U is for Unknown Salesman's Samples

A bit of a find here, and not mine, Adrian found them, and thinking I'd like them, saved them for the blog, and posterity! There's no clue as to their origins, and the message on the slips of paper pasted into the inner edge of the boxes (suggesting they were placed rather as the shots below, upright in a cabinet of some kind), which reads "Specimen contents as used if boxed to retail at 5/6d" [five shillings and six pence].

 

The mix of metal and plastic novelty 'prizes' places this very much in the 1950's, as do, strangely, the hats, rather squidged into one of the boxes, which are about three times the size of the hats I've known all my life, but which I remember from old TV shows (think 'Love thy neighbour,' Hancock, the soaps), where people often had the taller ones? Hard to unfold now, but they all have crude 'jewels' made from silver-foil, diamond (parallelogram) offcuts glued to them, which I also remember.

 

Both boxes have similar contents, indeed, very similar to the Old World Series we looked at years ago, with wooden whistles, steel wire-puzzles, paper logic puzzles and the novelties, which include stand-alone flats, broach-badges, the inevitable thimble (Christmas was almost a disappointment, if somebody didn't get an impractical, plastic thimble!), and rings. Many thanks to Adrian for grabbing these.

L is for Lazy Lizard Lounges in Lucky Bag!

So, I said in the shelfie-post the other day, that I'd bought a test one, and I dare say those of you who know me well enough, might guess which one it would be, farm? Unicorn? Noooooowh! Dinosaurs, of course! But it turned out to be doubly disappointing!

 

The first disappointment, it was mostly flat, paper product, and yes, I know kids love colouring, kids love stickers, kids love puzzles, but in my day it would have been a plastic or rubber dinosaur, some sweets, and something which made a noise! We buy this shit so you don't have to!

 

One small surprise was that the stated eight items, were in fact nine; they clearly think coloured-pencils and a colouring sheet count as one item? And it was also interesting to see some of the contents branded to both Playwrite (WH Cornelius, ex-WHC / Success) and Henbrandt, who are rivals in the same pocket-money, novelty field.

 

The second disappointment though, was that the otherwise, kitsch, but cool-looking inflatable dinosaur, was so cheaply made, it leaked air from a half-welded seam, and I had to try and carefully close the cap (no valve) without pushing so much air out, it wouldn't stand up! You win some, you lose some, and now we have half-an-idea what all the bags contain . . . no figures, no sweets, no whistles, rattles or blowers, except a blown blow-up!

T is for Two - Fairylite

By the time I was a kid, Fairylite (like Chad Valley), were as likely to be importing (rebranded Jimson, for instance) as claiming the stuff for themselves, but in the early days, they were a British producer, and recently I've come into two nice pieces of early, marked 'Made in England' output.

 

A lovely little HO/OO-compatible steam road-roller, before and after cleaning. I don't know how many toy road-rollers there were, but as they were still being used as the M4 started to snake its way through my local countryside as a kid, and the various duel-carriageway schemes on the A30 happened (I think diesels had replaced steam by the time they built the M3), they were still an everyday thing, rather than the exotic traction engines which were already appearing on mugs and tea-towels and being marketed as 'old-fashioned', so I guess most toy firms had one!

 

Then, at the same show, Adrian Little of Mercator Trading, gave me this, after no interest was shown in it by the general-public - who were never a good guide to true value!

 

It's a slightly 'stag', variation of the slide-puzzles more normally consisting of words, sums or a single picture, here you can keep going to your heart's content, making sillier combinations, once you've lined them up correctly . . . a lovely little novelty item. It's missing a set of lower legs, to allow for the movement of the other tiles, resulting in at least one child/dwarf each time you stop!

 

Proof, if proof were needed!

T is for Two - Full Size Christmas Crackers

Just a quickie, it's been a funny-old day, today!

We're looking at two complete sets today, both shot a few years ago, and both obtained for pennies, or I couldn't justify the philistinism of destroying them, although both are from the tail-end of the 1970's or - more probably - the 1980's, and both are budget types, so not exactly rare or valuable.

 

This one is a total generic with no identifying features or information. the photo-art on the box makes it recent in the history of crackers, but not ultra-modern, so the 70's seems likely, and there are 12 crackers in crepe-paper with metallic 'collars' - I'm sure all these things have their own piece of specific lingo within cracker-making circles!

Clockwise from top left we have a hair-clip, micro vanity-case/doll's accessory, motorcycle, cocktail ornamental-monkey, relief-flat spider, magnifying-glass key, elephant charm, moustache, two-part ring, fake fingertip, flat car (after a French original) and a baby's/doll's rattle.

 

Contents tick most of the boxes, there's no obvious puzzles or games? The cocktail-glass monkey was originally a design credited to Nosco in the 'States, but early plastics firms over here carried similar products - this one though will be Hong Kong.

The other set, equally cheap types, but in all-stiffer paper, and very 1980's is credited to a Napier Industries, who claim to be manufacturing over here, but using part-foreign pieces, we should get them on a boat to Rwanda!

Clockwise again - ballbearing dexterity game, hair-clip and trick rubber-pencil, Ultraman pencil-top, water squirter, magic maths puzzle, novelty curling-fish, metal puzzle, moustache, motorbike, rubber-spider and elephant charm.

 

Contents again ticking most of the boxes, but with the puzzles and magic tricks, which were missing in the previous set, note also, the motorcycle is a different design, I have bags of both, as with the elephant, but like the similar cats and Scottie-dogs there are many variants of them! Also we get a bi-coloured crown, but in the same easy-rip tissue paper!

 

Some of the LRG collectors get a bit excised over the Ultraman pencil-tops, not realising there were tens of thousands of them in British/Commonwealth crackers, and that they are ephemeral cheepies really!

Both boxes have a 'cut-out-and-keep' (or 'use') feature, for enhanced value-for-money, in a number of place-mat nameplates, which could equally be used as parcel gift-tags.

F is for Found Objects - Four of . . . More

Back to the general detritus of lives lived, and where those remnants combine with the interests of the Blog or my collecting habits! Remembering that we've also seen the tub of Christmassy cake-decoration pieces, and the stash of things Mum 'borrowed' for her silversmithing. There was more cake-decorating stuff in the garage, but they were subsumed into the collection a few years ago, when I sorted the garage out.

 

On the left; a Tri-Ang clockwork key-winder, I think it's the same as late Hornby and probably some tail-end Mettoy or Minic toys, earlier, pre-war toys tended to have more original designs, sometimes quite ornate, often individually toy-specific winders.

On the right; a plastic Meccano spanner, probably held-on to became it also fit some of the plastic nuts on the loo-tank/cistern, and Mum felt plastic-on-plastic would do less harm to nuts and threads!

 

We saw the stone 'Shroom, when I Blogged the Giant space and Aliens back in 2021, it will be a false-coloured one, like some of the more garish stone eggs you see, porous rock is dyed under pressure, oven-dried and worked/polished to produce stuff like this surprised being!

 

And we saw the mini-pencils/pencil-tops in the previous post, which leaves two craft style felt animals, built-up on wooden-dowel sections, they were probably Heals or Habitat items, very 1970's in styling, but so moth-eaten when I found them, they went to the fire-gods shortly after this shot! A monkey and a cat . . . I think, it might have been a demented panda!

 

At the front are a Shell-petrol keyring, a pair of magnetic pigs who still have the kissing-power and a small ceramic horse, which will be a 20th century copy of earlier pieces I think, nothing 'Ming', but nice, and often done in Ivory, there's a nice set of eight ivorene premium horses in the oriental style from the mentioned-the-other-day Jacquet.

A vintage Christmas gift box (funny how so much of this stuff harks back to Christmases past, every post so far has had Christmas references), sadly stained, with a slice of crimbo-cake I suspect; the staining has that translucence of sugar or alcohol, and the browning of molasses!

But containing old cracker gifts/prizes/novelties, being a ball-puzzle, mini Yo-yo, key/magnifying glass (never understood the combination, but there was always one in a  cheap set of crackers), pirate's eye-patch and something I've already forgotten, it was either a whistle or a periscope?

And note Santa is riding a rocket. So quite a 'Sputnik-fever', 1950's vibe on the wrapping paper!

I had, in the past, supplied my Mother with empty Kinder-eggs, which she would put a few pieces of fine gravel in, to provide endless hours of fun to kittens and younger, or young-at-heart cats, and as they got lost under furniture, more capsules would be procured from moi!

 

Clearly, at some point, a non-empty one was sent to feline playgroup. Mum used to work as a volunteer at the Barnardo's charity shop here in Fleet (before it closed, and they were all laid-off their unpaid roles!), and she may have got this one from there, I don't think it's necessarily Kinder either, one of the Turkish or Italian minor-brands?

Balls! The Wham-O again I think, an antique, glass, codswallop bottle-stop in front of it, and something I've forgotten in the interim, but which is the smallest size of gum-ball capsule container from the look of it?

 

An eclectic mix here with two tortoises, one a PVC tub/tube/blister/header-bag type with full paint, the other a polyethylene glow-in-the-dark novelty with keychain loop, probably from a Christmas cracker?

 

A piece of non-Lego, a felt-tip pen lid, a pearlescent bead, a very small battleship's turret and a Native American, who could be the remains of my 1980 collection (we moved here in October 43 years ago!), or an errant piece of show-plunder from more recent years?

 

One half of the pyramid puzzle from crackers, we looked at these a few years ago, and there was already a bag of oddments, so this will join them, and I think I've said before, I intend in a year or two, to run that whole mini-season of novelty posts again, but with everything now in the collection, storage, then and since, in each category, and any extra-subjects after Christmas; it will be fun to compare them, day by day.

 

This used to be in each car's 'emergency kit' when we were kids. It's an unmarked generic, probably British rather than Hong Kong, but you never know, it's a lovely memory-thing to find, we used to love fiddling with it when we were kids.

Back then there were two standard promotional items from the tyre manufactures, small model-tyres like this with a compass, sometimes as a key ring, and larger replicas as ashtrays, with either a glass or tin-plate insert as the 'wheel', they would be marked up with Goodyear, Michelin, Pirelli etc . . . sometimes, even depicting a specific tyre type, or new range.

This is obviously a mid-century, rear, tractor tyre, so may have come from an agricultural equipment firm, and with farmers on both sides of the family back then, could have come to us via either?

F is for Found Objects - One of . . . Some!

As I've slowly been working through Mum's estate, I've found all sorts of odds & sods which are of some use or interest to the collection, some of Mum's, some of ours (my brother or me), so more nostalgic than actually useful, and I've been chucking them in various corners of Picasa (to be honest I've lost some!), and have been trying to sort them this evening for what I thought might be two or three posts, but I've just given up trying to make sense of it with that narrow aim, and will do a few smaller posts until I've run out of stuff!

 

This bowl was actually in a drawer, and was a mine of useful stuff!

This lot is a mix of counters and tiddlywinks, buttons and tokens. The buttons; the main pile, are interesting in only having one hole, and will be from mattresses, where they are strung-through to hold and tension the two padded-covers against the springs. More interesting is that they all seem to be bone or ivory, which is obviously why my Mother kept them when the mattresses died!

 

The game counters/tokens are also bone (two larger yellow ones) or ivory, while the coins are a study in themselves!

The internet can't readily agree on what these are, when they were produced or why, and some very fanciful explanations with some very dodgy logic are to be found, particularly on the metal-detecting sites, where there seems to be the added incentive of getting thirty-quid for them rather than the 50p they're probably worth!

 

But museums (including the British Museum) also have an interest in trying to explain why they have some, using-up exhibition or storage space! Suffice to say, they are probably Victorian gambling tokens, aping George III 'spade' Guineas, so called because the shield resembles a spade.

 

I had a theory they might be connected to the TV series 'The Good Old Days', maybe as attendance tokens, and while I have to believe the Victorian moniker given them elsewhere, they mostly seem to have started turning up after 1950, and with the show starting in 1953, and with some examples clearly heavier and better made than these rather thin, tinny ones, there may be something in that?

The rest of the contents include a pair of shot markers from our old Merit pocket/travel Battleships game (white and yellow cones), two insect eyes from the Beetle Game, also Merit (blue and green dots, and 'Cootie' in the 'States), several puzzles in metal and plastic (old Christmas cracker prizes I suspect), a Christmas bauble hook (always useful) and a pair of premium animals which are the Kellogg’s rather than the Dunkin et al., ones I think?

The five dice will go with all the others (a mass close to Io's now), and the other bits are purely domestic (bread-bag tie and electrical-plug insulator/cable-clamp), I have no idea what the red widget is, but it looks useful and is plastic so will go with the modelling materials, in the drawer of round-section 'bits'!

Which leaves the rabbit? Obviously fretted, and I have a vague recollection of Mum cutting it out many years, even decades ago, but I can't remember why? It may have been a backing for something she was casting in silver, and by 'something' I mean a relief sculpt of a rabbit! Or it may have been a replacement for a shaped-puzzle piece for which I can't remember the parent puzzle, but, as a familial keepsake, it will go with all the other rabbits!

 

Separately, I found my brother's Airfix T-Rex's head! Most of the rest of it is in the stash somewhere, as - being an inveterate ferret - I had some idea of giving it an alternate head one day! So it may well all come together, but I think one of the legs may still be missing, and the house is cleared now? There is a Stegosaurus, similarly afflicted, by the lack of a fourth limb!

Posed (in the left shot) with a 9mm short round (Stirling SMG probably) from the sandpit in the butts at Aldershot (where Mum won the Officer's Wives shooting competition at Airborne Forces week, one year!), my brother would have been about 13 when he painted this?

E is for Exhibition - Fleet Library 2022

This year's theme is back to construction toys, a theme they (Fleet Historical Society) covered a few years ago, but it's mostly new examples, and I've ever seen the Phillip's sets before, or not so I've remembered?

 

 

We looked at these sets here