O is for Oriental Ceramic Bowl

A is for American Half-tracked Carriers WWII

M is for More Space Stuff!

This image was sent in by a reader/follower from Finland, who wishes to remain anonymous, however many thanks to him for doing so as there are two bits of real interest here...

First is the reversed colourway for the Space Hawk/Spaceship from Pyro/Poplar, which rather confirms my suspicion that the 'Tudor Rose' one below is actually another Poplar moulding. I was told it was Tudor Rose and the 'Made in England' rather throws you...but the Welsh (in the 50's) weren't as bothered by their status as some are now, and 'England' would get exports more recognition than 'Wales'?

Of more interest in the photograph are the four X-100 Space Scouts at the back, these are in a semi-transparent/marbled plastic, and in conversation with the guy who supplied the photo, the thought is they are local production. If not Finnish, then Scandinavian at least...Now, the Ajax/Beton/Everybody else mounted figures from the very early days of plastic, were carried/produced in Europe by an unknown French company, Airfix, Remsa and, in Denmark, by Riesler...could Riesler have produced these four?

The other two are a silver X-200 Space Ranger like the red one below [this is a pyro original] and an Atomic Space Ship (with a damaged nose), [marked] Tudor Rose.

P is for Poplar Plastics (and Pyro?)

Normal service will be resumed in a day or two, in the meantime here's a couple more additions to the 1950's space fleet. I will re-do the last few posts in a more informative and ordered fashion soon.

On the left is a Poplar Plastics (UK 'Spaceship'), copy of a Gilmark (US 'Space Hawk') model, on the right is [probably not] a Tudor Rose (UK 'Rocketship') copy of a Pyro (? US) model, but being reversed colours to the Poplar, it could be another one of theirs? [I think it probably is - see above post] The Poplar is unmarked while the single engined one has the typical 'MADE IN ENGLAND' of Tudor Rose, and Poplar were based in Wales. It could also be a Kleeware design, or even Marx, they used bronzey colours on some of their readymade/dimestore stuff? Either way it's missing its dorsal fin!

V is for Very Small Elephants

M is for Monopoly - Playing Pieces Through The Years

Originally posted on the 'Other Collectables' site - which I've now closed down - without text, I guess I should add a bit of text to explain the image...
They are basically arranged oldest to the rear, newest to the front, with a plastic set (which I believe was a limited edition) as the full front rank, with a new car design and a sausage-dog/Dachshund.

During the war there was a set with card flats in little slotted wooden holders/bases, which I have yet to track down, and there have been a few changes over the years with the battleship being replaced during my childhood with a Norfolk Broads type river-cruiser thing, the thimble changed for a scottie-dog, and the slipper becoming a boot. The racing car was also 'modernised' (and one assumes there must have been somthong before the mid-cenury design?

Maybe the gun, as I have seen antiqued lead versions of it, but this one with the other three items are from a recent limited edition. The rat might have no connection with the game whatsoever, and the two plastic cars at the back were from another - racing car - game altogether and were also issued by Tom Smith in Christmas mini-crackers.

I is for Invasion Fleet; Kleeware & Tudor Rose

R is for Ranger, X-200 Space Ranger by Pyro

C is for Clipper, Space Clipper by Tudor Rose

X is for X-400 Space Explorer

A family tragedy means no urge to write for a few days, this will have to do...

S is for Sorting-out

Having mentioned 50p bags somewhere in the comments section, I dug out this old article I prepared for posting just before my old Lap-top crashed last April. This is the contents of a small bag someone brought to the big toy fair at Birmingham's NEC. Needless to say they aren't 50p any more and I think this was about a fiver's worth. And thanks are due to either Trevor R. or Jack S. - I can't remember but they've both saved me useful stuff for years now.

This is the contents of the bag spread out in a vague order, like a spider-diagram, you start in the middle and work out adding in themes! Airfix ending up top right, Kinder top left etc...

Some of the better pieces, the two pink flats came soon after I covered some others in one of the 'unknown' posts I did about a year ago (I'll do some more soon), Quaker at the bottom, a Marx soft plastic African warrior and a couple of tiny racing cars for the Waddingtons Formula One board game I'm working on...I want to increase the number of lanes and run 6 teams of three cars each with a few rule tweaks! The problem has been finding 3 grey and 3 orange cars so I'll probably resort to painting some spares, but most teams have 3 original cars now, I'll post them sometime...

Three modern HK figures from some die-cast play set, unknown unless you know better (Majorette, Johnny Lightning, Tesco?!) [Arlin Tawser kindly confirms/identifies these as being from the Matchbox Safari Pack - Action System 5 (7 piece set, stock number 50711-5, copyrighted/issued 1996, made in China) and pointed out that there are a couple on eBay at the moment!], an HK copy of an Airfix Guardsman , Disney Dalmatian food premium and a common horse which keeps turning up so again probably came with a Matchbox 1-75 sized safari thing?

The Kinder in the bag, the Ancients are always damaged! Note: you can just see the RP of Res Plastics if you click on the image - behind/below the saddle of the brown horse.

Other purchases at that show included a nice Woolbro bagged Giant copy, the WWI tree moulding I've already covered, an old bubble-gum tank (HK copy of Manurba), Diver and mini-sub (HK copy of Manurba again!), two die-cast flat race horses from a board game and a superb space tank with mile-high carpet wheels! Kleeware ship and HK Olypian wrap it up.

M is for Mop-Tops - Culpitt 'Battle of the Bands'!

More Culpitt's - These are 45mm 'Beatles' era musicians, if you want a collection they turn up all the time on eBay, however, don't pay silly Buy-it-now prices, you can pick them up for pennies if you're patient!

The pale blue variant I mentioned in 'lazy post' last night, this is a 'full band' there was no left-handed guitarist, so they never tried to be the Beatles, although there are at least three lots of figures in 54/60 & 70mm that do represent that very band.

The various parts of the drum-kit with the brown boys, note; there is a slight colour variation with some a pinkish-brown, this doesn't show well in the photo, but there is a clear difference. The skins on the drums are paper stickers and were applied to one side only.

Two of the three green band with Culpitt's footballers, the footballers were never made in the brown, but there may well be yellow band around somewhere, but I've yet to come across any, nor indeed red ones? Yet the drum-kit only seems to come in red!

The figures are unmarked, and late production would have come from Hong Kong, however early production will be UK-sourced. The lack of a mark makes it hard to say for certain weather they were by Gemodels or Festival. Most think Gem, however the base designs, size/scales and sculpting are so similar between the two companies, I'm beginning to suspect that Festival was a trade-mark of Gem, but they may just have been sharing sculptor!

U is for Unknown

Can any one tell me what the following means, or what company used this marking on its products?

BTES.G.D.G

This is on the draw-bar of a Western stage coach with copies of the Ajax/Beton/Tudor*Rose hollow horse?

B is for Battle Ground, by Marx, a Miniature Masterpiece!

Generally I am not much of a fan of the mass hysteria and rivet counting that surrounds the bigger companies on the toy/model soldier horizon, the reverence in which some people hold Airfix, Britains & Timpo here, Starlux in France or - in the States - Marx, is while not a mystery, none-the-less an example of the sheep-like mentality of human beings. To regard half (or more) of all known production as nothing but rubbish, ignoring the cultural significance of most of it, to lose track of so many companies they become forever-after known as 'unknown', is not only to lose a valid part of our heritage, but if in doing so we elevate certain companies to god like status, it is to help devalue our own intelligence.

I say "Not a mystery", because while these companies often produced an awful product, or historically inaccurate examples (for how many more decades are the owners of Airfix going to peddle their Sd.Kfz 4323424whatevvverrr with 'those' mudguards?!), or ride roughshod over the wants, needs and goodwill of customers, there is an undeniable frisson of joy upon opening an Old School play set, so; proving my own hypocrisy; witness far too much blogspace devoted to this little gem of inaccurate crap from the land of 'Empire Made' badged to that master of exploitation; Marx...

A quite unassuming box and the worst of play-mats, a play-mat printed on something halfway between cereal box card and lavatory paper! Note the rather small beach on the Northern side of the river.

The contents include two Marx 'generic' tanks, and landing craft with Superfortress cupola! Some nice guns in hard plastic are included, although the ammo tray/bogie thing is very puzzling, the machine guns most closely resemble Vickers on .30cal mounts and the jeep design never left a factory in real life, not to mention the horse-and-musket era tents? Still - the dead trees and ruin are nice!

June 2015 - The 'bogies' are actually carriages for recoilless rifles, which must have been omitted by the packer? The trays then sit between the trail-legs of the gun - presumably it all works better on the 54mm originals?

The reason for the small beach on one side of the river...the Germans are rather outnumbered (by a factor of about 5 figures and 2 pieces of heavy gear to one), I guess they build a barricade out of the Merit-copy barrels and sacks, drape the barbed-wire over the whole pile and exit stage left while the Americans are still blowing all their boats up!

Three points of interest in this (apparently?) mint set; The only duplication in U.S. poses is the officer with life jacket, was he added (one jacket is a darker grey), or were there meant to be two as commanders for the two landing craft? There is no flagpole, the box art shows the flag flying from the lead tank, so did lazy old Marx just throw a flag in the box without a pole (other sets with flags get poles)? Finally; should there actually be 16 or 18 strands of wire?

All three questions are an academic exercise for the rivet counters, as I broke the seal on this set myself about ten years ago, and it's only been looked at a couple of times since!

To those of a humorless disposition...this post is meant to provoke thought, and I well know Airfix produced some of the finest figures ever...along with the junk! Starlux Empire Napoleonics are stunning and the Britains Swoppet Wars of the Roses Knights were a pinnacle in the toy soldier world, I'm not so sure Timpo or Marx can claim a pinnacle in anything?

P is for Paramount - Little Farmer Series

I covered the Paramount tractor when I did a post on tractors a while ago (about a year!), but here is most (?) of the rest of the series. The first time I got one of these I showed it to Paul Morehead at Plastic Warrior (link - as always - to the right!) and he said "Paramount" without hesitation. Now I have a rule that I don't accept anyones word for anything whether in print or in person, until I've seen a boxed/bagged example, or a marked example or a photograph of one or the other. Needless to say although I politely took his advice, it wasn't until I found the rake-harrow that I fully believed him!! [sorry Paul!]

Bagged examples with front and rear of the same card, I'd love to know what the 'Amphibious Ferry Boats' looked like and why you got more than one (boats is plural?) but only the one car...I suspect a typo and it should have been 'Boat' and 'Cars'.

A couple of tractors in close up, both the figure and the overall design of the vehicles puts them in the 28/30mm scale bracket, and while the front wheels use the Hong Kong wagon wheel 'pop-on' system, the rear wheels have an quite heavy eight-gauge mild steel bar to plug on to.

The implements I've tracked down so far. Rear row from the left includes a pair of gang-mowers, disc-harrow, rake-harrow and three furrow plough. In front of them are two trailers and a silage cutter, with a 'bit' in the foreground!

The red section of the rake-harrow (much pirated by our friends in Hong Kong, including Blue Box!) is well marked 'PARAMOUNT PR ENGLAND'. I don't know if animals were also made, or bought in?

Close up of the gang-mowers, the bit and the silage-cutter. The gangs have a pin for another set to cover the cutting gap left by the front two, whether this would have been a single or triple I can't say. The bit seems to be a road bogie for one of the towed items but - try as I might - I can't get it to fit any of my existing items, so at least one is missing? Bogie wheels are the same as the tractor fronts, so it's definitely part of this series.

21/12/12 - It turned-up in a mixed lot a month or so ago, it is the plug-in rear bogie for a 2nd trailer design! All I have to do now is track down the trailer, as the one that turned-up had someone else's name on it..Doh!

01/01/15 - Also; The Paramount would seem to be a copy of a TN Thomas/Thomas Toys original, differences now blogged Here with the Oxydol premium.Some of the above equipments are actually Thomas as well, but I will blog both families another day.

These are well made little toys, and given Paramount's history of rip-offs of Britains Herald Wild West a bit of a mystery (like so much early British plastic). Made of what I consider 'standard' soft polyethylene of the Airfix ready made type, colours are 'toy' rather than realistic, and if anyone has further items to swap I have tractors to reciprocate!