V is for Villagers; Various Little Plastic Toy Villagers!

Destined for the small scale Hong Kong blog but purchased for RTM last year it's a return to those keen and gay traders the Keen & Gay Traders! To be honest it was this set I was after over the Austin Champ I posted nearly a year ago, as I have been picking these up in ones and twos for years (I suspect cheap Christmas crackers; possibly the mini 'tree' versions), and was very pleased to find them in a generic pack.

The fact that it was a sample was also interesting as it may mean that it never got a release, or never got a 'Western' release? However here is one set at least and it says what it is - villagers.

To be specific: South East Asian villagers which could prove useful in choking roads with refugees if war-gaming the WWII Japanese campaigns, Korea or Indochina-Vietnam.

You get - from the left in the lower image - a guy sowing crops (carrying a rolled document in the header-card illustration); an artist or painter/decorator artisan type; a chap walking with a gravel-rake over his shoulder, off to make a nice Zen-garden (although it looks like a hoe in the illustration); a man walking with his hat (or a winnowing-basket) under his arm; a fisherman and an agricultural worker with bundles of rice on a [too short] pole.

You also get two pieces of wall . . . I can almost hear Peter Cook in the background "Four would be useful Mr Wall, but two? I have to say Mr Wall - two is two too few!" Looking at the header-card artwork; it can be assumed (or hoped!) that in some packs you got a arched-door/gateway piece, and that multiple purchases - if possible - could at least result in a pig-pen or local militia 'fortlette'! Age has curved them so they can at least be arranged as a partial backdrop for photo-sessions.

Posed with a Japanese celluloid tourist trinket, which is carrying us away from rack toys a tad, but sometimes you have to follow where the subject leads you. The size of both is perfect for 1:76 / 1:72nd scales and would seriously slow your armour down if they were travelling in the opposite direction.

Peter Evans as good as gave these to me back in May with the Big Bag of 'Army Men' and I am very grateful as I have been collecting these in ones and twos for as long as I have been picking-up the Asian civilians and although I have a dozen or so, they are all in storage, which will give me a chance to return to them in the future, but the three here are a good flavour of the type.

I don't know anything more about these than I can interpret with my own eyes, but they seem to have the look of craft items, made by hand in small quantities rather like Bavarian/Tyrolean or Erzgebirge wooden toys.

Some items are preformed-solids; the passenger, the loads, the wheels; but the animals are vac-formed in two halves and glued-together while the rest of the wagon is made from rod, tube, strip and sheet materials.

Different techniques are employed by different makers (again like Erzgebirge), some having the wheels and axles fixed, some making tube axles for the rod to turn in while others glue the axle but leave the wheels unglued so they fall off - if you're not careful!

Likewise the construction of the wagons, wagon-roof designs and even the attachment of the draft animal differs (one of these is removable, the other two fixed) and in storage I have paired teams and four-wheeled examples along with a man-drawn rickshaw in the same scale 'Ivorene' style.

So I suspect a kit of parts, sent out to lots of little crafters, collected in when finished and marketed from a central point?

As well as the wagons there are other common tropes in the same size and there are larger scaled versions of some, particularly the rickshaws which can be found in 54mm-compatible sizes. Pastoral scenes involving ornamental bridges, mini-dioramas or vignettes built in a real or celluloid scallop shell, and more formal plinth-mounted vignettes can all be found in this style, but it's the wagons I look-out for!

I is for It's War!

Well, "Dumber is as dumber does" as Forest Trump, no, sorry; Donald Gump said! Communism failed in '89, Capitalism failed in '98, and now democracy is failing! If you fail to educate millions of people (repeat - in a quieter tone) "millions of people, folks" while running a compulsory education system - for over a century; you can't be surprised if the dumb people you've allowed to accumulate bite you on the arse, even as they shit on their own doorstep!

We voted to leave the most exclusive club in the world and the pound fell through the floor, but nobody's learnt the lesson! "Start buying a little extra tinned-food every week . . ." someone should have told the people of Aleppo, six or seven years ago ". . . you never know if you may need it one day".

Thankfully, we can rely on our toys to deliver exactly what it says on the tin, every time . . .

This 'tin' was so old it was hard to see through but it still, clearly said: "Little green truck and a few Airfix copies". And that's exactly what it contained, a copy of the Dinky or Britains Austin Champ and a handful of ex-Airfix US Marines (1st type) and Russian Infantry; similar to, but not the same as, Baravelli's early figures.

Well, I say clearly; I commissioned a few polls prior to buying, and they all said that while it looked like a green jeep, it was likely, going to be, almost certainly, definitely, by about a 2% margin; an orange armoured car! Imagine the surprise of everyone (even one James Naughtie on the BBC's World Service) when a green truck fell out.

I normally wouldn't de-bag a first example, but with the bag failing and the remains of the rubber-band welding the sample card to the header; it wasn't worth trying to keep in one piece.

Keen and Gay, if it wasn't printed on the sample label, you'd think I'd made it up to annoy the parochial fuckwits who get annoyed about such things! "Drop'em Danno, I'm commin'in!"

Nothing about the company in Monks, nothing in Garratt, nothing on-line, Garratt mentions a Gay making 'solids' presumably in metal in the Disunited States back in the 1960's, but otherwise nothing, just another jobbing jobber with an office (well; a Post Office box number!) in the colony?

Although the finish is poorer than Blue Box's Champ, it's not that bad as a model, with moulding of the tools racked to the sides and a much better rendition of the wading snorkel.

The Austin Champ was a solid, reliable, Rolls Royce-engined answer to the jeep, but as I think I've mentioned before was a bugger to work on when it failed to be reliable - as all military vehicles do from time to time - as it had a 'sealed engine' (whatever that means - something to do with the wading capability?), and in the end while a whole bunch were produced, it lost out in trials with the Land Rover and Austin Gypsy, to the former, which the British Army still use in large numbers.

Those production vehicles were palletised and racked at the big bulk store in Donnington, for use in a future war, where the story used to be that the majority were destroyed in the big fire in the 1980's, but none of the Champ websites seem to mention it, so we'll put that one down to rumour-control!