctive lines of a Jeep.

 

Mine is missing it's spare, and like an idiot, in order to shoot one in situ, I took the back one, instead of a front one, so had to prop it up with my fingers! Yes, I could have quickly sorted it out and re-shot it, but what fun is there in such sensible conformity?

Then it was go fetch the truck, and give it the same treatment, with this I didn't remove the rear cargo-bed from the frame, as it looked like I might damage it if I forced the six clips, but the cab came off and the seats came out, while tail-gate and headlight bar both popped-off.

 

It's not a recognisable mark, but more of a generic . . . Bedford? And scale-wise, sits between the larger Jeep and smaller M55. It has a towing hook, but isn't as happy taking the 25lbr as the Jeep is (tighter space), so I may be looking for a smaller gun, or trailer for it?

 

The other obvious difference is the two-tone colouring and I think I've seen civilian versions with red, yellow or blue superstructures as 'tipper-trucks', was there a builder's/road worker's generator trailer or cement-mixer, maybe?

You can see the PVC door stickers didn't survive cleaning, one is lost forever (down the plughole I fear), the other fell off while drying, they were both time expired, the stars however (being a separate contract/print run) survived much better, and leave the question, should they all have/did they all have stickers, or were they added from other toys/models, to this truck? Stickers aren't normally a feature of Tudor Rose, nor did the Kleeware version M55 have any.

Still cleaned-up nicely. It's slightly bent, which is more of a construction thing than an age thing; as the frame gets heavier (as in a heavier moulding) under the cab, where the front wheel-arches begin, the frame has curved slightly and could do with a bit of hot water on the long spars with a press-down at the cab-end of the bed to get it all parallel with the road surface, but it's not bad enough to worry about really!

 

Interestingly, there seems to be a missing steering-wheel, well, that's not interesting, that's annoying, but there are two receiving holes (that's the interesting bit!), so an export version must have been sold with left-hand-drive? Across the Channel or across The Pond?

All cleaned and reassembled, if I had to scale them off the top of my head I'd say about 1:20 for the Jeep, 1:24/25 for the truck and 1:30/32 for the M55, it's about the same size as the Airfix Abbot SPG.

 

Hopefully if I find a cheap, maybe knackered Jeep (perhaps missing its windscreen, or chewed-up), I'll be able to take a wheel as spare for mine, and use the steering wheel for the truck - it looks like it would fit? Trouble is, one knackered-enough to be cheap is likely to be missing its steering wheel too!

The marking is clear on all four items, with 'Tudor Rose' repeated on some, if you recall (or followed the link just now) the Kleeware 'Howitzer Tank' retains the central 'Made in England' disc, but looses the other two, having a heavy KLEEWARE raised on the underside of the deck floor/rear step, aft of the bulkhead.

 

Which conforms to the fact that after they had taken them over and as Tudor Rose concentrated on more trade-related matters (raw materials and machine tools), they handed production of some of their old models to their [Tudor Rose's] new Kleeware 'brand mark/division'.

Last minute checks before setting-off, a runner is sent up from the back to speak to the convoy packet-commander, who looks ready to shoot him, if he says anything too stupid!

 

The figures used are all about 95mm, or just short of the full four-inches, and are an earlier painted Blue Box, a later unpainted Blue Box, both with the same mark as the soft ethylene issue of the 25mm GI's, and the third, unmarked is almost certainly a Rado Industries (Ri-Toys) issue, from the same ex-Blue Box (or ex-Tai Sang!) mould tool.

"Gentlemen! Start. Your. Engines!"