T is for Two - Pool Party!

I went back to B&M to try and get another set, so balance up the figures a bit, and they were sold-out in two stores! But I found these beach-toys, and shelfied one while buying the other!

 

Fun for kids, but the rubber boat would be useful for garden gamers. I suspect I bought these (or something very similar) a few years ago, which was why I only shelfied them, that and the rather too chunky, white-button motors!

 

De-carded now, so I can't retake it, I'm struggling with the settings on a new camera!

 

They are actually soft polymer (like a dense PVC), and totally sealed units so when the stack of three watch-batteries run out, there'll be no more lights, and the shock of them hitting the water presumably sets them off, I didn't work it out until I dropped one! It's the same tech' as all these flashing kids' shoes and suchlike!

 

B&M, now, three-quid each!

W is for Whirlybirds, D is for Dragons!

The Tudor Rose Sikorsky S-51 (company designation VS-327), the civil version of the R-5/H-5, (also known as S-48), and by Westland-Sikorsky as the WS-51 'Dragonfly', although we're actually looking at the Tudor Rose Dragonflies, as they made two, a posh one with metal parts and a budget one for the beach!

The smaller one on the left (from the 1955 catalogue) is the all-placky one, the larger brother is to the right with its box, although judging by the company codes (5089 [large] and 5897 [small]), the earlier would have been the bigger model, maybe 1953 or before, commercial operations of the real aircraft had begun in 1946.

 

Side-by-side the silver one (polystyrene and other materials) is about a ⅓ larger than the all-polyethylene yellow one, and redolent of old Dan Dare strips where similar machines of all sizes tended to be flitting around in the backgroun whenever the action moved to the spaceport apron/tarmack; this was once the future, people!

The machines themselves are very good, and there's not much loss of detail/accuracy over the larger one, by the smaller. However, the landing gear is a different matter, being redesigned for floors and carpets, not the roofs of skyscrapers, or the fledgling Heathrow Airport! There are also differences between the two in the wheel department, driven by the need to balance/operate (read - play with) very different beasts!

The mechanism which drives the propellers is similar to the old Thomas/Acme/IM (et al.) model, seen here passim at Small Scale World, but a more sophisticated crown-gear in steel and tinplate, on the larger Inter-City, and a less sophisticated, and less reliable, simplified bevel-gear on the Sea Rescue model.

 

Box art on the smaller aircraft suggests a cruciform arrangement of blades, but there's no sign of the other two blades, and I suspect the limitations of the box dimensions, took-over after the art-department had got to work? But it could be damaged?

The pilots are similar: semi-flat, double-sided relief 'carved' figures, in similar poses, but of different sizes and fixings, the BEA pilot being fixed in place by a slot-in baseplate, the SAR pilot plugging onto a spigot before the two halves of the fuselage are joined together. Neither is to scale with his machine!

A couple more shots of the Inter City Helicopter Service model and box, many thanks to Adrian Little of Mercator Trading for letting me shoot these back in 2019. Can you believe it's nearly six-years since I tried to cut the end of my thumb off?!

And a couple of the smaller Sea Rescue Helicopter. Our friends in the village had the bigger one I think, I probably would have preferred this one, but the gears are weak, and tend to bend-over/round-off, so it might have got frustrating! In the upper shot, you can see the pilot's 'feet' hooked onto the spigot.

Some old eBay images I had on the dongles, if you want the whole story it's here;

Sikorsky -  https://sikorskyarchives.com/home/sikorsky-product-history/helicopter-innovation-era/sikorsky-s-51/

 

Westland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westland_WS-51_Dragonfly

Military Slant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_H-5

DUK is for "APION" Amfibies Jeep!

This is an odd one; sometimes I just don't understand how the hobby works. What we have here is a never seen before, may never see again, South African toy of a military vehicle in 'around' a 54/60mm compatible scale, yet having shot it at length back in the early spring, [not] watched them not-sell on evilBay, watched them not sell at the Plastic Warrior show and bought an orphan - at the end of the show, I wonder how that happened?

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?

Q is for Question Time - Car & Boat

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on bar-b-queing/hunting/exploring apparent-Africans, and in part to illustrate the type of set I think they might belong to; there's this:

The bag is crinkly cellophane and probably is the original carrier, however it has no sign of staples (so no header card) nor tape (so always open, but folded closed, so should probably have had a box, but the shape of the bag seems to preclude the kind of long, thin, box we saw with the Laurie-branded set here.

Therefore I suspect maybe a larger box with some other bags; a bag of trees or shrubs, a tent, camping accessories or another vehicle and the whole in a larger, flatter box, a bit like this circus set (which also has a mix of 'styrene and 'ethylene)? It's that sort of thing I was wondering about for yesterday's figures; a Jeep or Land Rover, trees, some animals to interact with the spearman, maybe a white hunter or explorer, a cage . . . ? It's all conjecture!

An oddity with this set is that while all the components of the car and trailer, along with the two figures are 100% soft polyethylene, fully dismantle'able or clip-together, the boat is 100% polystyrene and glued together - possibly to ensure it floats, by sealing the join between the deck and hull?

Like the car/caravan linked to above, there is a lot of play value in this (whether or not is was part of a larger set), but it is the next level down as far as production-budget/quality (and aimed-for retail price-bracket?) is concerned and may have been an unbranded generic sold at beach-side kiosks, where it would have been pushing-out the domestic products of Kleeware, Poplar, Rafael Lipkin, Thomas and Tudor Rose, et al as the 1960's slid into the 1970's

The figures; there are some similarities with yesterday's African chaps, but the differences are stronger, with the pin-marks in the diving figures base, the paint carried round the figures and a more opaque plastic, they are also 50mm though, and there was a lot of this stuff around, and more remain to be ID'd . . . a brand or even just a set title for this would be a start!

Further to and rather rendering the above superfluous; Peter Evans just emailed me on yesterday's Africans . .

". . . Those native figures are from a Safari set made in Hong Kong. Sold in Woolworth's in the 1960s

There are two more natives, one carrying a case on his head - case was a separate piece and a native holding a bow.

There were two white hunters. Both wearing shorts and based on the Swoppet cowboy prisoner body and the firing rifle body.

As far as I can remember it was a carded set with about four copies of Britains Lion, Panther, Gorilla and chimp

No idea who the brand was but definitely Hong Kong . . . Peter"

Cheers Peter - So a carded set!

While looking at the circus set just now, fetching the link, the bag's are almost identical, so probably an unbranded 'generic' boxed set for the above 'Beach Bums'!

Q is for Query - International Products

Yesterday (Wed.) was a mare of a day for a number of reasons, not least of which was that Bakers hardware are closed in the afternoon and Farnborough Hardware had burnt down? No matter, I managed to get a thumb on the little buggers tail when he raided the cat food and a humane release on the golf-course followed!

Mice! Another failing of the 'assistant'. But nothing got posted for today, so this is a quick one from the archive - Sandown Park about a year ago - Adrian's stall.

Not a question mark as we know it's by International Products, but that's all we know, do you know more? M38-type Jeep 'Wrangler' and trailer, the trailer pierced at the corners for a load, box body, tilt-cover or something of that ilk; possibly a sweet container or tied-in bag of figures or sand-castle flags? The whole in the style of Tudor Rose, Lilo or other (International Products!) beach toys.

Mark - International Products London xx (??). The jeep is missing a windscreen and possibly a spare-wheel.

That's it, bit of a box ticker; can you add anything?

WTF is for What The Flippin' Ada!

The third of today's trio of pocket-money rack toys, and a brief visit to the beach . . .

. . . with a look at the Fun Aquad Set. Basically a small group (taken from a larger inventory) of Corgi piracies organised around the theme of water-sports.

With a shaped blister I think you only got the woman, but a man was available, also a Corgi clone. If you think she's looking a little naked . . .

. . . check-out the artwork, an Eastern-European ladies shot-putter from the mid-1970's?

Petrel issued this set in a larger configuration with the male surfer, a copy of the Matchbox motor-launch from the 1-75 Series trailer, several yachts in two sizes and some other bits, in the Petrel version; swimwear is painted-in I'm pleased to report!

T is for Tub Fun!

Courtesy of Brian Berke comes this set and the associated photographs, some taken of the sample he donated to the blog! You can't beat a good bath/beach toy - when you're six! But as we saw in Brian's own diorama of Operation Dynamo they can paint-up well and prove more useful than throwing at your younger sibling in a tantrum, when he tries singing over the wafted sounds of Bob Dylan Live at Blackbushe, blowing in the evening wind (see what I did there) across Bramshill Forrest and through the bathroom window!

Previously issued by Amloid (now holder of Crayola brand, still carrying beach toys and celebrating 100-years in the toy business!), these will be a copy of what were probably originally US desings, such is the nature of the toy business!

Common designs, they are based on earlier sets with more detailed sculpts, one of which - 'Pee Wee Boats' - is on Kent Sprecher's Giant page, I would disagree that Giant 'made' them, Giant issued them, as many other firms did, as Ja-Ru does, but they were (and still are) made in the plants of otherwise anonymous contract manufacturers in China or what were the 'New Territories'; these (and a dozen copies of them) were available in every sea-side kiosk in Europe when I was a toddler (and still are).

In recent years Ja-Ru have taken to getting their own logo placed/moulded-on to larger items (and most - but not all - packaging) this will likely be in response to China's decision to develop 'own' (or actuall!) brands (primarily to serve a domestic market) rather than exist purely as a contractor to the West and to establish Ja-Ru as a 'player' (or the player they have been for 55 years) rather than the [in the background] 'Jobber' they've been happy to operate as, thus far!

Two of the other designs from the Ja-Ru set, along with an earlier un-marked version of the yacht, and a carded set of smaller clone yachts from Pay Day Products (a Madeupbrand if ever I heard one!), we looked at a similar (but 20-odd years older) set from Ri-Toys quite a while ago.

The Ferry, again a common enough design, similar to the Lido dime-store model, and the barge I was chatting to Ed Berg about on his blog the other day. Basically an on-shore, inland or harbour ferry design with a roll-through facility to allow quick-turnaround, here loaded with rack-toy copies in soft ethylene of old hard styrene US dime-store mini-vehicles - more on them soon.

Yes - I am fully aware of the garbled block of 'text' pertaining to Ja-Ru (in answer to a totally unrelated comment about new production Nappies?) which have appeared after my recent mentions of them and apparently trying to pre-empt the A-Z entry being forthcoming; as have also appeared comments on Amscan, Ackerman and Hing Fat, also within days of them being mentioned here, most of them rubbish or containing a barrow-load of rubbish amongst the commoner 'facts'!

As there are only so many days in a month and this is Rack Toy Month, not 'Start a War with the Penn-State Toy Soldier Mafia (hereafter: PSTSM) Month; such things can wait, after all: Give a man enough rope and he'll hang himself! 'So called jogger' - Too funny! Somebody tell him what a jobber is, I hate the phrase - it's too similar to FoB'er, prefer 'importer' and only use it out of deference to the PSTSM!

The Ja-Ru A-Z entry is now here, and sensible feedback or additional links, product listings or empirical evidence will be happily accepted and credited/acknowledged, however made-up rubbish from secret ..."business chamber international system"…'s won't be! Although it's nice to know he's following the blog so closely!

L is for Li-Lo

Five years ago I posted this Unknown Figures post, Peter Evans kindly identified the Li-Lo within days - if not hours - and I finally got a bead on the lower set on evilBay the other day, and I was right about it being a shooting game, Hong Kong, generic. The three poses seem to be 'it' but I can't now find it in the Unknown HK folder which means it was 'brand' named, but I can't remember where I filed it...it wasn't Gordy, Larami, Laurie, LP or Lucky - I just looked!

Anyway, back to Li-Lo...this turned-up a while ago. From the warping it's either a very unstable polystyrene or some earlier cellulose or phenolic resin? Actually marked Lilo. It's missing a draw-bar/handle thing.

In the UK Li-Lo were best know in my childhood for being the manufacturers of a vast range of polyvinyl (PVC) inflatable beds or mattresses, 'floatation devices', balls, rings and other beach/camping toys, to the point that they became synonymous with them, we had 'lilos' not inflatables! I don't know if/what they may have made/sold elsewhere....did you have Li-Lo where you are?

I'm willing to bet that the 'oversized' figure in the original post was sold with this as a beach toy, either a few together in a larger polythene bag, probably with a card header, or in a mesh-net attached to this. Pure conjecture, so don't add it to any wants lists, but that is exactly the sort of combination you'd see hanging in bunches at seaside kiosks, or further inland at the back of cycle or sporting-goods shops. There may have been a set of paper flags glued onto cocktail sticks or little wooden spills as well.

Ten minutes after publishing...there was an Australian arm, the UK parent-company had another name and Lilo is still a generic term for inflatable beds! I've also tracked down a few catalogues/adverts so will do their - now three - entries for the A-Z in a day or two...maybe!