Most 'large-scale' collectors, or at least
the more generic or ephemeral collectors, the completist or competitive
collectors or the curious (which is all bar the subject-specific collectors,
i.e. most of them) would happily have a bright red Tudor Rose Land-Rover or bright yellow Pyro or Banner 'dimestore'
Jeep in their collections, yet no one wanted these?
Yet, I also half-understand, as despite
sliding the first image between the two introductory paragraphs, and sticking
another above this continuation of my opening point, I am going to struggle to
find enough blurb for the post, as there's hardly anything to say about them,
but having taken a load of images when I first saw them and some more of my
example (red one) I now have five collages to write up! Now obviously, the next
paragraph can be all about the Box . . .
Which comes in at least two colour-ways,
both are three-colour processes, but different colours, litho'd, not
dot-matrix, so green/orange are reproduced by overlaying. Each box also has two
panels and one end with the the written details in Afrikans and the other three
faces in English . . . like the contemporaneous stamps!
This leaves maker and the vehicle to
describe; but you've already seen it as I spread the images through the text!
It's an amphibious Jeep in leery colours, reasonably accurate for an infant
toy, and in a phenolic resin which is starting to distort - in the case of the
yellow; particularly so. Opposite colours are placed as 'small parts'; red on
the yellow vehicle and vise-versa.
Final image leaves us with the maker . . . African Plastic Industries (Pty) Limited
trading as Apion and the price . . .
three shillings and ninep'nce, for something this large, which has probably
been sent half-way round the world on a tramp steamer, places them in the
nineteen-fifties I suspect, while there's nothing on Google!
Phew! Got there, can't understand why no
one wanted them, can half-understand why they generated so little interest, but
. . . humans are weird! Still they join the Haarlem and SA marked SAE in the collection, what next from
that part of the world?
