Not often we have a piece of Victoriana on here, so twice in one day, and another board game, is a bit special! I shot these on Adrian's table at one of the autumn shows, and it's a very unusual thing, as its primary purpose seems to be the promotion of pencils, despite being plaster figures.
Burglar & Bobbies, a lovely litho-print label which conjures-up Sherlock Holmes or
James McLevy running about in the dark while some villain from the slums fires wildly into the night hoping to stop the chase!
Slush-cast from plaster of Paris, or possibly blank-de-moudon (it's quite hard) suitably painted, and not that big, maybe 55-mil for the Bobby and 60-odd for the burglar, I didn't measure them, but sort of standard chess-piece size!
The dimples in the centre were probably caused by a wooden dowel 'dibber', being used to push the material into the corners, such as there are, while the air-bubbles were being knocked or vibrated out?
There were five Bobbies and one burglar, so I think it's best described as a variation of Fox & Geese (or Pig and Mooses, as I believe they play in North America!), or Hare/Fox and Hounds, as far as the game-playing mechanism goes, but with a smaller playing area, vis-à-vis number of squares?
Given the age of the game - it's obviously older than 1952 - the 'Her Majesty,' must be Victoria? And I was clearly born decades after 'The Bank of England' pencils ceased to be a thing! E Wolff & Son, being the actual maker, or issuer?
Given the amount of mentions of pencils on both the box - outer and inner, and the paperwork, the feeling is that this was a promotional item, like the Seagram's Whisky game, and like that, might have been bought in, or at least the playing pieces would have been? Although, I think Falcon pencils were still around, when I was a kid?
I forgot to shoot the other side, which must have had the movement instructions! I have two good shots of this side, so I suspect I was distracted, and thought I'd tuned-it over when I went back to shoot the other side! Many thanks to Adrian for letting me shoot this.
