H is for Howdahs

Continuing to look at Elephants with a view to scotching a few myths or just generating a better understanding of the practicabilities of using elephants in the field as war-machines.

All these images are taken from Mundy's Pen and Pencil Series - India (or; Journal of a Tour in India by General Godfrey Charles Mundy), published by John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1858 (from the 'Books for Railway Reading series - those were the days; black smuts and a good read...are we there yet Papa?), now available as a Google eBook, but these photographs are taken from a private copy.

Mahratta Chief and Horseman - Gwalior in the distance

How most elephants in most battles in most wars have been attired, heavy blanket protection and a bit of jingly-jangly and colour to add to the overall impression. No heavy wooden tower or throne-like structure, no castellated, crenelated fort with crew of four, no forward firing siege-engine, no overhead protection, just a huge beast with heavy hide running at the enemy with cavalry outriders to keep ham-stringers away.

Lion and Elephant

The purpose of this and the next three images is to show the sort of typical construction of a structure an elephant could be expected to carry for a day - or even a week's expedition - a well-fed elephant mind. It looks as if the front of the howdah, forward of the entrance has been torn away and is falling away over the left shoulder of the elephant.

Tiger attack on the Elephant

Here you can see the entrance and the forward screen intact on the elephant being attacked by the enraged - and probably wounded - Tiger, while others have a fully-enclosed howdah, the elephant in the right-hand background for instance, the Europeans are putting their weight on the walls so they must be fairly stable.

Starting for a Tiger Hunt

Here the construction can be clearly seen to be a light timber (or bamboo?) frame filled in with some sort of fabric, board or matting and with the provision of cartridge-pouches attached (riveted rawhide or sewn leather or canvas?) to the central area of the infill 'screens'.

A grab-rail and parasol are further equipage on both animals, note the means of egress on the left-hand elephant by means of a ladder, the howdahs with 'gates' would be easier to enter from a lower platform. The parasol of the right-hand animal is lying within a cargo compartment a bit like the trunks that would be a feature of early motor-cars.

Elephants crossing at Nullah

Here the fabric is quite obvious, note also the carrying of the ladder and the reinforcing cross-spar, which is why the figures in the shooting incident above are able to put their weight against such a light structure. Note also the fourth slimmer (younger?) figure on the lead animal apparently keeping the howdah steady by holding its sides and bracing the rope with his feet.

Also - in all the pictures where it's visible - the Aṅkuśa (Eng.; Ankus, or; Anlius) is a deal longer than most war-game elephant makers provide their mahouts with.

Lion Gate (Sing Durwasu - at the Black Pagoda)

Reading highfalutin language seems to have lead me to write in a more pompous fashion than normal (?!!), despite no actual quoting from the work...so apologies for the hectoring or tutorial tone tonight ("motorcar"!! "equipage"?...Ha-haha!), however as it's one of my life's crusades to see the back of heavy timber forts on toy or model war-elephants, I hope it makes people think...also I can't re-write it as my voice is 'set' now for this piece!

M is for Mud-Pies

I was thinking of doing more Starlux or more Elephants tonight, but then these turned-up and I thought I'd do a quick "Look what came out of the toy-mine today", with a single photograph as I did when I found the lead horseman a year or two ago, but the more I dug the more turned-up...literally; as the fork was producing them as it turned-over the soil.

So these were the harbingers of the mother-load to come...I was digging Mum's veg-patch, bearing in mind that she has lived here for over 30 years and both my brother and I have dug bits of the garden from time to time, dug-out old roots and weeded here and there, and I have found the odd bit of Lego or Betta-Builder over the years but thought nothing of it, there are billions of bits of both in the UK and you often find them in the strangest places...but this; this is different!

The stuff was eventually coming out of the ground with every forkful, and I dutifully put it to one side along with an old Marmite bottle and a Camp chicory bottle, both pre-dating this stuff by several decades and both in good nick.

Top right shows the washed articles like a plate of little jewels, for the most part the plastics hardly faded or affected by several decades in the ground, bottom left shows them divided into four piles; Binned before you read this (sadly that included the Matchbox Spitfire wing...why were their transfers so much better than Airfix's?! +/- 33 years and a wash in hot soapy water and they stayed on!); The 'Savable with work' pile - yellow and green bits, the 'Odd bits for an eventual feeBay lot' which will join tons of similar detritus in a large picnic-tub somewhere and the 'Going into the collection' pile which consists of the items in the close-up.

Being - a near-mint Charbens lifeguard trumpeter on foot, regal trumpeting, for the use of. He did have the remains of paint on, but it was so sparse I removed it at the washing stage. A rocket-tip or bomb for the bag of such things and a piece of pink plastic which I'm pretty sure is from the Merit castle-builder/infant-toy we looked at ages ago, I'm so sure I'm not even going to check that post before I publish this, so maybe a slice of humble-pie before bed? [Hark the sound of an ample slice of pie being consumed - the hole wasn't even the same size! so...] If so it will go into the useful bits pile!

Top left is a few of the other usable items, and the broken car, which I show here as I have a horrible feeling its a Mebetoys car, a few years ago I worked with a chap called Andrew Adamedies, who is a bit of an acknowledged expert on Mebetoys and remember him telling me how you could tell them by the self-tapping screws rather than rivets on the underside...this one has a self-tapper!

Weird how the ear from a Mr. Potato Head - usually the first item to brake - is the only survivor of a long-lost set! The yellow thing is some precursor of Kinder, and I have found a few of these over the years, the holes are for sticking things into it to make something a bit more recognisable that an egg with holes...gum-ball machines?

The flat-bed for the Lego articulated lorry seems beyond redemption, but a judicious cut by the wheel-stops will result in a usable piece. The fork unfortunately killed the Lego tree made from raw-material pellets (my favourite type of Lego tree) and I think the base is still in the ground as the break was clean. However, a bit of rain may reveal it, or tomorrows raking...and in the meantime the three-pieces will glue-back together to make a fine bush!

So, a bit more digging tomorrow and then planting, but from plotting what I found today and where the other bits were a few years ago, the main mother-load is still to be dug, they are safe in the ground for a few more years and one day I'll make a project of it...It's a load of junk but it was free - which is always nice - and it just came out of the ground - which is nicer still!

If this was a movie; Someone (Guy in yellow tee #3) would be throwing his safety-helmet in the air, jumping up and down, grinning like a madman and shouting;

"Broken Plastic! Boss - We've hit broken PLASTIC!"

T is for Tops...on Pencils!

I know! But now that I've combined this page with the 'Other Collectables' page you'll just have to bare with it on the odd piece-of-shite posting!! They do after all have their place in the cultural history of toys and things...what '70's child didn't have at least one Munch Bunch?

The Kellogg's super-hero Snap, Crackle and Pop are actually more recent, being mid-80's of thereabouts (I don't have my 'Cluck' at the moment), and I'm missing one pose of Crackle, they only came in the four colours shown and seem to be Ashford Mouldings products, there were other sets in the same style - but not Pencil Tops - involving both these guys and other characters from the Kellogg's universe (Coco monkey, Tony tiger etc...).

Next to them are two sets of Paddington Bear figurines, the top row being a soft silicon rubber with red or blue plug-in hats (the black one was stolen from a spare hard vinyl one for the photo-shoot!) and below them the harder/more rigid PVC figures with red or black hats just mentioned.

Odds and sods. the Wonder Woman is - again - a more recent product, I think it came from Tesco's about ten years ago, and is technically a 'Dangler' not a 'Top'. The big silver monster (Minator?) is the only one with a mark; CH.

Danger Mouse sort of completes the Super-heroes, while how many Highland Pipers based on the Zang/Herald/Britains figure can a man have in a collection?! I must have a couple of dozen now from the Zang original through various Herald and HK-for-Herald,to other UK company's copies, Hong Kong pirates, key-rings, whiskey mascots, and this topper.

Like the upper row of Paddingtons, the two figures bottom left are made from a silicon rubber and bare more than a passing resemblance to the Poopa-Troopers that used to come with little parachutes.

The last shot is just a few odds, I'd like to find a Jerry to go with my Tom, the dinosaur is flocked, and the green parrot/penguin will give succour to 'Folgor' the idiot Italian who once accused me of "...Collecting little ducks and things..." on a forum!

The Munch Bunch...or are they Fruit Salads...or Mr Fruity? They are all three (and probably more beside?) I don't know how many of these there were altogether, I remember as a kid having a purple blackberry, red strawberry and tomato and a rather sickly creamy-white onion, while among others not shown here there was a black something (version of the green pepper above?) and another corn - with the leaves as a jacket? Green apples, oranges and orange pears, a yellow gourd...

Shown here are at least six types;

*Plug-in hat - long legs
*Moulded-on hat - short legs
*Plug-in 'greenery' - long legs
*Moulded-on greenery - short legs
*Moulded-on greenery with key-ring/charm bracelet loop - short legs
*Nothing on the top, nor hole for anything - long legs

I'm guessing the blue 'Pineapple Pol' (the only one who's name I can remember) is a more modern/recent version in a non-realistic colour...and I hope the brown one is a sausage of some kind?

Someone with limited space and limited budget, looking for a hobby could do worse than to collect these alone, it would take a year or two to track down a good example of every version and you'd need a side-collection of pencils to display them!!

WWW is for Wibbly Wobbly Way

More Toy-Soldiery stuff on that there Inter-web thingy...

Armyman by Tim Rietenbach.

Deployment - in the name of art I think!?

Murder Silhouette Greyscale's Coriolanus.

World War by Valerie Leonard, click on 'Fine Art Gallery' for more

T-Shirt I Want one!

Kris Kuksi Exhibition - The guy responsible for the big 'Cathedral Tank' that did the rounds a year or three ago is back...

S is for Shrubbery! "We are no longer the Knights who like to say 'Ni'..."

As well as collecting things some might be embarrassed to have in their collections, I have always picked-up and added to my own collection scenic items that 'fit' or which were issued by the companies that make the figures. Starlux being a case in point, with the added bonus that as most of their scenics are flat or semi-flat they make for good background pieces with shelf-displays.

Trees and shrubs. As I pointed out the other day; I'm not 100% sure on the origin of the stand of fir trees in the centre of this shot, under the paint it's a semi-translucent orangey-yellow polymer, possibly an earlier cellulose-acetate, and is quite unlike the other plants which are A) flat colours under the paint, and B) stand-alone items.

The rock formations

T is for Toppers; Pencil Toppers

So to something completely different - Pencil Toppers! I originally started 'collecting' so that I could get as many poses as possible for painting-up and adding to my armies and or vehicle models. Knowing about the Blue Box and other HK figures 'cos they were already in the big tin (ex-army bulk biscuit tin with very sharp edges!), I moved on to tracking down the - then new - Atlantic and - short-lived - Rospacks, minor kit-figures from Fujimi, Hasegawa and Esci and such like, from there I started to find other bits and bobs and thought I waas getting somewhere only to find in Fleet toys ( months before I left home!) the new range of Esci ethylene figure sets.

After about six years faffing around in the Channel Islands and Infantry, I took-up where I left off, getting into shows and swap-meets and the then pretty new phenomena of Car Boot Sales, and realised that to get small scale usually meant either 50p bags or - increasingly - at shows £5 bags of all sorts. Buying like this brings in a plethora of weird and wonderful figures and other bits, among which has been over the years a fair few pencil toppers, so here are a few...Heroes and Super Heroes;

These are based on the Japanese character Ultraman I think (lower row), as are the little inset heads, done like the Munch-Bunch 'foodstuff' toppers. I'm don't know if the robots are Manzinger, Transformer or actually from Ultraman...and I don't care...although I'd be interested purely for identification purposes!

These turn-up quite often and I think I'm right in thinking that the one with the lightning-strike on his chest is 'The Flash'? [No - he's Captain Marvel, see; comments] If there are two Batman poses, there may be other poses of the other characters still to find? The brown Flash is in a softer PVC, the others in a harder, less flexible type.

BA Baracus (Bad Attitude); Whadyameen Foool! I 'aint gowin-in no-'plane...[Later] Whadyameen we're in'Hondurass...Foool - I'm gona'kilim!...From the TV series The 'A' Team, there are - I believe - 4 poses in the set and the other characters were never done as pencil tops?

Also from TV are two versions of Worzel Gummage (spell that again please?), staring one ex-Dr. Who (Jon Pertwee) and Postman Pat with his Black & White cat...Jess was it?

A is for Allemands

Right - That's enough ships, back to Starlux for a quick look at what was - in my opinion - one of the best sets they did, lots of poses, different arm variants, well sculpted, the only guy in a zeltbahn in any scale for years...

Standard 25mm and a Solido commissioned 35mm figure with the basic flesh paint-job, one day I intend to have a serious go at producing the correct camouflage for the zeltbahn, after which he will probably replace my Airfix German Para' officer as 'last man standing'!

The 'standing around' poses, several of the figures came with separate arms and in the factory they chose one at random, there must have been a whole bucket of spares chucked back into the hopper from time to time, but what happened to the last few dozens of arms at the end of the run...

Some of the more combative figures, they have a bit of the look of the Comet/Authenticast metal figures by Eriksson about them pose-wise and were quite a late set so do still turn-up from time to time although the 54mm ones seem more common.

Close-up of the box which has been seen here before, if you find the version with the German sprue in it (I haven't yet), you get the extra arms to fix yourself. If I had one criticism of them it's that like the Airfix 2nd version, they are a bit sanitised or clean and parade-groundy, as if they are re-doing the invasion of Poland for Leni Riefenstahl's cameras, somewhere on the Lüneburg Heath!

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 1 - Lucky for some...

...but not the owner - who was gunned down in public by the Triad's after he failed to repay them some money he owed! Lucky Toys ('L' in a horseshoe and probably LP - Lucky Products), Laurie Toy (LT), Clifford (CT), et al. There was as much from this company as Blue Box, if not more and one of the variants of the logo is this E for Empire Toys...but I'm getting ahead of myself! Given that I am the grandson of an Admiral, the first C-in-C of the Indian Navy; Grandad! I know precious little about naval matters or ships, so the seven posts below are - you must understand - written by someone who barely knows a trawler from an oiler! However I have been following the games of Tim Gow and friends over at http://megablitzandmore.blogspot.com/ with some interest, not least because there seems to be an 'old school' casualness to it, just get some boats, paint them grey, give them names and away you go - all over the floor (they do need a roll of blue linoleum - I think!...but if none of them has a Volvo that's going to be problematical!), then they bomb the hell out of them with out-of-scale aircraft...it's how war-gaming should be...says a non-war gamer! Anyway the other day he (Mr Gow) was saying he'd found some ships on feeBay, wasn't sure what they were, but they looked like such-and-such so that's what they'd be in the next game and I got to thinking; "Yeah, there is a lot of this vessel-shaped stuff in the mixed junk lots at shows and toy fairs, in fact...I've got a box of it upstairs... E for Empire by Lucky, these are clearly meant for the bath as the bigger vessels have weighted hulls and they all have deep hulls, but it makes them hard to stand without taking a hacksaw to them! Another view of the same three vessels and a couple of close-ups of the missile cruiser [this is how little I know - should you use capitals? 'Cruiser'?], I think this may be a copy of an old kit by Pyro or Aurora, I'm sure they produced something with a ridiculous great missile on the deck! But it may just be 'based on'? Also while the rest of the range are vaguely in-scale, the missile vessel is huge. The smaller warships - the five destroyers - are all different and again may be based on or copied from Western or Japanese model kits. The medium-sized thing (corvette?) turns-up unmarked in all-silver but it's the only one I've encountered so far, I have a red-hulled version of one of the little ones, which is also unmarked, but somehow it didn't get photographed. Sizes; Missile Cruiser - 18cm (weighted hull) Carrier - 15cm (weighted hull) Missile Destroyer/Corvette? - 14cm Tramp Steamer (?) - 12cm (flatter bottom) Small vessels - all approximately 10cm These have flatter bottoms and can be used strait-to-floor! But they are all civil subjects...with a simple 'MADE IN HONG KONG' they may or may not be Empire/Lucky, I suspect a rival, but you don't know with HK stuff until you get marked packaging. Sizes on these and the lose ones below are between 12o (green and red one above) and 155mm (the two black & white ones below). The small black and white one is 130mm The upper shot shows three more with - is that? - the QEII at the back, a large steamer with cargo and passenger areas and a smaller liner which also comes in grey (inset left, 105mm). The shot bottom-right shows the grey one with a smaller compatriot (who may also appear in the coloured series, 80mm), both these have been put together very poorly with funnels all askew and glue all over the place. They have also been militarised with the addition of gun-turrets! The little ship sneaking away at the back is by the Italian from of Ingap and is 10cm long. everything in this post is polystyrene except the masts of the civil set. I've put the sizes in so that if you are a gamer you can work out if they are 'your' size, and any corrections or identifications will be most welcome, some of them must be based on real vessels, but apart from the cereal premiums in Part 7 below, none have their names on them. Also I've guessed scale for one or two but any help there would be appreciated too.

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 2 - Bath toys and 'boxed'

These are my favourites of all the Hong Kong ship sets, they have a toy charm that you can't put your finger on, they seem to be original designs not piracies, they are 'pretty colours' - what's not to like!

Invasion Fleet - because everybody's LCT's are the same size as their carriers, aren't they!, these are probably meant to be bath toys despite the inclusion of the figure blister, there are no sharp edges or small pieces to brake or get lost.

A close-up of the carded set, when you scroll to the Submarines (two posts below) you'll see a note next to the Missile-armed one suggesting it belongs to a set like this, and you can see from the sub. included in this set what I mean.

A loose carrier of 10cm in length, I love the rakish flight-line in bright vermilion strokes and the hull-sculpting, I'm sure you're meant to float it!

They also appear in the non-carded bags, probably from confectionery 'lucky-bags', Christmas crackers or bulk-bags of party favours. Along with copies of first version Airfix figures and an MPC 'Mini's' aeroplane.

This Woolbro set has appeared here before, these are similar to the Lucky Toys vessels in Part 1 (above), but much smaller at 70mm. If you remove the hull though you get a good warship around 1:1200?...ish! Both these sets have polystyrene ships, with other accessories in soft plastic.

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 3 - Common or garden!

This set/range is by far the commonest of the Hong Kong stuff, not least because being made of polyethylene is relatively indestructible, albeit; prone to losing the small parts that plug-in.

Limited to five vessels which will be copies of something better issued previously in the West (Tri-ang Minic?) the range included two liners; one large and converted into a hospital-ship with a crude cross carved into the mould, the other small; a carrier with various aircraft and two warships; one battleship/cruiser type thing and a smaller vessel.

Two more carded sets, these all have copies of the old Monogram/Revell GI's, and a couple have the mini-truck copies of Dinky's Humber 1-t0n. Sizes are;

Carrier - 18cm
Battleship/Cruiser - 14cm
Hospital Ship - 14cm
Small Liner - 11cm
Frigate/Destroyer - 92mm

They are about the size of the Airfix waterline series, or at least the small fighting vessel looks a bit like my memories of a Tribal Class Destroyer twin-pack I once made a complete mess of!

Some close-ups of the various vessels abroad, the green is usually reserved for the carrier, but as you can see a green Frigate/destroyer has turned up. Also the silver varies from a pale grey through to a gun-metal colour.

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 4 - Odds and Sods.

So - to a few other bits and bobs of a naval persuasion...

The metal; As the submarine (84mm in length) is clearly marked Crescent, we can assume that that is indeed who made it! They did make quite a few in this range, but they usually cost a bit so mine probably came in a mixed lot of some kind as I don't - as a rule - search this stuff out, I'm supposed to be a Toy Soldier collector, not a micro-scale vessel collector!

I always suspected the hollow ship was Crescent due to the colour being one they used on a lot of their figures, but it's unmarked and at 83mm; totally out of scale with the submarine (while being the same 'size'!), it's also a different style, so might be a penny toy or Edwardian board-game piece? The middle one (55mm) seems to be a WWI era destroyer (correct me!) or escort of some kind, is stamped 11 on the base and could be early...Authenticast, Wiking or that British company I can never remember the name of; Trafalgar? While the smallest (32mm) is almost certainly a board-game piece with a chrome/anodised finish on lead - the other two are die-cast mazak, but for now all three remain 'unknown'.

Back to plastic, the image top left is of some real odds in various sizes; the painted trawler/barge (or tanker?) being the largest at 5cm and manufactured in two parts with a hull I water-lined to match my micro-tanks about 35 years ago, might be from one of the HK ranges looked at above. The motor cruiser of similar size was from a Christmas cracker, the two little ships (silver and red) used to come in the very small crackers for putting on Christmas trees, and when we were kids we had a handful (very small handful!) of these including a submarine, all in silver/gunmetal so the red one may be a bit later.

The smallest one - an MTB with spots of red paint (2cm) is probably from a board game again, the brown one might be from a kit (I haven't subjected you to the bag of ship-kit's boats...very tedious and all so small!), the scruffy blue thing is - I think - a 'Battleships' piece and the three-funneled liner is probably a Hong Kong dolls-house toy, it's hard styrene plastic, factory painted.

The large bi-coloured liner (14cm) in the next two images is an early British bath/beach toy possibly by Kleeware, Betterware or Independent Moulders or someone like that. The red-hulled vessel (75mm) in the same pictures is a German premium from the 1950/60's and I'm pretty sure it's one of the items made by Siku and supplied to all sorts of food companies, long before they got a name producing die-cast vehicles.

The final shot shows the accessories from a Matchbox Harbour play-set, they are approximately 6.5cm.

These (14cm) are interesting, I always thought they were something like Bismark or Tirpitz, but checking just now think they are Iowa/New Jersey'ish. They seem to be copies of the HK incarnation of the Tri-ang Minic vessel (with the wheels) but I don't remember either the British or HK ranges having non-British vessels?

My Submarine sub-collection (groan!); I always wanted a motorised sub. as a kid, but never had one, and would like to get a few more now, there were many versions, even Airfix made one, this one (33cm long) is a more recent HK one with a built-in battery-housing, most took the slip-on motor unit which was always an orangey-red and white - whoever made it!

The next largest (18cm) is a rubber-band powered Honk Kong novelty, the fins (of which there were four to go in the holes you can see in the photograph) are polyethylene and have become so brittle (rare for HK plastic), they languish in a bag waiting an advance in adhesive technology!! The sub itself is polystyrene and relatively stable.

Top-right is a Hong Kong bath toy (95mm), tubes attached to the conning-tower masts would allow you to raise or lower the sub by sucking until you got a mouthful of soapy water or blowing until your ears hurt! It was used as a premium by Kellogg's among others but could usually be found as a rack toy along with a similar diver figure.

Next to that going left - is a baking-soda submarine (120mm), also a premium, but more recent, while the three small ones down the bottom in yellow (67mm, three blobs on the tower, 1990's/current), and red or grey (55mm, four masts, 1950/60's) are also baking-soda subs. I've seen it suggested somewhere that you should use 'Baking-powder not baking-soda', as my understanding is that 'baking-powder' is just baking 'soda' with preservatives, I suspect that sticking to soda will prove to be the cheaper fuel-source, and burn cleaner!

Going right from them is a blow/balloon powered sub. (85mm) again; probably both a premium and a rack-toy, while the final example (with a missile on the deck - 95mm) might belong to one of the sets looked at above, or a similar carded HK range?

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 5 - Bigger boys!

Looking at some of the larger vessels, we have something a bit special from Germany; an S-boat and some nice Celluloid bits form Japan, both nations - at the time of likely production - on the 'other side'!

This is one of the ten things I should try to save from a fire, at first appearance it looks like a Hong Kong item, and if it had come in a bag of dusty bits I'd probably be telling you; "It's almost certainly an HK item", but it 'ain't...it's German, and it's actually 'almost certainly' from the era of the Third Reich.

The box is the same type of box the German wooden tractors, the plaster railway figures from Berger we looked at a month or so ago and German Christmas-baubles come in, the paper wrap is more reminiscent of the earlier half of the 20th Century and the spring-loaded firing mechanism is very 'European' in execution.

The clincher is that something - almost certainly an Eagle - has been painted-out on both sides of the wheelhouse...for export? or to comply with the Allied de-Nazification program?

So why does it look HK? Because back in the early days all cheap plastics looked the same, and the Germans in the immediate post-war period through to my childhood in the 1960's/early '70's were second only to Hong Kong/Japan in the production of plastic toys and novelties.

The paper wrap with the torpedoes in (and out!) and a close up of the finger-operated firing mechanism. I can't work out if the torpedoes are plastic or wooden, if they are wooden it would be more proof of the likelihood of the origin, but I think they are plastic, it's just hard to tell and I'm not going to start scraping the paint off!

The S-boat (Marked S-71, with a '71'painted below the engraved version) is about 125mm long, the Japanese blow-moulded celluloid gun-boat next to it is a tad smaller at 100mm. This Website reports S-71 as being lost; "Hit by artillery in battle with British units in the Channel" in 1943 and was a real vessel, another reason to doubt it's HK origins.

 Next to them is another Celluloid vessel, this appears to have dome sort of mechanism in the base, but I can't work out what it is, even with a jeweller's 'eye' and a torch. It may be only a weight, but seems to have brass and white-metal components? And I owe thanks to Pam Taylor (Kleeware collector supreme!) of Wales for the tall-ship which is 6cm long.

[Added 24th November 2013...I saw another one the other day, the mechanism is a rusted-up spring return form a novelty tape-measure!]

Other larger odds and sods (we'll look at the bulk of the bigger vessels and landing craft on other days in a year or two, this is enough bobbing about on the briney for me for a while!); The top image shows two liners marked 'GERMANY' (9.5cm) and will most likely be Manurba or Jean, and also 'look' like Hong Kong product. They have an polyethylene upper deck and a polystyrene hull. The other liner is a whistle (7.5cm) and probably an early British product in a flecked-styrene polymer.

I don't know how the hovercraft got in this lot - well I do; they were 'to hand'! The one on the left is the one currently in Poundland from Funtastic, the other was a common rack-toy in the 1980's and I've seen them painted on some of the Blogs I link to here in the last couple of years, and they came-up quite well. They are a vauge HO-guage type size/scale thing...

The small sailing vessel (3cm) is a Christmas cracker toy, the yellow tug (65mm) is a recent (1970's?) baby's bath toy, the other two tugs (55mm) are the 1950/60's equivalents.

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 6 - Manurba and Montaplex

As we have seen before on the Blog; Montaplex are not too bothered about scale when it comes to the contents of their little envelopes and The Battle of Salerno is no exception!

We get a Spanish copy of a Hong Kong copy of a Manurba fast patrol boat and a small four-engined bomber, there are other contents - see below - but first let's look at the other fast boats...

A carded set of the Hong Kong effort, but look at all the little figures...bargain! From the colours and weapon/accessory types, you can tell they tie-in with some of the mini-trucks I looked at back in the Autumn. They are roughly HO scale (the figures) which makes the boats no bigger than Lake Geneva motor-launches!

Close-up of the HK boats, with a few other MTB's; the bright green one is a modern Kellogg's premium, re-issuing an old 60's toy, the black one is a Manurba original, the dark green one is a variant of the HK ones but with an ensign instead of a figure, the pink-decked one is another HK design entirely and the little silver one is unknown but probably HK. All between 50 and 60 millimetres.

The other contents of the Montaplex set are these two sprues of little mirco-vessels, about the size of the board-game playing-pieces in the next post (part 7), they have been 'worked-on', but the name 'LIDIA' remains of a couple of the ships, and must point to a company before Montaplex got the mould?

S is for Ships (and other vessels); Part 7 - Games and things...

Finishing this seven-part overview of small toy vessels finds us looking at the very small ones, mostly board game playing pieces, but also the Hong Kong copies of Minic ships and some cereal premiums.

So, most of you should recognise at least one of the above lots as three of them are from one or another version of Battleships, and anybody who hasn't had a set of Battleships in his past has had a deprived childhood - in my opinion!

The red plastic ones top left and inset - right, are actually from a game called Up Periscope by Denis Fisher, and the inset shows the depth-charge and torpeado pieces, while the main image has one (right-hand cargo-ship) with the stud removed to make it 'waterline'.

The vinyl ships are from a travelling set of Battleships, the little silver one is from the Merit pocket-set and the grey ones in the other inset come from an unknown source probably MB Games - see below. For size; the vinyl carrier is 30mm and the little silver MTB is 15mm long. The grey set are between 26mm (MTB) and 65mm (the carrier).

This set (red and yellow), is from MB Games - Germany, and belongs to a game called Submarine Hunt, you can see they are similar too but not the same as the grey set from the previous lot, however the shot-pegs are identical - hence my suspicions that that set too is MB - vessels vary between 28-45mm.

The other (clear and smoked plastic) set is from Salvo! by Palitoy for Parker Games and vary from 30 to 40mm. The styling - all 'groovy' Habitat perspex dates this to the early 1970's?

The set illustrated in the two left-hand images are Quaker cereal premiums, and I think this is a complete or near complete set, the inset shows a variation of the Empress of Britain without tonnage and a redesign of the whole face of the male half of the mould.

Queen Elizabeth 83,673 Tons - 9omm
United States 53,329 Tons - 86mm
Queen Mary 81,238 Tons - 85mm
 Liberte 51,840 Tons - 83mm
Tina Onassis 27,853 Tons - 77mm
Mauretania 35,677 Tons - 64mm
Nieuw Amsterdam 36,640 Tons - 62mm
Arcadia 29,734 Tons - 61mm
Edinburgh Castle 28,705 Tons - 61mm
Empress of Britain 25,516 Tons - 53.5mm

The grey vessels top-right are from an unknown sourse and are both well detailed and quite modern in design, they may be from one of the Japanese kit manufactures, sold as war-gaming pieces? The carrier is 75mm the smaller submarine a mere 45mm.  

03-09-2016 Now ID'd with the help of Uncle Brian - Silvercorn.

The last picture shows the 4 sculpts from the MB Games Axis & Allies (Sub; 35mm, Cargo vessel; 38mm, battleship; 50mm and the carrier 55mm) and 3 of the old Lido ships from the 1950's dime-store cards (55-60mm long).

These are a lovely little thing, they are mostly Hong Kong plastic copies of the smaller models from the Tri-ang Minic mini ships, in various grey-blues, the painted tug seems to be another HK copy, but HK was responsible for a revival of the original moulds and they may have put this in with one of the bigger ships? the pale grey tug, while a HK copy - seems to be from another source, being a little 'heavier' all round.

The lifeboat is a Minic original from the launch-station next to the pier and comes in at about 7mm (I forgot to measure it and it's back in storage!) the tugs are 4cm with the larger warships 9cm.

M is for More again; More Starlux...

A round-up that will serve as an introduction as it will always appear at the top of the posts below in tag-searches for Starlux.

The top image shows how they used the same pose over and over again, they are all slightly different, so it was copying not pantographing, the final figure is probably a home-cast piracy.

The middle image is a scale comparison, with 25 and 60mil Paratroopers (regular not FFL!) and an early infantryman in 50mm with his 25mm compatriot. Also the Accessories - in this case a range-finder in 25 and 54/60mm were reproduced in different sizes.

The last photograph starts with 40mm figures on the left and runs down to a 20mm sailor. The guy with the side-cap and briefcase is actually from a range of O-gauge - otherwise - civilian figures supplied to or for model railways. Then there are 40 and 35 mil Solido figures, 25mm helmeted figures (one - the Bazooka No.2 is only about 23mm) and the sailor, although the sailors, pirates and Civilians were reproduced in both 20mm and 1:87th/HO-gauge, the military don't seem to have been.

Bazooka No.2 in 23'ish and 54mm (1:32 scale) along with various plastic colour treatments for the accessories, the 54mil one is an early production figure again - with the ovoid base. For some reason Starlux never painted the bases of the support weapons and accessories, if they had they would have matched their figures better?

French Paratroop mortar-line, with a bit of a scrap going on at the far end! The ones with the darker berets have been 'worked on' to create British para's with the beret flattened to the other side and I think the jackets have been painted too. They looked so casually painted I didn't put them in the paint stripper that the rest of the lot received, they now languish in a bag waiting a better paint-job!