600 is for Welsotoys!

For the second positive ID of the day (and second mention of Lone Star by-the-by) we go right back to the beginning of the blog and an image kindly lent to me by Moonbase Central (link) for an article on the Raphael Lipkin tank transporter (mentioned again the other day!) which I then further mined for the not-Lone Star crewman figures post . . . or maybe I borrowed the image for the later and returned to it for the former? Mass-nicht!

At the time I stated "I was not so sure about these as being also Raphael Lipkin, and suspect they are actually Triang 'Minic'" and "The figures I thought were Lone*Star are - in fact - a slightly different design, clearly copied from LS,..."], and it turns out they were neither/nyther/none [of the above], they were actually Wells-Brimtoy's under the Welsotoy branding, catalogued together with the Raphael Lipkin set.

From the box-art it would seem you only got one figure per-vehicle, and could chose weather to have him seated on the crew-bench, or operating the 'load' from a protruding bucket seat - faithfully reproduced by Blue Box in their diminutive piracy.

Now - Wells, Brimtoy and Wells-Brimtoy pre-date Lone Star/DCMT by some years, if not decades, and given the resemblance of several of Lone Star's Wild West to the Britains/Herald figures, I think it's fair to suggest that the figure we looked at in the above linked post actually originated with these '600 series' toys and was lifted by Lone Star, but in their defence it may be that both companies availed themselves of the services of the same sculptor?

The wagon in detail - there were still a few of these Bedford RL's in second-line service when I served in the mid-1980's, mostly with fixed, specialist bodies, or recovery gear. I don't know when they came into service but I think it may have been quite soon after the war, as they are 'next generation' although in Malaya they were still using QL's and - to ferry the kids to school in CT-troubled areas - armoured AEC's or Ford WOT's . . . or Indian Patten equivalents (this is from memories of pictures in Soldier Magazine, not absolute fact!).

Blue Box in copying these for their small-scale range, as well as adopting the Lone Star seat position while sticking with the Welsotoy flat-bed seem also to have replaced the crew-bench with their own design of James Bond-style control console! Albeit; not copying the gear-wheel revolving mechanism.

Thanks to Alcuin for letting me shoot this at Sandown Park while he was trying to pack-up; nice to end the mystery.

W is for Brimtoy - Wells-Brimtoy

Brimtoy were an early British tin-plate toy manufacturer, who used to work with  Bing, the famous German tin-plate Toy specialists. Founded in 1910, they were absorbed by another UK toy company - A Wells and Co. and became Wells-Brimtoy, whence came these half plastic half metal trucks, in the years immediately before they folded (1965)

There are several military vehicles in the range, a bit bigger than 1:72 they go best with the larger figures of someone like Spencer-Smith.

And the 'military' green chassis of both the push-and-go and free-running versions are used with other bodies, to give a wider range of transport that could be used in a war game in the 1960's, when vehicles for the purpose were thin on the ground. I have the canteen lorry with a green body and it looks very much the part of a YMCA or NAFFI-wagon.

The standard 'box body' came litho'd in a variety of types, these all being the push-and-go version. I got talking to a chap back in the Spring at the early-year Sandown Park toy fair who is publishing (or hoping to publish) a book on these little trucks and he did tell me how many variants there are (excluding body-colour variations) but I've forgotten how many he said...50-something I think.

These were mostly shot at Sandown a couple of weeks ago, with two recent additions (but older purchases) to my collection at the top, and one from the main collection (on the Jean transporter) which used to be on Imageshack and has lost some resolution. I also have the street-lamp mender/cherry-picker, and a cement lorry. There was also - I think I'm right in saying - an articulated version with a low-loader attached to an blank chassis/cab unit

The free-runner has a generic cab design and a smaller bed than the push-and-go design which is larger to accommodate the fly-wheel mechanism and gear-cog. It also resembles my favourite; the Bedford RL or 'Big Bedford'.

The smaller un-motored versions also seem to have the closed bodies, Ambulance, Horse-box, Cafeteria etc...While the motorised ones often have the open back (albeit with nicely turned-back edges to protect little fingers), this may point to the two ranges running contiguously rather than together/side-by-side? If so I wouldn't know which came first, but they were probably quite close together, time-wise.

I knew I'd find a use for 'Contiguous' one day, once I'd met it on my old fragmenting graphic!! We will come back to these one day, as I have quite a few somewhere, and I do like them.

S is for Sandown Park

Not as late as last time, this is the plunder-haul from the Sandown Park toy-fair last weekend, I seemed to get a bit more than in November, but spent about the same, not that I was counting - every purchase at the moment is one that can only be justified by some pretty twisted logic!

Vehicular buys - The helicopter top-left will be seen again here so that's enough of that...very pleased with the Wells Brimtoy Radar truck, there is a crack on the dish (which made it affordable!) that will mend with a bit of nail-varnish remover (or even nail-varnish?!) and brings to three my collection of the military trucks in this series. Ths chap I bought it off has quite a collection of these and is hoping to get a book out at some point on both these early ones (Cellulose-acetate Beford RL - or 'S' type/Big Bedford in civi-street) with the push-and-go mechanism and the later generic squared-cab polyethylene ones with or without motor.

The cap bomb is interesting as it's the Merit marked original, not one of the many Hong Kong versions. Two cereal premiums and two HK road-rollers made up the rest of the vehicles.

The figures were an eclectic mix with metal, rubber and plastic taken-in. Vaguely clockwise round the two Arabs which are Speedwell and at a pound a piece - a bit of a bargain;

The seated cowboy comes off a die-cast stagecoach I can never remember the name of, a Cherilea mounted guardsman, two Galanites, but from the US in soft ethylene polymer not the hard plastic of Co-Ma originals and two of the rubber-sucker versions of the LP robots, with a 50mm copy of an LP astronaut beneath them.

The six combat infantry are for a book project, quite common but this was a 'clean' sample and has 4 marked UNA and two unmarked in a slightly darker plastic but the same paint-job as the UNA ones pointing to further evidence of the connections between Kentoys and these other early British companies and their copies of Britains and Timpo.

The Crescent confederate was an impulse buy (to make-up the value of a pick-n-mix lot) and is not that special, either by way of rarity or his paint finish. Then a metal porter from Mastermodels, a Crescent semaphore signaller with both flags attached and a much-needed Vickers MG for the Skybirds. Next to them is an American solid sailor which the seller thought was a home-cast, but I think I've seen in a boxed ship set, like Timpo with their out-of-scale pilots and lead aircraft sets.

To his left is a nice HK copy of a Crescent cowboy and above them 6 rather nice lead flats of what I guess are Prussians, three Jaeger and three helmeted somebodies (foot-chasseurs?)!

The other image is of some larger HK Cowboys and Indians, the single bagged and carded, the double was bagged but not carded so maybe the contents of the business-section of a Christmas cracker? The small one was not a Saturday buy, just there for scale.