S is for Show Report - Not So Late - Sandown February

It's only 'not so late' because we're still in April, actually more time as passed since the show than between the September show and the January post I think? Hey-ho, it looks better! I got my purchases at the show and Adrian Little's (Mercator Trading) brought-for-me's mixed up in the packing so I've Blogged them all together.

The loot, the plunder, the ill-gotten gains, the 'stuff'! We'll look at most of it below, or the figural stuff, but I also bought three Weetabix 'Workshop' card premiums, an armored car, a DUKW and an RAF Queen Mary Recovery Trailer, only to also find a guy selling Micromodels who had a complete threshing team with steam engine, threshing machine and walker/elevator. the Thresher looks sufficiently like our Marshall's to guarantee a sale to me!

The Taiwanese Asterix figures (bag of blue) are bigger than (but based on) the Euro-premiums (Olá  et al.) and will be seen in their own post, while the SAM-2 Guideline from Airfix was going . . . reasonable, in a tatty box with loose parts, but it's all there and I'm hoping to pick-up a better one soon.

Bigger stuff, including an 80-mil' Blue Box radio-operator, three 40mm Comansi Wild West, the 'Spirit of '76' figures are the plastics here, a composition Land Girl (from a planter or binder's seat?) in composition is the sole representative of that material, and increasingly I raid Adrian's chepo-trays at the end of the show for a few unusual or 'example' hollow-cast metal pieces and this time it was a box of khaki infantry.

I haven't checked them against the books yet so I won't try to ID them, but I'm loveing the WWI'ish standard bearers! The sub-scale Arab on horse-back and Aluminium camp-fire were bonuses.

One seller was clearing his father's estate so we had a nice, if poignant chat and welled-up a bit, but he had beautiful things, and I bought these three, I think the spirit-painted tin horseman is from Japan and depicts an inter-war period Japanese policeman?

The composition post-coach could be a continental fairing? I really don't know, it comes under the generic moniker of 'novelty' I think! While the Christmassy box contains . . .

. . . Christmassy contents! Tiny little 10/11mm figures of Victorian types with an even smaller post-coach, also in a continental yellow, designed purely as a novelty vignette for the festive season, although they would look good in a larger-scale doll's house's play-room (you could actually have a dolls house, IN the dolls house!), and not too shabby on an N-gauge model railway layout! Probably also Japanese in origin?

These were all from Adrian I suspect, and we'll look at two closer in a minute, but the two racers were nice, one a pale-blue colour variation, the other one of the slightly different copies. A pair of cuckoo-clock barometer figurines, he's lost his head but it hadn't gone far and the glue was to hand when I got home.

Below the rustic couple is a Codeg Trumpton postman, three of the other version Battle Space figures from Triang, the irony being only the casualty is complete! 3 home-painted Slater's seated passengers, a premium flat of a ship, bits of a jig-puzzle car (I save all the bits until I can build whole ones!), a modern PVC horse, damaged Dinky die-cast driver and PVC firefighter make up the lot.

The aircraft in the previous shot was a Tudor Rose 'Tornado', not one I was familiar with, but it appears to be trying to represent the North American NA/B-45 Tornado bomber of the early Cold War?

Adrian had a whole fleet of these Quaker ships, but I knew I had a full set (seen on the Blog somewhere) so only took the one marbled example, although it's mud-brown running through herb-green and just looks dirty!

After I'd shown Adrian the bits I got from the chap passing on his late father's collection, he went and had a look and came back with this plane, which I promptly gave him a quick profit on!

I also got one of the two missing bases I need for my Cherilea Batman & Robin figures, along with the Kemlows 5.5" Gun which is towed behind a Bedford RL or a Saracen with limber in the Sentry Box series, where it's described as a 25lbr, but the recoil actuators are all 5.5"!

That plane; after cleaning . . . it's only another Palitoy, init! And very definitely a post-war model, which doesn't affect much of what I've said in the past about wartime production, this is a very different beast, with very different construction/realism and different materials, producing a fine rendition of a De Havilland Vampire, and it only just missed the war. It's also a solid where all the others are 'dimestore flats', and has no metal parts which most of the others do - axles and propeller-shafts.

I think this was all saved for me by Adrian as well, model railway bits, mostly metal with the bulk being Wardie / Mastermodels, the telephone kiosks, for instance, although the one at the top is entirely scratch-built in cartridge paper, with [I suspect] Superquick windows!

The plastic sheep are Merit (now PPP's Modelscene) copies of Britains Lilliput except the one outside the bag who's Airfix or Hong Kong - I didn’t check! The taller lady in red will be the Irish Comet-Gaeltec with three Britains and a Hornby below her. The copper-effect die-cast is Kinder, while the brass chap is more of a mystery, and may be from a larger 'thing'

Kwong Wah; contents of two sets of six, three each Jap's and Brit's, all copied from the Britains Deetail range, albeit with integral bases, they were pennies for the bag, and a useful gap-filler/box-ticker.

Feeling blue at the end; these were both from Adrian, and they're great! A whole carton of Blue Box toys (I haven't opened it yet!) and a Steven Manufacturing Co. take-off of Britains Twizzletown's demented horse, in blue, as the original!

KWI, CWI or RWI? is for Kwong Wah Industrial!

Or Kwong Wah (Lap Kay) Toys Limited.

I've been rather bounced into the first-half of this post, and it will be brief as I know someone else is working on an article about the figures which should be appearing in a magazine which ought to be dropping on your mats four-times a year, but only if you keep subscribing! Also I have very few of the figures and haven't dug-them out.

You will know these, if not from collecting them, for seeing them in rummage trays at shows, you may have picked them up, seen the clear logo-mark on the base and asked a fellow collector or the seller or a passing member of the 'Old Guard' if they know the maker to get an answer along the lines of 'No, Hong Kong though, but I don't know the mark', I know I have!

Chromium-plated copies of Britains Deetail with integral bases. People call them 'electro-plated' but they aren't, they are just sprayed, which is why they wear so badly; electroplating leaves radio-buttons, toaster parts, mobile-phone detailing, or polypropylene B/O robot highlight's shiny for years, Lego elements can be found with electroplating; this is the stuff you can buy in cans from craft shops for a fiver!

Kwong Wah Industrial is the moniker, formed in 1971 and they were still going until around 2008 as Kwong Wah (Lap Kay) Toys, producing more up-market stuff, their slot-racing sets were in many households, as will have been their microscopes, telescopes and robotic stuff. They also had a range of Playmobile-like play sets with larger, simply-articulated figurines. 1986 above, magazine-advert graphic in the middle and 2006 below.

I did still have this copy of the US Recoilless rifle to hand and it's one of the nicer pieces, the weapon is heat or friction-welded to the base, but the figures are just plugged-in. You can see the logo clearly above the code.

I'm giving what little history on the company I have to the author of the article forthcoming, so for now I'll close by trying to disassemble the logo; the earlier cutting dates from 1986 and it's easy to see the WI of Wah Industrial, but how you get the Kwong's K from that basket of snakes is anybody's guess!

There is a possibility (revealed by the cable (direct telegram) code) that there may be an R for Ray in there or that the K has been iterated as a C, or (most likely?) that there is an element of a Chinese character (or characters) incorporated into the logotype?

Note how the stars - small stickers on the Britains originals - have been etched into the helmets of the Kwong Wah knock-offs, on the front of the officer/NCO's helmet and the left side of the soldier/gunners'.

These don't have the Kwong Wah mark and might be another HK maker altogether, being copies (third or fourth generation?) of the die-cast figures known here as Lone Star Metallions, but also part of the Fontanini/Cané/Peltro family of much-licensed/copied/influenced stuff, they were further copied in metal, in Hong Kong and supplied to SS.Kresege (now K-Mart) and Cragstan (and a third brand, I've since forgotten - AHI or the one from Philadelphia?), so whether Lone Star were first, or just a step-on-the-way remains a question.

There's a link to a very good German-language site on these, which should be on one of the 2017 Fontanini posts? The fact that Kwong Wah also did copies of the large Fontanini figures may point to a link though! They were also sold through Zodiac Toys here.

Returning to the theme; we're back to Deetail-copies, but not Kwong Wah, and now Kwong Wah has been indentified, these are next on the list, with their distinctive H? Unlike the Kwong Wah's, these have the separate bases with the little foot-catches and they are copies of the oblong ones, so probably slightly earlier than the Kwong Wah's as well.

The reason I took three shots is not because of the bag-reflection, but that I kept umming and arrhing or whether or not to get them out of the bag, and each time I'd take a shot before opening them and then - not open them! But it does work for the reflections to a certain extent; I think you can make out the three poses copied here.

And the deciders for not subsequently getting them out were that with one figure duplicated twice, there are only the three poses, and also that they are the same colour-schemes as the originals (Deetail Turks), if I find a second sample with a better mix I will probably open than one!

The H is also on the bases so not a 'phantom brand', but a serious attempt at brand-marking both packaging and product with something which must have been known/familiar to the Haitch-Kay Toymen?

I would like it to be Herald Holdings, but that would be too neat, and there's rarely anything neat about HK company naming, look at how Kwong Wah have changed their title over the years.

It's not Herald Metal and Plastics, or I don't think it is and I don't know if they (1980's) were the same as the 1960's Herald Holdings, or if either are in anyway related to Britains Herald (I don't think so) and with forty or fifty + other H's in the colony, of which I've only eliminated 30-odd, it's still up in the air? But it will come out in the wash, one day; as Kwong Wah now has.

The backing card is a weirdly anachronistic battle between Viking long-ships, I can only guess at a tangential reference to the crusades and/or the fall of the Eastern Empire to Islam and/or Viking or Rus mercenaries/traders in the Holy Lands or Constantinople (Istanbul)?!

Unpainted Hong Kong-made copies of Deetail knights also appear in gold, silver, greeny-gold and pale-grey polyethylene plastic, but I don't have any so I don't know if they have the H-mark (making them likely late issues of the above line) or are blank generics, but Brian Berke sent us this China-made, silver one, which is a clear, late third/fourth generation copy, possibly relatively or actually current.

He's marked CHINA and the thinner legs & arms, along with the poor quality of the detail all point to copying rather than any skill with a pantograph! Sized with a spigot-armed Co-Ma copy, he's been promoted from medieval to 'Janissary' with an upgrade from cold steel to Springfield's-finest courtesy of . . . AIP, BMC or TSSD . . . Conte even??

Thanks to Paul Morehead and Bill B for KWI info., and Brain for the late Turk, a Kwong Wah A-Z listing will appear after the other article has published.