F is for Further Follow-up - Micro Vessels

I'd forgotten I'd picked the bits up from the storage unit, to do a comparison, so here's a bit more on the small or 'micro' vessels we looked at a couple of days ago, and some more bits from the Internet downloads folder on naval stuff.

 

Both this and the previous should be viewed in the context of the original post on the very small vessels, which was part of a series of seven articles;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2012/03/s-is-for-ships-and-other-vessels-part-7.html

 

There were also some comparisons in the MPC series a few years later; 

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2015/05/mpc-is-for-mini-ships-part-two.html

 

Which was a two-parter, both series have become dated by the scope of the collection now, and one day I intend to re-do all seven of the first lot, in the same order, but as longer, fuller articles, in the meantime a few more points arising . . .

 

. . . including a colour fan of the Quaker samples which are here at the moment, I know the original sample with all ten mouldings, and other accrued duplicates is elsewhere, so a better version of this shot is in the Blog's future, and looking at these, I think there's some merit to my hypothesis re. Tom Smith?

 

Furthermore, I'd suggest that whoever made these ships, made the Gladiators, both are relatively common in small quantities (down to single samples in mixed 'junk' lots), more common than other cereal premiums, and while there are none here, the metallic green in the original post, is matched perfectly in the Gladiators, originally, also Quaker.

 

Nine of ten, by size, with a hole for the missing one!

 

The two Sanella superstructures I have here, there are at least three, and they have a common hull, sometimes found loose, sometimes found glued together, like that water-film novelty I got from Steve Vickers recently. However, I'd forgotten . . .

 

. . . the larger., better finished liner, also marked Sanella, which is almost certainly a later model? The Manurba seem to have three hull types, not the two mentioned the other day - my bad! Pointed, rounded and flat sterns, and maybe only three matching superstructures? Although, like the Sanella - lots of colours, albeit brighter/primary, as opposed to Sanella's more muted or pastel hues.

 

Recently, with the help of Chris Smith (pink, middle), and - I think - another purchase (red, front), I've picked-up three vessels with WWI/turn-of-the-19th-Century forward sloping prows (there was a silver warship, from Adrian Little, still in a separate bag!), and it turned-out I'd found them online some time ago (2020);

 

Apparently sold in waxed-paper bags of twelve vessels, there are possibly only four sculpts/mouldings; twin-barrelled warship, single-barrelled warship, merchantman/tanker and liner? But with three marking variations (prow - my red one, stern - this set, and none - silver warship), there really aught to be more in the collection than there are?

 

The fate of all this Hong Kong bottom-end/pocket-money stuff is that it was always unappreciated and mostly went to landfill decades ago. So, if you have any going spare, bring them to the Plastic Warrior show, this Saturday, and I'll give you real Earth money for them!!

 

Finally, found in 2021, and as an addendum to that part-7 link above, another game which contains a micro-navy, to add to the games in that post, is the Ariel Games one, Manoeuvre, also sold as Strategy, from 1973;

 

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8905/strategy-the-navy-game-for-all-the-family

 

Which is quite bloodthirsty, if you contemplate the number of troops you can have on a troopship! I'm sure there are more games with these micro vessels, and - of course - we've ID'd the slightly larger Silvercorn stuff, since those early posts.

A is for A Few Follow-ups!

A few things raised by stuff we've looked at recently, and despite a slower than usual posting rate so far this year, we've covered quite a bit one way or another, and here are a few bits and pieces related to some of the odds & sods, seen here in the last couple of months, or so!

 

This was an internet sales shot I downloaded a few years ago, I download a lot of stuff which illustrates stuff I don't have, but which it's not worth bidding on, or because I'm not - at the time - bidding, and this is one such. I downloaded it for the little blue Bisque pilot (whom I didn't know was bisque then, I assumed composition!), and, of which I've since picked-up a sample, seen in this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2026/06/bmss-is-for-more-plunder.html

 

The other stuff above is mostly common lead, some of which I've obtained in the last few years from Adrian's rummage trays, but it seems I'm still looking for the sub-scale chap. top, far-right, or is he the Crescent pilot (which I do have)? And the guy next to the blue pilot, also slightly smaller than the 54mm's. I think the sailor/lifeboat man, two along is a modern production, whitemetal solid?

 

While this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2026/05/d-is-for-donations-peter-animals.html

 

Reminded me I'd downloaded these wooden flats, when I saw them on sale, again, not the common poultry girl and chickens, but in the same vein, and like the farmer in Peter's donation, slightly better decorated. I've never seen the Wild West figures before, but will look out for them.

 

On the subject of the mazes we looked at, on the London Underground, it struck me, back in April, that the tiled panels at Warren Street (geddit? Warren = labyrinth, maze), should get an honourable mention! I think there's a deliberate mistake in this, but need to check it with the other panels, and there are several per platform and four platforms to check.

 

But if you look at the 7th tile along from the left in the second row from the top, it's not right? Breaking at least two rules - two red lines adjacent, and a shadow-wall falling away at the wrong angle?

 

The various Hulk's we've seen since Christmas! I think the oldest is the pencil top, and there are others to look at one day, so we'll return to Hulks at some point if I'm granted the time, by the powers that be, but the weather this week has suggested we might, none of us, have the time left, we've been hoping for or counting on!

 

I've got the blues! I thought there were six shades here, but actually there are seven, so the early works on Kellogg's jig-toys were pretty generalised in their colour lists, and clearly there were many runs of the tools, and cereal premiums was only one of several issues, for these polyethylene jig-toys.

 

These got left off one of the Peter Evans' donations, and are mostly Hong Kong small scale with a few kit-figures and other bits (central bag), but all grist to the mill! When I'm better organised, these will all go on the But Is It Giant? blog (no, none of them are!), and with both my own quite large collection of carded, bagged and blister sets, and the many I've also downloaded from the Internet over the years, we will make sense of them all, and annotate most of them!

 

Further to the recent purchase from Isaac's friend at Sandown Park;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2026/06/t-is-for-two-diver-sets.html

 

I took this image from evilBay back in 2021, and you can see the same soft 'polythene' ships (sans the hard 'styrene submarine), with one version of the sailors, taken from Britains hollow-cast US Marines, but what it would seem to suggest is that there's an ABC-CMV-HK link to some or all of these sets, more work needed, or a couple of confirmatory finds!

 

Sticking with vessels, these are a purchase a while ago, of the Quaker cereal premiums, we added five the other day, courtesy of Chris Smith, including a new colour (white), and while I haven't managed to shoot them all together, one day we'll unite them all and cover all the colours and all the vessels (ten?), however, I suspect, from the breadth of the colour range, these, like the Gladiators, found their way into Tom Smith crackers at some point?

 

I should have credited the seller at the time, name long-lost, and they probably don't even know of the Blog, let alone follow it, but this was a cheap BIN I got back in February '23, and this is how they arrived in an otherwise standard envelope, and I thought they were beautifully packed to ensure they arrived as they were seen in the auction shots.

 

The cereal premium submarine has all four periscopes/air-tubes/exhausts up, which was the real reason for bidding, the Quaker and Manurba vessles (middle pair) were grist to the mill, and the yacht might be from a board-game, but the keel suggests not? Maybe the water-bowl equivalent of Blow Football?!

 

And mentioned in passing in another plunder-post recently - the Tallon (UK) packaging of the Manurba vessels, I have quite a few Tallon packs now, but this one has eluded me so far, it'll come; nothing made after 1950 is 'really' rare!

 

There are two common hulls (flatter stern and pointed at both ends), to which two or three superstructure types are added, to each hull. We've also seen similar ships from Sanella, who had the one hull, and several suprestructures.

C is for Corgi Copy Circus 'Car'!

So, I should try and get the Sandown stuff cleared before PW (two weeks today!), but there was a lot of the sort of 'stand alone' stuff, so it'll be a bit bitty for the next few days, but well start with a peach of a small-scale piece, of classic Hong Kong plastic tat!

 

I knew of the larger ones, but had no idea a small-scale one existed, so I was well-happy to find this the other week, unmarked generic and just the sort of stuff you found in the less-lit corners of a newsagent back in the late sixties or early seventies!

 

 

This is from one of those auction-aggregator sites, and I can't remember whose auction it was re-posting, but this is the Corgi original, a fully die-cast model with six circus horses in grey polyethylene which may have been domestic production, although a lot of Corgi's accessory pieces were bought-in from a certain far-eastern colony.

 

Telsalda did two versions, there are a few on evilBay from time to time, often with the animals mucked-about with, I think these are original and this in the earlier version, with the 'technically' Bedford type cab-unit. A later one had the classic Ford D-series, which is the one copied in small-scale. Interestingly, you may recall Jimson did two versions of their trucks, which is a sign HK was trying to keep up with both their Western donors and 'the times'!

 

With all three Hong Hong models the 'exhibition' horse-box, becomes a transparent roofed animal transporter, with six different animals, the big-cats seemingly facing way from the other four, to prevent nervousness? I don't think so! Box art with both generics and Telsalda marked boxes show the same solid/painted tops as the corgi original, so the clear tops might have been a last-minute idea?

 

If you didn't find the thing near-mint, you'd never believe the over-sized sea-lion belonged to the other five, but actually his stall has cut walls to accommodate his flippers, which shows how much effort they put into these toys, after casually selecting such a daft animal to include, far easier to find another small animal (see below) and not re-tool the whole body - all a bit daft really!

 

Polyethylene aginst the polystyrene of the vehicle, the five miniature animals, and slightly larger sea-lion with ball, a useful ID, as I have a sizeable bunch of these in the unknown section, and should be able to sort a few out/together, into a new bag! The camel is the smallest, scalewise, with the elephant very young!

 

I think the one on the left can be generic or Shackman of New York, while the Nesbit/Merri-Craft is similar to stuff from Unique, Grandmother Stovers, Carousel and others. They are not all the same, but rather sub-piracies of each other, the donors tending to be Briatins or Elastolin for the most part.

The baby elephant has many versions, with some from these sets, some, bought-in/used by Western makers, as safari or jungle board-game accessories. One I've yet to ID has a distinct 'A' on it's belly, but it is neither the Arco, nor the Triple-A!

T is for Two - Diver Sets

I picked these two up from a friend of Isaac's, over the phone, I won't bore you with the details, but as soon as I saw them I knew I needed them, if the price was right, which it was, as they are one of those things which brings several threads of the whole Rack Toy oeuvre together, while half-ID'ing some bits.

 

We've seen this card before, and most of the contents, one suspects they all shared pegs in little independent newsagents and corner-shop/convenience stores for a few years, in the mid-late 1960's, and sold well enough, despite the poor quality of the contents, as there's still a lot of play value in a relatively cheap set, for the era?

 

The ships are really quite common, but here we have mid-quality copies of the Lone Star divers, instead of the Monogram figures we saw last time;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2016/08/m-is-for-monograms-men-made-much_10.html

 

Trucks have been associated in previous posts, but now I can find the correct mini-subs and rubber boats from the larger, unknown Hong Kong samples, and, possibly of more interest is the hard polystyrene plastic submarine, which I would never have assumed went with the soft plastic surface vessels.

 

Although, thinking about it, they have come together in mixed lots, or donations of the sort Chris Smith, and particularly Trevor Rudkin have given me over the years, confirming patterns that were already hidden in the background wallpaper!

 

Fewer total contents in this slightly smaller card, which is a new addition to the series, and which may also include some of these;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2010/01/b-is-for-beachead-hong-kong-style-part_01.html

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2010/01/b-is-for-beachead-hong-kong-style-part.html

 

They don't solve many questions, but they do thin-out the various other bags and tubs of unknowns, with the Lone Star clone divers now associated with the commonest of the 14-odd different copies of Monogram GI, the ships and Humber 1-ton mini-trucks brought together with the smaller vessels and submarine, and one version of equally common aeroplane type added to the whole.

 

These both need a careful opening, and re-threading with rubber-bands, at which time I'll dampen and iron the cards to stiffen them up, and restore them to something like how they looked sixty-odd years ago. A task which will be easier on the second set, it's pretty obvious what went where, there will be more guesswork involved in getting the upper set shipshape!

D is for Donations - Peter - Animals

The sorting of the animals is going to be one of the bigger tasks, one day, the hobby is probably bigger than Toy Soldiers, certainly, it supports several vigorous forums, and there are as many makers, if not more, while mine are rather in an anonymised heap within the bigger stash, but they keep coming in, and here's some more!

 

A nice cat, which looks like it might be an accessory from a non-animal set of some kind, the lizard is from the little small-scale, rack-toy play sets from Toy Major/Ackerman, while the bear is both a bit crude and a bit unusual!

 

A whole sub-genre are this smallish scale, softish vinyl sets from toobs, tubs or bags, which are sort of 35/40mm compatible, but really 'bag-scale' or unit scale, and while some are marked, other's easy to ID, many sets are to be found on FeeBay-Amazon-Alibaba, as generics or under obviously phantom brands. These seem to go together, but a couple of them are questionable. Nice, different, cactus!

 

Two generic rack toys, over-stickered to Toys As Fun, which I could have saved for Rack Toy Month, but I think there's plenty for then, and this is the next size up, again, a bit unit-scale (elephant undersized, pig oversized), but mid-sized animals are coming out as 54mm-compatible, which is useful for dioramas and vignettes . . . big cat stalking a patrol, that kind of thing!

 

A couple of proper antiques, I love these! The pressed-wood farmer seems to match the common girl feeding chickens we've seen here before, in point of fact, she or her chickens, turn up so often she must have been from a popular set, for several years, but this chap I've not seen before. Although the blue paint has suffered badly, the other colours remain in sufficient quantity to give a good idea of what he looked like new!

 

While the horse in tin-plate might be a cigarette premium, while we, here in the UK, had cards and silks, as giveaways, some brands on the continent had tin-plate flats, prior to replacing them with the numerous plastic flats used as premiums with other products too. You fold the base out, after the item has been slid out of the packet of cigarettes.

 

From a more recent pick-up in London is another Toy Major lizard (used as a dragon/monster/dinosaur in both the cavemen and medieval sets), two tree frogs and a very daft-looking sauropod!

 

Some larger animals, I think a couple were Triple-A marked, and the green pony is from the Tupperware interactive building blocks, we looked at here;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2017/11/g-is-for-great-grey-green-greasy.html

 

Where they were used as, removable, playable rattles, in opaque blocks, unlike the transparent ones from Airfix and others.

 

A large lump of dense vinyl, makes a rather nice Hippo', and these are starting to grow as a side collection, purely by accident, and we did look at a load in a lazy post a while ago!

 

This is from PMS, and I ummed-and-arrred over whether or not to open it, in the end I though I had to, or I wouldn't know what I was dealing with, and was quite suprised to find a gold mokey!

 

I don't know wheather it's a 'chase' figure, or if the whole range is finished in a similar fashion, nor do I know how many there are as there;s no flyer/leaflette . . . probably a £1-shop thing, and therefore stripped to the minimum on unit-price!

 

Another group of - probably - related small vinyls - wild!

 

And another - domestic!

 

Mentioned the other day I think, and seen with a few others a while back, oh yeah, it was the post on mixed shots, a week or so ago. Anyway, here's the farm one, courtesy of Peter, and these sets annoy me, nice animals in a vague scale, so why add huge dogs and ginormous poultry! They haven't even got the excuse of box-scale, because there's plenty of room occupied by the plastic end-filler!? I know, it's a cost thing!

 

Again, many thanks to Peter for all these, they're not just grist to the mill, but also 'bricks in the wall', gaps filled in the archive.

B is for Bagged, Boxed and Blister-Carded!

Now, there's a title I should have, could have, aught to've thought of years ago, having decided to stubbornly stick with the 'A is for . . . ' trope. Especially when I could have dropped it the first month, after we got to zed, or the next month after we'd gone back up to ay? But, whatever, we've had it now!

 

February's Sandown resulted in lots of nice things being added to the pile, and these are all those - we haven't seen yet - which came/come with their packaging, there not being enough stuff for thematic posts, I'm finding other ways to run-off shots from the main folder!

 

This was an amazing find, on the nostalgia front, not because you can't probably find them regularly on feebleBay, but because I hadn't thought to look, having forgotten this for several decades, but this was my Brother's piggy-bank, when we were kids. I had the hard polystyrene 'pillar-box', with three black bands, numbered as a combination lock (which I have seen, but not while I was buying), from Hong Kong, while my brother had this, also from Hong Kong, imported by CODEG Productions (Cowan de Groot)

 

It's not exactly the same, as his was yellow plastic under the flocking, which came off quite soon, ears first! So our Rupert was plain yellow for years, probably until we moved house in 1980, while this one is actually red polythene, so at least two production runs for this.

 

We loved Rupert, and had quite a few annuals from the Church fête, it was all a bit Edwardian, prep-school and jolly hockey-sticks, but kids don't mind, same with the Enid Blyton stuff, prejudices are passed-on by grown-ups, kids just like reading that other kids are having adventures in a pirate cave with a pet mouse in their pocket, or - in Rupert's case - chasing a Bramble Imp with an Elephant in a suit!

 

Purchased purely for the card sample, we looked at the figure set a while ago, as I have them all loose, but at that time I only knew about the five or ten set cards, now we have pairs, for really poor kids!

 

Close-ups; Slinger (below) and Stinger!

 

Box-ticking, I now have complete sets of Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, and most, if not all the Wild West, but I only had one nurse from this set, maybe another figure? Although, looking at the card-reverse, I still haven't found the firefighters!

 

Unusually (especially when you consider there are ten firefighter sculpts), there are only six poses in this set, with four duplicate pairs and two 'uniques' for the ten-count?

 

Contemporaneous with all those magnetic novelties, was this, Falbala the Fakir, from Fairylite, who could be cut in half, yet remain whole, I say 'could', because his - probably - phenolic-based polymer has warped, and he actually falls apart rather easily and stays together only with delicate intervention!

 

When new, you would prise his two body-halves apart, enough to get the sword in, then, upon slicing downward, would push a locking key out of the way. There are three of the slightly curved keys on a revolving wheel (think the Coat of Arms [legs] of the Isle of Man), so as the sword pushed one out of the way, another would come round and lock in behind it, so the Fakir stayed together as the sword went right through him!

  

From the 'Empire Made', I'm guessing this was a Swansea-operation corner of the 'Kins universe, if it was the US arm of Marx behind it, it would usually be 'Made in British . . . Hong Kong, Crown Colony' and/or etc. The seller had several, some with two Fairykins, some with common window-box accessories like the dog-house, but I thought the semi-flat guardsman was a bit different, and needed to be in the master collection!

  

More Humpties here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2023/05/e-is-for-eggcellent-effigies.html 

 

100% sure this is Airfix, no pattern number, and no banner-logo, but in every other way mirroring other known examples of early Airifx novelties, plastic colours match the animal flat/building block/baby bricks, and the micro-aircraft I've also called as Airfix, while the card is very similar to the one the animal flats came on, and I bet those 'planes came from similar cards? I will add more imagery of it to the Airfix Blog, in a day or two.

 

Finally, a cereal premium Hulk, mint in 'food-hygienic' pack! Called 'Desktop Buddies' and issued in 2003 by various Nestle properties, including Golden Nuggets, it's actually a relief sculpt with a hollow back, but a packaging sample is always useful!