E is for Eye Candy - Starlux Knights

I actually did this back in 2011. Yeah; some things spend a long time in the queue, but everything will appear here eventually, especially now I'm not about to die!

 

A certain amount of trickery was employed in hiding the bases, and lighting wasn't the best as I think the image was in a book, and I had to hid the bulk of the old patterned carpet I used as heathland! Four of the Starlux 40mm knights, against the background of a fortified château!
 

E is for Eye Candy - Pilots

Specifically a comparison of the various Zang, Zang-for-Timpo and similar pilots, currently within range of a photo-shoot, allowing for a few more being in deeper storage, than the more recent stuff!

 

There are three of these line-ups I keep returning to; this one, the various Britains and similar khaki infantry sentries and marching chaps, and the Acedo-Speedwell-Russian paratrooper, along with the paratrooper plunder line-ups, but they are less comparative.

 

I've annotated it, and we've looked at them all before, so nothing to add, just an image to obsess over!

E is for Erudite Editions and Ephemera

Let's get the boring ones out of the way first, then we can get into the proper polymer plunder! There was a new book, a new facsimile catalogue, a - now - quite old book and some other ephemera in the PW show loot, and that's what we're looking at today!

Barney Brown had these two on his stall, and I dare say you can get them from him at;

 

https://www.heraldtoysandmodels.co.uk/

 

The Timpo facsimile is a new one I think, being a scanned reprint of an old Timpo plastic solids catalogue, from the time between the hollow-cast era and the full-on Swoppets, and while it's mostly black & white, there is an opening colour page, with the cowboys, Indians, FFL and Arabs fully illustrated. It also includes a copy of a letter signed by Ally Gee, head of Model Toys.

 

I haven't managed to read the Swoppet tome yet, it's a sister publication to the one on knights, which I passed-on a while ago, I just didn't believe there was that much to say on less than two-dozen figures! But, this has four sections, covering all the other Swoppet lines (although you could argue the Eyes Right were only the parade/ceremonial Swoppet lines!), with a less fastidious, shall we say, attention to the minutiae of each range, so it will be a better general read.

 

Not than I'm knocking the first volume, if it was for you, I know how obsessive some people are on Swoppet Knights! And hell, I can get bogged down in the small, precise, or trivial details of far more esoteric stuff, than this 'mainstream' interest material, but it wasn't for me.

 

Also, I think it's a similar format to the other works on Britains plastics by Barney and Peter Cole, published in association with Plastic Warrior, so will sit well with them, at the 'landscape' end of your bookshelf!

 

This is a fun one . . . I've been waiting thirteen years to get this, I knew I would; it was just a case of waiting for somebody to die, at the right time for his copy to end up at a show I was attending, when or where that might be, and while I don't know if that's the case, in this case, but anyway, here it is.

 

And the first thing I'll say, is, it's bloody heavy! I reckon it's about the same as eight bags of sugar, 8kg's or about sixteen pounds (I haven't actually weighed it), or a large bag of potatoes, but that's where the parallels with potatoes start and finish, this is a fantastic work, and I won't hear a word against it.

 

It covers in some detail, everything the non-Spanish collector might need to know on Spanish toy soldiers and model figures, and while I think I might have a Sobre brand or two, not in here, and seem to have more Credeco elephants, than are listed, that's just the eclectic nature of my own collecting, and there's a ton here, I knew nothing about, at all, including on both Credeco and Sobres!

 

But why the thirteen-year wait Hugh? Well, therein lies a pretty tale! Which goes back further than the 2013 publishing date of the volume before you. I originally saw it advertised on one of the Spanish or Portuguese Blogs, which pre-dated mine, and were among the first Blogs I linked to in my sidebar features here at Small Scale World, but upon expressing an interest in getting what was the earlier, self-published version, was warned-off, by one of the Spanish collectors (the thread's still there), due to, shall we say irregularities in the book's arrival and/or repayments?

 

So, when a while later, someone waxed lyrical over it, in a UK magazine, I thought it was right and proper to warn others of what was being reported, by the Spaniards, as I was still, technically, at the time, a 'consultant editor' to the publication here. And that was all I did, I repeated the warning, as clearly second-hand, and, from the Spanish.

 

Mr. Hermida managed - understandably (no one likes criticism) - to take a certain chagrin to that, and rather over-personalised his response, in a subsequent addition of the magazine in question, during which he seemed to admit that there had been problems, but that they were all sorted [however I've since been approached by a major German collector, who is still owed several hundred Euro's for his copies, which never arrived], and a slightly catty repost from me ended that particular long-distance, printed conversation.

 

In the months (or years?) following that exchange, it was announced that Andrea Press, the publishing arm of the very well-know Andrea Miniatures, would be taking over the project, for the second, enlarged edition, and that there would be an English language volume, which was good news for everyone!

 

Except there then followed a long series of publishing dates, new publishing dates, rumours of plan changes, and press releases, explaining last minute updates, hiccups, and so on, to the point where some thought it would never actually happen!

 

But, in time for Christmas 2013, if memory serves, it was finally published! I believe there are 300 in English and maybe a 1000 in Spanish? I don't know, but mine is numbered 'of 300', so I assume that's the English-language 'limited edition' total?

 

Obviously, given what had happened, I wasn't contemplating sending off to the author for a copy! But this was back when I wasn't active as a consumer on that there Wibbly Wobbly Way either, so ordering a copy from Andrea wasn't likely to happen, and while I did hint to family members who were online in that fashion, that it might make the best Christmas present ever, for anyone they might know, who collected toy soldiers, the hints fell on shallow ground, and that might have been the year I got three copies of 'Tailgunner's repetitive second/third/forth (?) effort! Well, it was piled-high and sold cheap in The Works!

 

Now I hold Mr. Hermida no ill-will over the correspondence through media, all those years ago, and have only raked it all up here, to A) explain why it's taken so long to get one, and to get it on to the blog, and B) as a cautionary tale for anyone thinking of writing/producing a 'grand opus' . . . it's not easy!

 

In fact it's bloody hard, especially if you are planning a large format, or lots of data/tables of information and/or many illustrations, or any combination of them, and even more so, if your target audience is probably no more than a couple of thousand dedicated collectors nation world-wide, in a small hobby, where not everyone can throw four ponies at the wall, in short-order!

 

I know what publishing the two Farming in Miniature books involved, or have a fair idea of some of it, and it was years of dedication by three authors who had regular meetings with each-other, in pairs or threesomes, getting up to monthly or more frequent, as publishing-day loomed, meetings with the publishers, travelling all over the country, thousands of eMails, emergency updates of images, re-writes of paragraphs, whole pages or entire entries! Discussions on fonts, typefaces, pagination (how you number the pages!), layout and cover-designs, it's an endless headache, which I've avoided by just throwing it up here willy-nilly in a voice which changes with my mood!*

 

And, ignoring the problems associated with its gestation, 'Made in Spain' is a superb work, and Mr. Hermida is, along with Andrea Press, to be congratulated for getting it to those of us who have been lucky enough to get a copy. If you haven't, and you're a younger member of the hobby, I'll be dead soon enough, and you can enjoy my copy!

 

I will do a proper book-review of it, once I've read it a couple more times, I've really only leafed through it a few times, since last weekend . . . OK, I've dipped into it every day, alright! But there's so much to take in!

 

* And they still had to put the third volume online, and that, after a publisher change between the first two volumes! You can see it here;

 

https://farminginminiature.co.uk/volume3.html

  

 

I also picked-up these, I wasn't sure on the PW-20, but if it's a duplicate, it will make a useful swap for some of the earlier ones I still need (I think I'm still two or three issues short of a full run), while the PFPC has Marx Miniature Masterpiece stuff in, which I still have a soft spot for. The German (Strenger, Berlin) retail store catalogue is a box-ticker of limited use, but adds to the whole, and likewise the John Sanders/Treforest Mouldings thing, which is heavily annotated by a past owner. I think I actually have the full catalogues, by nation, from the James Chase collection?

 

Interestingly, the Strenger catalogue refers to the tanks as 'tanks' (kletter tank 'clatter' and Feuernder tank 'firing' or sparking), so panzer seems to have come later, with Nazism - there's a small sample of Elastolin SA, so the catalogue would appear to be 1933/34 maybe? 

 

While this site;

 

https://www.etymonline.com/word/panzer

 

Seems to indicate that the use of panzer was a deliberate act, sometime in 1939, what did Guderian call them in his seminal work? Could it be something the Nazi's came up with (from armour or mail), because those pesky Jew-loving Churchillian's over the Channel invented 'tank'? It's the sort of thing Trump does, with his Gulf of Fuckwit, Museum of Grifter, Peace Prize of Bum-Chums and Arse of Mouth.

 

A few other bits of ephemera which made it into this year's plunder-pile, mostly old Britains leaflets, a Timpo tick-list of medieval movie-character models, and a Skybirds packers card, by the looks of it. All grist to the mill of research!!

 

So, now we're into the plunder proper, I must thank, in alphabetical order, by Christian name this year, because I've forgotten, or not got several surnames; Adrian Little, Brian Carrick, Colin Penn, Isaac, Matt Murphy, Martin Fahie, Michael Mordant-Smith, Paul, Peter Evans and Trevor Rudkin.

E is for Eye Candy - Marx Babes in Toyland Soldiers

Picked-up this little doozer of a lot at Sandown Park the other day, and at the pre-sale, car-boot scrum on the terraces, before the doors opened, too! We've seen me slowly collecting them loose, here on the Blog, and the Wilton knock-offs loose and bagged, but these are the icing on the cake!

Different lighting and angles, I'm studiously failing to get a grip of this new camara! The Marx toy soldiers, from the Disney movie Babes in Toyland. There is a 'Warriors of the World' style issue with them named on plainer boxes, two of each for an eight count I think, among various packagings, but I prefer these unnamed ones in their generic sentry-box cartons are nicer, and you only need four to complete!

E is for Eye Candy - Indian Animals

I shot this back in February at Sandown Park, I should have bought it really, but the images will have to suffice, just as you can't know everything, so too, you can't own everything, but you can have a damn good try at it!

 

A nice set of Schneider type semi-flats, hand-painted and tied into a tray, in the 'old school' fashion, and there were 33 previous sets! Box ticked; Karachi Industrial Works under two forms of lighting!

E is for Eye Candy - Tootsie Toys Boxed Set

I shot this at the Sandown Park show in September 2023, almost certainly on Adrian's table, when he was still Mercator Trading, and it's interesting for two reasons;

 

The first reason is that it ID's that funny little man, in die-cast alloy, who turns up infrequently at the older toy-soldier shows, in mixed rummage trays of lead and hollow-cast stuff, of whom I have a few in an 'unknown' bag, now known!

 

And secondly; it's got the same trucks as those Charbens ones we've seen (and did Johillco have some?), but as it represents the US Militor 3-ton truck, Ordnance Department Model 1918, or Mack AC, I think it's fair to say Tootsietoys were first, and the UK-produced examples are copies?

 

As you also see various versions of the 'plane (half eindekker, half Lindbergh) about the place, it can probably be assumed these sets were imported into the UK at the time - between the wars, making piracy of the elements easier?

E is for Eye Candy - Flamethrower

One of the rarest of the Timpo WWII or 'Modern Army' vignettes, and also, with the flame, one of the most imaginative, but it's the flame which helps make it rare, being marbled orange/yellow, the very fine locating stud at the hose end of the flame tends to fault-lines or brittleness, as does the quite thin silver hose, resulting in very few complete survivors.

 

Lacking accessories, and lacking the imagination of thinking they could use the shrub from the German mortar (in case it caught fire?), they - instead - added the bazooka rocket pile, which was more than a tad anachronistic!

E is for Eye Candy - Infantry Mortar

Back to the Timpo Germans, and their 80mm mortar, and the other of these little vignettes which you can switch-out the figures and swap (or swop!) for British or American troops, and given the differences between mortars at this scale, and the simplistic design, means it makes no difference who's serving it!

 

The shrubbery, or - more accurately - 'shrub' is as unique as the mortar, I thought it got further issues with one or two of the wild-west vignettes, but it didn't. Somewhere I have one reattached to a standard figure base, but it tends to fall sideways on the long-sides of the slightly ovoid base!

 

If you look carefully you'll see the fine crossbar is broken, it wasn't when I got it out of the tub, but it's definitely a weak-spot with this Timpo weapon-sculpt, and went the way of most others, I just hope the other end will stay attached, and one day I'll try a miniscule blob of superglue, off a pin, to try and hold it long enough to get a better shot for the final archive/A-Z Blog post.

E is for Eye Candy - Bazooka

This post was going to be the Plasma Tent, but in Googling it to see if it was really called the Plasma Tent (it was!), I found this post, in the results;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2017/01/b-is-for-bonus-post.html

 

So, that plan got pulled, and the British stretcher team have been taken out of the queue as well! I'm losing control of the queue! Anyway, I then plundered the catalogues for the WWII stuff (although Timpo tended to call them all 'Modern Army'), so we'll have an ephemera post at the end!

 

In the meantime, I only have two shots of the Bazooka, which came with the Americans, and I realised I was talking bollocks yesterday, only the two German sets lend themselves to being used by other nationality's figures, the others all have set-specific poses!

 

You might be able to get the SMG gunner from the first type British/Aussie to hold this, but, he'd be the only other figure with the right-hand hole/s, and I haven't tried! While the No.2 is even more specific to the US Army!

 

 I also had this shot of the Officer kicking around, so he can go here.

E is for Eye Candy - Searchlight

Part two of several, brings us to the German army searchlight, although like most of these vignettes, you can change the crew (the whole point of swoppets), something you can't do with the Vickers MG, or the US Flamethrower.

 

The operator is the mortar-bomb guy, with the mortar-bomb removed, or, probably more accutarately, the mortar-bomb moulding cycle not performed. Usually the officer with Luger came on his own base as a third figure, with the Binocular guy the other one on this base, something I will correct as I have spare bino' guys!

 

777 - the first cousin of the beast?

Note the extraneous hole under the searchlight's base-plate.

 

These are in photo-shoot sequence, so I must have tried the grenade thrower after I'd shot the more correct bloke?

E is for Eye Candy - British Vickers MG

Seen elsewhere, a year or two ago now, there's a whole bunch of these for box-ticking, so they can be February's theme! If the Timpo figures were 'pocket-money' toys, these accessory vignettes were high-day and Holliday treats, usually requiring a little financial input, from an adult!!

 

Getting across the weight of the thing, quite well, the 2nd version Timpo British Infantry with their section-support weapon, technically a medium machine-gun (.303, same as the rifleman's round) or infantry machine-gun, it was redesignated a heavy machine-gun in WWI when the Owen came in as a light machine-gun (also technically - or by today's standards - a medium machine-gun), becoming a medium machine-gun, officially, for WWII, although it remained bloody heavy!

 

***      **    *    **      *** 

 

Many years ago, maybe 1969, or 1970, I fired one, and nearly broke my jaw! Dad, who had little regard for regulations, and was Commandant of the Infantry Battle School at Brecon, thought it would be a good idea to wake the garrison with machine-gun fire on the 50m pistol range at the back of the camp, so had a Vickers set-up, and my Brother and I got to fire a few rounds each!

 

I can remember it was a cold, foggy morning; that clinging, Black Mountain mist, thickened with coal-smoke from the chimneys of the town, and still quite dark, and as I fired the thing I coughed and nearly caught my face on the shuddering body.

 

The SNCO who was with us, managed to get across his concerns about the whole performance, while doing whatever Dad told him, but Dad thought it was all highly amusing . . . It was an unconventional childhood, especially in those Wales days!

 

Strangely - fifteen-or-so years later, also at Brecon, while looking for something mundane like shovels or sandbags, we found (me and a couple of mates), in the POW Div's storeroom, a US .50cal, heavy machine-gun (in anodised silver?! A presentation, or demonstration piece?), just leaning against the wall, it didn't seem to have a cradle or tripod, and we just moved it out of the way, but that was a two-man lift, for two fit young men.

E is for Eye Candy - Crescent Highlander Swoppets - Late Follow-up?

I have a folder simply marked 'George K', dated July 2020, which I suspect might be the follow-up images mentioned in the comments, last time we looked at these, back in 2018;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2018/11/s-is-for-swivel-not-swoppet.html

 

Or related to them in some way (there are two years between the events), in which case, this post is a follow-up which never happened, but it was a bloody odd year, and, with Mum and Girly-Girl both leaving this world, over Christmas, a rather shit one, in which I had other things on my mind, but many thanks to George K for sending them, and here's the officer who was missing last time.

 

This time the marching rifleman's the missing chap, Crescent's 60mm 'swoppet' Highlanders, marching, fighting (the Officer) and dancing, I think that sums-up Glasgow on a Saturday night? Thanks again to George K.

E is for East of India

Another non-toy company whose products had a bit of a Christmassy vibe, also shot at the Birmingham gift fair, but crafty fun, and no polymer in sight, bar a few rabbit-sized, dungaree-buttons!

 

There's something of the primative votive about these.

 

Cake decorations?

 

Felt tree-hangers.

 

There were several displays of 'The Boos'

 

Nativity figures, so generic, you can't tell which is Mary or Joseph?

 

Boos . . .

 

Animals . . .

 

. . . and more Boos!

E is for Eye Candy - WWI Cavalry

I shot these at the BMSS (British Model Soldier Society)'s show in Reading, two years ago, on Mercator Trading's stall (thanks Adrian), and they are pretty special; Holgar Eriksson's finest, WWI British Cavalry in the charge. Probably from Comet-Authenticast's set British Cavalry, Field Uniform, 1914, which was unnumbered.

The brown one may be Chinese or something, Eriksson's lists included dozens and dozens of nations, and often it was just a paint-job to create another catalogue listing, but only Boxer Rebellion types are listed to my knowledge, although #56 was an 'unused' number in the later sets. The same - painting to order - was true of the first Malleable Mouldings lists. Or, it could be one of his own figures, from Sweden?

E is for Eye Candy - Sort Of!

I think we've seen this before, in passing, but I took it apart and cleaned it of a lifetime's kitchen grime, a while ago and seem to have taken far too many photographs, which need to be out of Picasa and on the Wibbly Wobbly Way!

 

 

Obviously you need a kettle with the right kind/diameter of spout, and when the water starts to boil, the inner sliding component moves and the bird starts whistling! Before modern automatic cut-offs (which work the same way - pressure, try getting one to work if you haven't closed the lid properly, it'll boil dry!), this was an ingenious solution, to a minor problem!