P is for Pattern - 1907 Lee Enfield Sword Bayonet

To paraphrase Blue Peter, and further to the second-previous post - "here's one I shot earlier", the longer bayonet of the infantry, this has a non-standard, green canvas 1950's-dated take on the WWII frog which should take the short spike bayonet used in the European theater and which carried-on in service with the Lee-Enfield's until it's replacement with the FN-licensed SLR, and I think the metal of the scabbard has been polished up from gun-blacked, possibly for ceremonial duties?

To Paraphrase Sunday's Post - This IS the long 17-inch 'sword' bayonet of WWI infantry charges across no-man's-land AND that of the 'Desert Rats' of the 8th army in those iconic press-shots (and Airfix artwork) of World War II!

S is for Still 'Q is for Question Time' but C is for Closer to an Answer!

Sometimes these things come fast, sometimes they drip-drip-drip toward the truth, I'm not sure which this will prove to be, but we can add a bit to the three figures originally tacked-on to another post here, in the hope it may trigger someone's memories?

I actually found this in Greece, but with an English title 'Plastic Toys' that's no guarantee of anything, I also sourced an Alamo set in generic packaging from Greece, which was actually BMC! Four cowboys on foot protect a wagon from two mounted Native American Indians. Stapled (rather than heat-sealed) blister hints at age, but it's not empirical.

Colours aren't as interesting as the metallic's we looked at last time, but new poses include a couple more Marx 54mm clones and a mounted Indian, he has both a familiar look and the look of French 1950's hard plastic, which could be another clue?

The wagon is a common design, Crescent, Blue Box, various US makers and Giant et al in the smaller scales, this is the version with a box-seat forward of the tilt and differs from others with an additional towing hitch at the rear. And . . . yet another iteration of 'THAT' horse, which - while Bergan/Beton to us - is actually the old Britains hollow-cast standard!

Foot figures are marked as last time, the mounted figures have a more evenly scalloped edge to the base side/rim, and what looks to be a removed brand-mark, all are numbered, seemingly in sequence with the previously seen ones (by which I mean the duplicates are marked the same!), starting somewhere above ten or fifteen, suggesting earlier numbers may be for another line - WWII or US Cavalry, knights . . . or something else?

How it looks now; the reason I only shot the one mounted Indian from the set as 'new' is that factory-painted versions had since turned-up - in the pile! So we have Marx clones and [possibly] French clones, in a least three issues (one painted, two colour-way runs) which may be French and/or have had a Greek branding/importer.

The card also has a spurious '2' hinting at other card-arts, or suggesting the artwork may have been nicked from something else? And the numbers now found hint at a set of at least 15, in fives, plus the wagon (or any other accessories?), thus:

[11-15 - Foot Indians? (yet to be found by this author)]

0 - 15 - Unknown

16-20 - Foot cowboys
21-25 - Mounted cowboys
26-30 - Mounted Indians

31-35/40 - Foot Indians?

35/40 - 55+ Foot Cowboys ?

 

Unmarked - Covered-wagon and team with driver.

But that is all pure conjecture, the Marx foot figures were a larger set and more/all poses may have been copied, taking the numbering back to 1, 5 or 10 . . . with no foot Indians being produced?

Anyone feel they can add anything, or ID the mounted figure's donors?

Now known to have been Kain premiums at some point, and one of the Indians on foot was here, elsewhere, and a higher number, as are two more, all under both Kain and Make; Greek tags now so you can find them, and more have come in. product issued by Kain is still unknown and cowboys on foot may be numbered from 10 or 11?

N is for Naval Landing Parties

Another piece of ephemera, nostalgia, family history . . . I think I've mentioned my Grandfather was drafted across from the Merchant Navy to the RN in 1915, in time for the Gallipoli Landings in the Dardanelles, serving aboard HMS London. I've found his copy of the land-fighting manual used by Naval Landing Parties.

'Rifle and Field Exercises for His Majesty's Fleet 1913', so, written/published the year before it all kicked off, lacking anything on trenching and entrenchment.

I wondered at them having marker-pens in 1915, until I realised it was pencil which has lost its shine after 106 years!

'JTS Hall Midshipman RNR HMS London', I don't know if this means they made them substantive RN personnel (RNR is the Royal Navy/Naval Reserve) later, or not at all, neither do I know if he was already in the RNR, or was co-opted into it when leaving the MN? I suspect he had to serve in the Reserve as part of the payback for his merchant naval training, crossed as RNR and became substantive later?

This appears to be an 'emily' or what the Army called the MLE (Magazine Lee-Enfield), the first version of the weapon, dating from 1895, reworked in 1899 and obviously considered good enough for the Navy! The Army had by 1915 switched to the SMLE, lacking the protruding barrel obvious above. The SMLE (Short, Magazine Lee-Enfield) was known as the Mk.1, hence the Mk1* above, to differentiate it from an actual Mk.1! The Mk.1* would still be in use with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles in WWII!

This is very similar to the SLR bayonet I trained with/carried in the 1980-90's, even down to the mounting-catch design, but the blade is longer; the SLR was 8-inches, not 12. This is not the long 17-inch 'sword' bayonet of infantry charges across no-man's-land, nor the 'Desert Rats' of the 8th army in those iconic press-shots (and Airfix artwork) of World War II either, but rather the P1888 Bayonet carried over from the Lee-Metford rifle.

The Webley Scott .45" automatic pistol, far more useful than the revolvers a lot of Infantry Officers were still going 'over the top' with at this time, and would still be doing in another war? But that's the Brit's, always slow to rearm, re-equip or modernise, always fighting the previous war . . . presumably, needing fewer numbers, the Navy were allowed to be daring with the 'new-fangled' weapon! Issues with barrel residue had been solved by the time Granddad got his!

What the figure painters were waiting for, even though they're black and white! I would say the standing firing pose is not pushed forward enough, but he's a big looking chap and can probably take the recoil! The prone figure, not shown clearly, is angled so that the recoil is taken in a line down the right leg.

How the instructions for firing sitting can take precedence over kneeling (the best firing pose of all) is anyone's guess, but they obviously did things differently a century ago! He is shown firing downhill (or from a crow's nest?), which makes sense, sitting to fire level is the worst of all poses!

The final images in this section; there's not many other images in what is a very wordy tome of many pages, but there is some interesting stuff on battalion advances in column, line, echelon etc . . . which I'll get up here another time.

A is for ARMY Men; the People's Liberation ARMY Men!

This lot present the same moral quandary as some of that overpriced stuff coming out of a co-operative 'somewhere' in the Ukraine (several 'interviews' now, several brands; no location?), but as I didn't pay for them I'll desperately try to pretend there's no hypocritical conflict of interest here and/or a public service element to the posting!

Sent to the Blog by Peter Evan's - roving reporter for Plastic Warrior magazine and moderator of the Friends of PW Faceplant group - They are variously branded to Jeu, Jeunow and Vi!Kondo, these are clearly and best described (there's no clues on the packaging or online - it may be hidden in the Chinese characters) as Middle Eastern irregulars, but have the look more of 1970's PLO/PFLP, 1980's Lebanese combatants, Hezbollah or similar Levantine fores, rather than the looser-garbed modern terrorists of Al Qaeda, IS or the legitimate power of the [never listed as 'Terrorists' so OK for The Donald to do a deal with them-] Taliban!

These are the 'army-builder' poses, the bare-headed pair can be used anywhere that's had problems in the last 40/50 years from Ireland and Central America to Namibia or Burma! Their clothing is more Viet Cong, revealing their Chinese-centric sculpting. Top left has a Turban which could place him with Maoist Nepalese, or in the contested Indian-administered Kashmir? The others have cloth balaclavas of the Keffiyeh / Shemagh / Hatta type made iconic by generations of Palestinian fighters.

Slightly dodgy sculpting on the Molotov Cocktail here, but what a useful pose, cut-away the gun and we could be in Paris '69 now! The bases are separate and both plastics are quite hard polyethylene or 'propylene types and a single lug on the base locates in a hole on the figures, leaving some a bit off-center.

25-10-21 - For more on the poses see Craig's comments - below 

These two particularly; are both stuffed-up one-end of their bases by the parameters of the fixing system! The 2"/51mm generic infantry or foot-mortar is more of a VC thing than for modern insurgents, but some may have IRA style home-made mortars, however the limitations of the AN/FO explosive they tend to use makes them larger on the whole! Note Accessories.

Googling them to find-out more, I discovered my sample was missing a tenth pose, and he looks quite Mujahidin/Talib-like! The machine-gun's an oddity - looking a lot like the brand-new RPL-20, I suspect it's modeled on a Chinese copy of the old RP-46 LMG, or an FN Minimi LSW which is becoming quite ubiquitous now?

All-together a really useful set for irregular force-building.

On-line, they are Jeunow, and here are seen with 'Fritz'-helmeted opponents and various other items from the same source. Of interest is the variation of stock-quality, from the excellent (and probably HO-compatible) Opel Blitz, to various lumps of anonymous imagi-AFV, some of which are copies of copies, or have been copied, as I think we've already seen some in other sets!

Chinese WWII-era figures and Japanese invaders also exist, and integrally-based variants of both are seen on the right here. I was unable to find built-in base versions of the insurgents and US-helmeted troops, but imagine they all-four come in both types?

The Japanese have been given an accurate flag, the Chinese have been given one which can't be mistaken for any of the flags (CSR, Maoist, Nationalist or Imperial) they fought/resisted under! Quite deliberate I'm sure; Xi Jinping's regime is trying to re-write the history of the period to include the better details of Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang party, in part to weaken Taiwan's claims to that history/legacy!

A few hours later - never try being clever when you're tired! Both forces on the right have perfectly good flags, it's the Japanese on the left who have a generic printer's registration-mark! But the Wikipedia page (link below) is still an interesting read!

The paper header was a home-printed affair, although a subsequent one was in a glossy-magazine style, professionally printed on card-stock, so it may be someone ran-out on a Friday afternoon and printed a few copies off in the warehouse, to finish an order?

But this is where it all goes a bit sour, morally . . . that third logotype, is CCTV7, that is China Central Television [channel] Seven . . . the channel exclusively for the use of (and probably funded by or for-) The People's Liberation Army.

What I'm suggesting is that by purchasing these, you may well be financially supporting the army of the Enemy! Because, and make no mistake about it; A) That's how these things work in China (as they did in Soviet Russia), and B) despite the rapprochement of Nixon (another lying, narcissistic Republican with the gift of the gab, more interested in power at any cost, and profit over the best interests of most of the people most of the time), China were always the 'other enemy' and are flexing like never before . . . indeed through these toys! What do you think the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Malaya were all about?

Now, OK, if you're a simple-thinking, garden-gaming, kidult, you're not going to give such things a second thought as you squat in the yard going "piow-piow", but I served, and I served for a reason, with a sense of purpose, and I find it all a bit disturbing . . . this watching the American far-right getting into bed with Eastern-European disrupters and mercenary gangs in Donbass or Libya, on the Dark Web, watching Trump selling-out the Middle-East to Russian influence, hanging the Afghans out to dry next to the Kurds, watching Biden going along with it all while Boris kills 200,000 of us while banging-on about Vegemite!

We're fucking rudderless in the West right now, the only rock among all the self-serving wankers, populist liars and religious-Right nutters was Merkel and she's now just keeping the chairs warm for a few more weeks, in a caretaker capacity, while they sort out a new coalition.

Deep breath . . . these came (also from Peter) with the glossy card, and can be seen in the previous shot, I saw them on-line in other, wackier, colours - pink, purple etc . . . probably down to any end-user/customer's requirements.

As sculpts, these (or some of them, the two kneeling poses may be new) have been around for a while now (Ja-Ru, Soma?), and these might be 2nd or 3rd generation, but cut/re-cut to a good standard, and basic modern American troop types, usable for m-any forces who use Western/NATO equipment.

Many thanks to Peter for sending them, and I'm not meaning to be ungrateful or cast aspersions, but now I've uncovered the somewhat sinister link, please think twice before buying them. One man's freedom fighter, is another man's terrorist, another man's resistance fighter, another man's revolutionary, but one's enemy, is one's enemy, is one's enemy, and we forget that at our peril.

Here's a lovely 'Rabbit Hole' - go; lose an hour of you life!

A is for Ahhhhhh! The Children's Crusade!

Well, you've seen me frustrate myself wreaking a big red Dinky London omnibus, while my brother sleeps oblivious next to me, you've seen the the pair of us as biscuit-chomping cowpoke gunslingers, now I seem to be a crusader!

I have absolutely no recollection of this whatsoever, however I think it might be 1969 (I look about six - far left) when I stayed with my Godmother while our parents were in the 'States. The guy in the middle is her son Charles, who was a couple of years older than me (so eigh'tish in this shot?), and while I thought the other guy might be an old friend Tobin, I suspect he's actually some one from the School I attended while staying there (Bishops Stortford), as my brother is absent and he must be my age/from my class, as Charles was a year or two above . . . or even attending a different school?

Could be a school-play? But 'Blondie' hasn't gone to the same lenths with his costume? Although his bow looks a little more professional than mine! Am I Robin Hood to Charles's Friar Tuck, or a man-at-arms to his crusader?

Fun thing to find!

The Children's Crusade

News, Views Etc . . . Airfix Blog Update - Astronauts

As the title says - I've added some stuff to the Airfix blog's Astronaut post, in fact I think I've nearly doubled the size of it, with lots of new comparisons, the 50th anniversary issue, a Polish set, more links, a repaired link and a new link in the older section . . . 16 images with blurb in total, so there might be something over there to interest Loyal Readers!

More of a security guard than an assistant!

What I have done over there is remove all the spurious brand-tags, and I will do it on all the posts there in the fullness of time, there were going to be many-more comparison brands than the tag-limits allow-for, and that will be the case on all posts in the end, so they'll have to be served by the meta-tags. And some of the things which are there 'only', will eventually get a box-tick here and their own A-Z listings or thematic pages?

Next day - forgot to add the link; now added above - Doh!

News, Views Etc . . . Design Eye

As I mentioned last night, I've put the Design Eye A-Z entry up here;

http://smallscaleworld-d-e-f.blogspot.com/2021/10/design-eye-design-eye-publishing.html

I haven't done as much on those blogs as I'd hoped this year, but the day when I really get stuck into them is not far off, or nearer, whichever gives you more hope!

D is for Design Eye - Ultimate Explorers 'Ancient Egypt'

Sad that the series only ran to the two sets, but then the recent Klutz sets with figures only managed four titles, while the ones a contributor found in Europe for PW magazine was only two as well, I think, but between the three similar lines you get a clue as to what a larger run might include - Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gladiators, Medieval, Pirates, Space, Circus, Farm & Zoo . . . I guess a Phidal Disney for 5.99 is easier - more figures less craft faffing!

Because similar things lend themselves to similar photogenicity (if that's a word, and if it isn't; it should be!), so this post is almost the same as the last one, just with different images, which might make the blurb sparser?

Cover and contents here, similar mix, but paints and an ink-stamper up the ante on craft in the absence of a catapult! The 30 (3x10) HO figures of the medieval set are replaced by only 12 (3x4) in this set, but there's less play-value in civilians I suppose! The booklet doesn't seem to have a byline/given author this time and another board-game is printed on the back of another fold-down . . .

. . . of an imperial or religious monument, this being a conglomeration of the Great Temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel (famously moved under UNESCO funding, several hundred meters, in my childhood to save them from being flooded by Lake Nasser after the building of the High Aswan Dam), married with a pair of obelisks and Karnak's restored Khonsu Temple walls as a backdrop.

They are rendered as they would have been at the time, so colourful and no missing heads! there's also a couple of Sphinxes and a pop-up religious procession, again it's all sized to use the small figure included in the set.

Card game playing pieces lye behind a two-sided painting guide for both sizes of figure, but the guide is clearly using larger-sized models of the three diminutive sculpts, it would take a master-painter indeed to get that level of detail onto the actual figures, also they look more Egyptian here!

The two finished 'wealthy Egyptians' actually looking more Babylonian or Biblical! I only have these in the hard polypropylene type plastic, I don't know if a soft PVC'ish issue ever occurred? The one thing I failed to record when doing these shots, was the other issuer (there's two versions [earlier publisher?] of one back-cover) and it may be that there's a link between issue and plastic type? I can add anything relevant to the A-Z post at a later date?

Upper shot is a reverse-order of the previous post's, the lower shot is the same image as last time - I forgot to take two slightly different ones! The Crescent 'berserker' was found to be only 50mm to his helmet top, so the king is approximately 54mm to his eye-line which is how some measure them anyway, you could call them 60mm at a pinch, it's all subjective and the Horus figure in this set has  a very deep base - he slips on to one of the card press-outs if I recall correctly.

Those press-outs include a number of Pyramids (about 10?) in various (7 or 8?) sizes, a gold-plated funereal-barge and attendant tender!

I also found an image which belongs on the previous post so I'll add it there later, while there are a couple of scans which will go on the A-Z entry, and which I'll try to get done later tonight.

D is for Design Eye - Ultimate Explorers 'Castles'

Looked at in Plastic Warrior's little brother One Inch Warrior, many years ago now, and not by me, but I made it my business to track them down once whoever had covered had done so!

Interactive books, or 'activity packs', there were two and we will look at the other shortly, Castles dealt - obviously - with medieval forts, and you get some figures in two scales (approximately 54mm and 15mm), some plastic jewels for craft projects (make a crown type of thing, a clip-together catapult, a booklet (authored by Susan Churchill), a scroll, some game-playing paraphernalia and the game itself, which hides . . .

. . . a fold-down fort! Specifically, the entrance to a Norman castle tower/keep with raised walk-way to a barbican gate-house, draw-bridge and mote. It's quite a complicated arrangement with several layers and various connecting pieces, along with a couple of other features.

Here on the left the rooms of the keep are revealed by a fold-back section of the wall being pulled away, while on the right a wooden portcullis can be raised and lowered - a slight 'continuity error' is that it takes the drawbridge chains with it!

The figures; Earlier this year I suggested elsewhere that the king might be based on a statue of Alfred the Great, but then spent a few days trying to track it down on Google and while finding several, including a couple in similar garb, none of them were the right pose, so it may be a more unique sculpt, or based on another statue (Richard I, or John - it still looks familiar?), he's compared with the similar figure from the other, Egyptian, set.

Above them are the three poses of small figure - crossbow, longbow and swordsman. I have found sevearl sets over the years (and lost one!), and I now have samples in both a hard polypropylene (left-hand trio) and a soft PVC or replacement material in a similar soft rubbery composition - right-hand.

 

Airfix figures of this age tended to 23mm, so they are getting on for 20, but the knights are a tad smaller, while the Egyptians have heavy bases, so 15mm or 'HO' compatible is a better bet, they can be used with the fold-down fort . . . or on the carpet.

The catapult is a little unsteady in that the swinging arm is rather suspended in thin-air and held in place by a rubber-band. On the left a pair are accompanied by Airfix yobbo's of the Sheriff of Nottingham's mob for size reference.

On the right the machine is compared with stone-throwers from Zvezda (lower, similar wheeled-catapult), Orion (white, a later Einarm with wrought-iron spring action) and the Elastolin Onagar, but here in its undecorated (and rather glue-smeared) for-France Ougan-branded guise.

Well, he follows me all the time and they were in the queue! Taken on 19th May, for those getting hot under the collar . . . and it's a question answered! Egypt next.

A few hours later - I found this in the folder for the Egyptian set, it's a cage behind sliding wall sections, there's a winder behind it (as artwork, not working!), so you can send your pitiful prisoners into the dungeon to rot!
 

G is for Gods - Moving in Mysterious Ways?

We've had a couple of these string-of-coincidence posts over the years of the Blog, and it's about time for another, and this is a particularly odd series of coincidences, which follow-on from the previous post (below or 'older post') as a starter.

I found this figure in the flower-bed under the bay-window this afternoon when I got back from town and saw a flash of scarlet under the bush. Now I've raked leaves and the detritus of passers-by from under there dozens of times and know it had to be new, but "WTF"?

It looked like a Cavendish figure, and as I was washing it, I remembered dropping the Cavendish box when I was loading the car from the garage to take a load up to the storage unit  a few weeks ago, so that mystery was solved, sort of!

Also, while cleaning him, I was thinking, 1) "It shouldn't have been loose, on its own, it should have been with the rest in their bag?" - when I occasionally drop the boxes (150x150x200mm) the contents don't get damaged as all the little card-backed 4x5½" self-seal bags act like air pockets, so you just gather-up the escapees and sort them back into the box, and 2) "it doesn't look like the Cavendish figure?"

So I got-up the Cavendish articles dealing with the Guardsmen here at Small Scale World; there have been two in recent years, and sure enough, he wasn't the Cavendish pose, although by then I had a half an idea what he was, and that's the big coincidence, as I think he's from the pencil sharpener family of that previous post!

The only clues are the two locating studs which are the same as the loose Beefeater, and that the scrap of remaining base between the feet is the same red as others we've seen in that set, not the heavy base of the Cavendish figures, there are other differences between the Cavendish and this chap pose-wise (bearskin is slimmer, he's got a Lee Enfield not an SLR etc...), but they are the only real clues to his identity, so it remains provisional.

Now, I have half a memory of stuffing  a figure through the gap in the top of the Cavendish box a while ago, out of lazyness while sorting, and thinking that'll need putting in the bag next time I've got them out for a reason -  clearly I hadn't looked closely at him!

I then wondered if he'd come from Chris or Peter in a mixed lot recently, so searched the 'H is for . . . ' posts in the queue (including charity shop posts there's sixteen in that bit of the editorial waiting-line!), but I can't find him, so he must have come in with one of several mixed lots I've managed to find in the last few months - well, since I posted the two boxed sets on a Faceplant group a few months ago (last/most recent Cavendish post on that tag). He might have been in a lot from Adrian / Mercator back in May/June time?

But that seems to mean that a figure which I barely noticed coming-in to the collection, and which I needed for the last post I edited, was accidentally put in a box, which weeks or months later would be the only box dropped, and the first dropped for a while, and where in picking up the spillage I missed the one interloper (I thrashed that bed this afternoon and found nothing else!), only to find him in time to both recognise him and to tack him up here as a follow-up to the follow-up which was the previous post? The Gods . . . see? They're laughing at us!

Anyway, there you go, under my nose for a while . . . he's a better sculpt than the Hong Kong takes on Cavendish's figure, and will probably turn-out to be another of the pencil-sharpener/cake decoration/novelty set . . . bargain!

F is for Follow-up - Novelty Toppers & Sharpeners

Last time we looked at these I titled the post "M is for More to Come . . .", so confident was I that we were only going to scratch the surface, and further predicted a return, and while this isn't perhaps as full as I had visioned that future follow-up, it does widen the field and reveal some new poses . . . although it also clears a few duplicates out of Picasa, so apologies for that!

The first duplicate shot is - I think - the original Shackman set's listing shot, which I'd downloaded before winning the lot we looked at last time! But it reminds us of what we looked at then!

I'd also shot the comparisons and the 'new' policeman several times shoving the images in different folders, only to re-take them for that previous post!

This arrived this morning; I haven't even done the feed-back yet - next thing on the list, it's the man for the lady dancer in the boxed set, no branding, and very different packaging to the stock-box from Shackman, and never/hardly ever been out from the looks of him.

Clearly not a Spanish-anything, he's sort of Tyrolean, but more accurately a Slovakian Folk Dancer (Czech's tend to red or white trousers, while the true Tyrolean's wear short lederhosen or longer, black velvet trousers with high white stockings), not that the blue seems terribly Slovakian, but A) it's a cheap toy, B) it was a very brief Googling, in image results and C) I don't really care, but he's not a Spanish Dancer, whatever the HONG KONG box says!

These were (are?) both still being offered by an Argentine seller on feeBay, and seem to be an earlier iteration, loosely channeling the Disney cartoon of Peter Pan, base is flat (no step/plinth), but sharpener looks to be the same design as the others. L-in-a-triangle brand-mark means nothing to me, yet?

While these chaps are from the 1965 (or '68?) catalogue from Wilton in the 'States, we're looking at a full license here, I think, from Hanna-Barbera Productions, but the same bases as the Peter Pans', and definitely the same sharpener-units, it may be that they were all coming from a smaller factory among the many in HK, who only specialised in these and jobbed to everyone?

A new colour for the sharpener in the Policeman's pale blue, and a new pose in the Native American lady - another Commonwealth knock-off - both from feebleBay.

Returning to the new figure, a bag of what I suspect are wholesaled Christmas cracker inserts and a cat! The inserts include a green plastic copy of the standard die-cast alloy sharpener of our youth, two hexagonal ones, a hippo-outline (or at least I think it's a hippo, it's not terribly clear!), a heart-shape and a round one pretty similar to the one basing many of these figurative novelty sharpeners, but quite modern/current.

The new one is marked Hong Kong on the underside of the sharpener, has an unmarked plinth, and a box code which is in sequence with some of those we saw last time, but not the Wilton or Shackman codes, I guess it depended who the end user was and whether they chose to adopt the manufacturers code, or re-number in line with their own 'in-house' cataloguing system/s.

All of which brings us to three plinth types; flat, flanged single-step or edged double-step, coming with or without a pencil sharpener which itself can or cannot be a separate piece in crackers, gum-balls etc . . . and a selection of subjects from the Wild West, through dancers to civic & ceremonials, some of which are ex-Commonwealth, some based of Commonwealth-Van Brode sculpts and some quite original, with - now - Disney knock-offs and HBP characters . . . what next?

Because we're looking at mostly sharpeners;this is a follow-up to this post and suggests there were two each, cowboys and Indians in the 'West Germany'-marked set of pencil sharpeners utilising the Crescent/Lido poses? There may - of course - be more, but four as two-pairs seems sensible, and only those four keep turning-up? Another evilBay image.