L is for Lone*Star

After all that very small scale stuff the other day, here’s a bit of 54mm from the Autumn purchase of last year, and continues the ‘theme du jour’; that occasion - one hundred and fifty years ago - when two halves of a Nation only 90-odd years old itself, decided to have a little discussion about the doctrines of Nationhood, Citizenship, tax and er…slavery…“Yeah! Let’s wrap it all up in ‘Slavery’!”

This is my rather pathetic sample of Lone*Star ACW figures, well; I have only been collecting larger scales for a couple of years, and money’s been tight!

Four Confederates in reasonable condition, paint on the trousers of the first one will lead to an update sometime, but as it’s a different shade, it stays for now. Inset is a 60mm figure from Crescent to show how these two companies went with a very similar paint scheme.

Might I also suggest that the sculptor (Erik or Revere/Riviere?) used a Britains ‘Swoppet’ Cowboy head as part of his master sculpt for the running-waving-hat figure? He is far more detailed than the other faces, and looks vaguely familiar.

The only Union figure I have happens to be the only pose I don’t have in Confederate garb (the two sets were the same 8 poses, in either grey or navy blue plastic), while the officer is a repaint on a confederate-grey figure.

The next two have been converted to high-boots with filler, a knife and paint, while the last figure is actually a Lone*Star Foreign Legionnaire, a set whose poses mirror the ACW.

Inset are examples of the helmeted and bereted Infantry to show how L*S liked to stick with favoured poses across the whole range.

I is for Initial Introduction

Below these three shots - If I get them all loaded today; are 7 other articles, which this picture will help with, as far as identifying the various figures goes and judging the sizes against each other.

Soldiers, pilots and civilians/rail passengers, the relevant rail staff are dealt with in a couple of the posts below somewhere and the entire range of Hornby Dublo/Hornby/Hornby-Triang and Hornby Railways sets and issues will be covered in another post another time, as will a more in-depth look at the relationships - as I understand them - in the Modelmaster/Merit/Wills/
Slater’s/Peco/Guagemaster family of semi-flats from old die-cast moulds.

For some reason this is not enlarging when you click on it, probably too much coding on the image, I'll re-load all three seperately in a day or two, sorry for that, it's the one image in all 8 posts you want to open - peer hard!!!...Done!

Three years later (05th April 2014)...we'll try this;

That seems to have done the trick...click on it to enlarge them all to tha same relative size!

T is for Tiny...Tiny Trojan's

The reason I ended up with 7 articles was that I wanted to cover the ‘Tiny Trojan’ figures, but to do that I needed to compare them to their Crescent originals, which lent toward further comparisons with Skybirds and Dinky and so on…
The Trojans are bigger than both Airfix and Britains ‘Trooscale’ who were aiming at a market which was quite dominated by the smaller European HO railway equipment, and the associated buildings, trees and so on that the war gaming fraternity were interested in campaigning their Airfix figures through!

They are however the same size as the small ranges of pre- and post-war figures by Skybirds, Crescent (1:72) and Dinky (nominally; 1:60), and it’s this early inability of the toy industry to standardize a size or range of sizes that leaves us collecting figures that climb in quarter-millimeter increments from less than 15mm to 70mm+

As can be seen in the picture at the bottom right, there were two distinct issues of these figures (Khaki below and a greyish brown – the more common – above), with further ‘collectable’ variants as well, such as the black or unpainted helmets of the former issue.

The Crescent figure with an asterisk seems not to have been issued by Trojan in plastic. The lack of a discernable size difference between the Crescent originals and the Tiny Trojans would suggest that Trojan inherited the moulds for the Crescent range, why they dropped one pose and created 3 new ones may never been known, a guess would be the level of damage to the moulds when Trojan got hold of them and/or a desire to fill gaps in the ‘Infantry section’ with an anti-tank weapon and a machine gun.

All the Trojans in this collage are from the set known to the hobby as set ‘B’ or set ‘2’ or ‘The second set’, as neither set is identified anywhere other than the catalogue list, there is no guarantee that this is the correct way round, apart for the fact that these poses seem currently less common than the other 4 poses and it seems reasonable to assume they were in production for a shorter time.

The additional poses (over the Crescent range) in this set are the Bazooka-man; here seemingly based on a pose common to a lot of Eriksson’s kneeling figures (posted the other day in an ACW article), which by the late 1950’s were everywhere in all sizes; and the flailing around/stabbing pose which was common to a lot of larger scale figure sets of the time such as Marx, MPC and so on, indeed it bears a striking resemblance to the stabbing 8th Army pose from Charbens.
Set 1/A/The first set; The extra pose here is the prone machine-gunner, clearly sculpted by an amateur, probably from someone else’s casualty (?), and I’ve shot three together to show that he is meant to look like that! His weapon seems to have been sculpted from the weapon on the deck of a common pocket-money/bath toy MTB of the time from Hong Kong, and is a scaled-down twin-Oerlikon (with shield) from the front deck of the said boat.

The other three poses are from the previous metal Crescent range. The fact that the gloss paint on the browner/khaki figures probably pre-dates the matt colours of the other batch, and the fact that the other 4 poses appear in both styles, would point to neither being more or less common that the other, and that larger numbers of ‘Set B’ are just ‘still to be found’; three shop-stock boxes of ‘Set A’ having turned up in the last 12 years - on both sides of the ‘Pond’.
Added 29/02/12 I've been waiting a while for this, now it's here - the 'shop stock' box; this is the second one to turn up in the States, and like the previous one contained only the four 'set A' poses, originally about 36 sets of them.

Purely by a process of elimination (which is by no means accurate), I have tentatively identified these (‘T?’) as being from the other two sets in the Trojan Catalogue; Passengers and Rail Staff. Both are taken from the Britains/W.Horton/Trix (‘B’) range of ‘Trooscale’/Lilliput figures.

Again, evidence - lack of size difference - points to Trojan (if it is them) getting hold of the moulds originally used for the metal ranges. The better detail on the plastic figures can be explained by the use of a different material in the mould, while the head/hat differences of the mother and daughter (Britains; No.LB/517 Nurse and Child) is easily explained as being due to flash rather than remoulding.

C is for Crescent

Leading on from the previous post one might as well have a look at the small scale output of Crescent, who seem to have provided the moulds (or some of them) for the Tiny Trojan military range. So here they are…

The packaging is obviously not contemporaneous with the contents of this set, which would originally have been tied in with some unbleached or neutral coloured cotton thread; the mounting-card has also been lost over the years.

Of the three AFV’s the armoured car is more common than the two tanks, hinting at a smaller set with just the A/C and a few figures. The 4-post wire entanglements are from the large scale range and are over-scale for this set, but were included in it.

It’s hard to date the origins of the range that led to this set as the T34/85 is a late-/post-war Soviet standard, while the generic Cruiser/Covenanter is a pre-/early-war British item, this box would date from the late 1950’s (?), and the incongruous nature of the contents is not worth dwelling on as it’s almost certainly explained by a total lack of interest in accuracy on the part of the toy-makers.
“…Soldier…Sailor…”. Most of the Crescent small scale metal figures were scale-downs from their large scale hollow-cast range, but due to the small size are - in fact - solids. I’ve only found 6 poses, one of which – as we’ve already seen above – was not apparently produced by Trojan for reasons lost in the mists of time (the marching pose to the right of the lower line-up in the 2nd row), and they came in a wide range of colour-finishes, the later ones being all-over bar the hands, face and weapon, the earlier batches having separately painted bases.

The Naval personnel came with either a blue-green coating, a metallic ‘spirit’ finish along the lines of penny-toys (officer; top left) or in a more realistic navy-blue. These figures came in sets with small slush-cast naval vessels, again in the penny-toy style, with a coat of silver paint, and sometimes a weathering/antiquing in a darker wash or ink/stain. The tin-plate fort comes with the larger scale figures, but goes much better with these!

The semaphore-flag signalers, seem to have come in two versions; big flags (middle guy) and small flags (right-hand figure), but…when you look again at the chap on the left, it’s clear his right hand flag (left as you look), is not the same as the other two, his v-neck is shorter and he is taller, and apart from him; none of the other arms seem to have been accidentally bent?
Could these have come on a card spelling out something such as ‘Crescent’? I stress – I’ve only ever found them with their arms up, but the second and third figures definitely seem to be spelling two different letters?

The Air-force figures, I’m pretty sure they’re all Crescent, the baton-wielding ground-crewman is not spelling out anything and always comes in this easy to damage pose, consequently he is (nearly) always missing at least one bat, and I’ve got a whole bag of similar can’t-direct-a-plane-for-toffee guys! However; once they’ve had a cross-pollination training weekend course with the Preiser synchronized swimming girls (which always end in drunken ribaldry in the Mastermodels ‘Dog and Partridge’), they learn to work in pairs, as these two are!

The top-left photograph shows on the right, a home-cast or other - more commercial? - piracy, something that happens with all these early metal figures, particularly; Skybirds (whom we look at below) and the pre- and immediate post-war Hornby Dublo railway figure sets, which we will look at another day.

Again; Colour variation in both uniforms and base-finish leads to a number of figures to track-down despite the low number of poses, and a seated pilot I’ve put in the Skybirds article lower down the page may be Crescent? Unlike the Army and Navy figures which were taken from the 54mm range, the Air-force/RAF figures seem unique to the small scale sets. A comparison with the Airfix figure shows how much larger these figures are.

R is for Railway figures

Returning to the Trojan article that launched this group of 8 posts, we find that the figures I believe to be the civilians from the Trojan Catalogue that’s been doing the rounds for a while now, are based on the Britains Lilliput series, itself probably produced/certainly marketed by W.Horton and also supplied to Trix, who drilled the bases and fixed them to their wooden station accessories (probably also - actually - made by W.Horton).

Top Left shows the same picture already seen in the Trojan Article, to the right is a ticket-issuer or platform vendor (?), the chap on the right has clearly been painted as a vendor of something rather than a member of Railway Staff.

Below them is the full range as I know it, the man at the back right is showing the hole used to fix him to a Trix platform. I’m not 100% sure about all the cargo, most is Britains/Horton/Trix, but some of the barrels may well be Wardie/Mastermodels, as might the small box on top of the two bigger ones? The trolleys; both powered and trailing, are marked ‘Trix’ and may well have been exclusive to them, although the powered trolley is listed in the Lilliput range (LB/549). Of interest is that Airfix (most pirated of companies after Britains), did themselves pirate the large box (Britains; No.LB/546 Large Packing Case) for their HO/OO strongpoint/outpost Playset type kits!

The last image is possibly the most interesting; as it shows the figures I used to think were the Trojan ones, even though they were hard styrene plastic, until I found an early Merit box with the same mouldings, it then transpired that they were ex-Wardie ‘Mastermodels’ moulds, which we now know emigrated to Merit upon the demise of the former. However by the time that had all come to light, the soft-plastic one had turned up and he took the mantle of ‘possibly Tiny Trojan’!

Mastermodels by Wardie have also been looked at in this series of articles and should be the next but one down the page, although - like the Hornby family (see note in the ‘Initial Article’ 3 posts above) - there is a lot more to the Wardie/Mastermodels, Merit/Model Scene, Peco/Guagemaster, Slater’s/Wills story than I’m ready [can be arsed] to cover here.

The Britains/Horton/Trix passengers/civilians with colour variations, again the Trojan photograph is re-produced bottom left. Bottom right shows another Trix mounting hole, and it’s interesting to note that some out-workers painted the woman with handbag as sometimes looking to the side, sometimes; looking forwards. The Golfer however has a pigs snout and can only be painted looking sideways, this WAS the era of ‘Animal Farm’!

To prove the necessity of my stressing that the identification of the Trojan civilians is still very tentative or conjectural, here are some other figures that contend for the title. Top left are some soft plastic/polyethylene figures based upon, but not the same as; the Wardie/Mastermodels set of stevedores (57), while to the right is a hard styrene better quality copy of one of the plank-carriers from the same set. Hammond states that there was plastic production at some point from B.J.Ward/Wardie, but the Brookes (who have done most of the work on the subject) don’t mention it, so it could be that the figure on the right is a late Mastermodels issue, and the figures on the left are just piracies? But…either could be the true Trojan figure/s?

Below them are the early Merit figures again, now; usually the Merit figures from Wardie are taken from the same moulds (the Merit ‘Remote Control Driving Test’ game playing pieces for instance), but these are clearly more of a piracy thing, the cut of the waistcoat of the porter carrying luggage makes a good comparison. Merit did copy a lot, so it may be that these were copied before the ex-Wardie people carried the moulds over to Merit as they went bust, which is one version of the tale…

Bottom is the replacement Merit set with both Merit and the current/late (?) Model Scene packaging, note; Model Scene issue/issued theirs without bases.

The Salisbury Station unit from Trix, probably made by W.Horton who also supplied 54mm scenics to Britains who made the Lilliput range of OO gauge figures that Trix used on their TT gauge Railway sets…clear?!

M is for Military by Merit or Model Scene

Because I’ve touched on Merit above, and will cover a lot of the other early British small scale Military in the remaining new posts below, it seems right to just slot these three sets in here…

As most of the variants could have been produced by paint alone; The WAF’s, WRAC’s and WREN’s, the Officers and the bereted other ranks; it was good of Merit to go to the trouble of producing 15 new figures for these sets, these being un-related to any Wardie/Mastermodels mouldings.

I used to think the blue WRAC was a colour variation, but a look in Picasa under 100% enlargement shows she’s a home-repaint, some fool liking Crab Air as much as he probably likes the French! An out-painter did forget to paint the flesh on the soldier next to her, and I think of him as my Gurkha soldier, point-off-fact; he also came without a base so he may be a late Model Scene figure, unpainted to save money?

Early sets were pink plastic, with the uniform over-painted, late sets were (for the army at least) uniform colour with the flesh over-painted. Note how the late officer has green (Light Infantry) shoulder flashes, not red; line regiments, artillery etc.

W is for Wardie from B. J. Ward

So, from the above posts we end up having to have a quick look at B.J.Ward, Don Bowles and their Wardie/Mastermodels range of model railway accessories, or at least the figures from them.

These are the uniformed personnel; well strictly speaking the guy in red is a civilian wearing a boiler suit!

The bottom images are all metal Mastermodel originals, and they differ from the other metal figures in this group of posts by being made of die-cast mazac rather than soft lead or poured white-metal alloys. Rather hidden by the second sailor on a kit-bag is the seated WREN, while one of the sailors is inching toward the soldiers to wind them up and start a fight!

The benches in that photograph are metal, while the bench in the pictures above are plastic and marked ‘Peco’, so not all the moulds went to Merit…but that is definitely for another day! The AA motorcycle goes with an RAC phone-box and can be found with metal or plastic wheels. All the figures in the upper photographs are plastic, and while the poorly painted ones will be Slater’s or - at a stretch - Wills, the soldier may have come with a Peco set of benches?

The three sets of ‘working men’, the matchstick plank-carriers come with the figures bottom left, and are supposed to be unloading a lorry, but the guy directing makes a good ‘crane instructor’ or grounds-man. Apart from the colour variants, the late production seems to have got nothing more than a quick ‘wash’. The figures bottom right, are from two sets, the grey figures come in track-gang (maintenance-of-way to US readers) sets or with a night-watchman’s hut and brazier, while the black and brown ones come in sets of cable layers, black ones with silver knee-pads are miners.

Incomplete shots of the rest of the range, Rail staff top left, mostly public figures top right and the passengers below. The woman with a pleated skirt does not seem to be from the Wardie Mastermodels range, and may be from a die-cast vehicle set of similar age, or a railway accessory from across the pond (making her a railroad accessory!). The newspaper seller would reappear in the Merit board game ‘Remote Control Driving Test’ along with the Policeman, lollypop-lady, 2 Belishia-beacons and a ‘phone-box from Mastermodels moulds – Merit would later redesign the ‘phone-box as a very delicate structure that took a caller figure, Model Scene issued it as a kit, still on the sprue.

Notice also how there is more than one version of several figures, the woman in the pale-blue two-piece has a lower hand and fewer buttons in different places, there is one version of the left-hand (right as you look) walking stick man; holding a newspaper, the other; holding an envelope or book, there’s the cream boy without gaps between his arms and body, the red boy with one gap and two different golfers, while two of the rail-staff seem to be from a specific TT-gauge set as does the blue and white lady/nurse [pleated-skirt girl may be from this set?].

The distinctive base with its side-chamfers makes it easy to identify a lot of the Mastermodel figures, but as can be seen; later sets, discontinued figures (man carrying sack with jerkin - top left) and the odd-sized figures have more common generic bases like the later Airfix HO range, as do most of the ‘public’ figures.

L is for Lilliput

Having now cleared those companies linked to the original Trojan post, we might as well clear-up the other loose-ends that have been raised one way or the other. As the Britains/Horton 'Lilliput' range were touched upon, let’s do them first…

Loose figures and other items from the farm range, all badged to W. Horton. The tractor has been looked at before here, and these animals are - for the most part - a bit tatty, but that’s life on the farm for you! Since taking these pictures I have removed the larger pig from the Britains box, there’s no evidence for him being there and I don’t know why he was…probably a piglet from a 54mm range? These are - basically - scaled down from the 54mm range, with the exception of the tractor-driver.

There is no cataloguing differential for black or brown splotched cattle, nor for the pink or black finish on the pigs.

Also Britains Lilliput (originally) are the hunt scene, and in metal; very rare, due to their thin legs and small parts (fox and dogs), as a result I only have one and he’s a very headless rider!

The mystery is where the (really quite common) plastic mouldings come from, they could be unlisted (in the only catalogue found) Trojan figures, for the mould-destination reasons brought-up in the above posts, but for the same or similar reasons they could be Trix, an independent Horton thing, a late Britains thing to accompany the plastic Herald downscales (but why has no packaging turned-up?), or even someone not yet mentioned…Culpitts (for cake decorations), Hilco or Cherilea (who both liked other peoples moulds/sculpts…Hell - the saddles are all Skybirds (and Crescent) khaki infantry colours! Meanwhile the horses in the upper image (earlier set?) are manufactured in colours common to both Britains/Herald AND Timpo plastic?

What we do know is that they come in two distinct issues, the earlier, better mouldings in flat realistic-coloured plastic and the later sets with a more glossy, translucent (is that the right word?) plastic in brighter colours. Sitting here pouring over an enlarged image of both sets together, my vote veers toward Culpitts. Mercator Trading had lots of these at the PW show last month, in little bags, and Culpitts used to use un-carded little bags in the big stand-alone revolving 6-foot and counter top 2-foot Perspex display units they used to use, it would also explain the difference between the first issue (made for Culpitts by Britains/Horton…or Gem?) and the later ones which look like the later HK produced versions of other Culpitts/Gemodels stuff?

The other thing we know is that no one has ever seen the fox in this range, but there was a metal one? Well - you wouldn’t want a fox about to die on a cake, but a little might want to celebrate horses or horse-riding on her birthday or Mum might make a cake to celebrate the beginning or the end of the hunt season? This set is different from the 54mm Hollow-cast range, where most of the horses are standing, and there are three dog poses, not the single one found in this set (there are only 2 poses in the Lilliput metal set), while only three of the four (Lilliput metal) rider poses are reproduced in the plastic sets. Finally note how the woman rider (all black) is side-saddle.

The two box sizes the Farm came in, Horton also produced a lot of the Papier-mâché buildings and scenics that Britains used with this and the larger-scale ranges, a job which had previously been undertaken by Hugar. Also a look at some larger-scale farm from Taylor and/or Barratt versus small scale Lilliput figures from Britains/Horton.

As we also looked at the Crescent military figures above, here is their small scale farm, larger than Britains offering they are quite crudely painted and were probably sold on small cards as penny (or from the likely dates thre’penny or sixpence!) toys. As with the military figures; there are crude home casts/piracies around - not shown here.

S is for Skybirds

So, to the final post in this concurrent group - Skybirds; not really connected to Trojan at all, but mentioned enough times in the 7 posts above to merit coverage of the figures, at least. Similar to and running alongside the Crescent figures, you could in the 1930/50’s (long before the ‘modern’ war gaming movement) get up quite an armed force, with a few Fantasyland imports and some semi-flat European figures to fill the gaps.

According to publicity material at the time in the modelling press, these figures were re-issued by Douglas Miniatures in the late 1960’s/1970’s and another source states that Douglas issued some new poses. Well, I’ve seen enough over the years to know that all the existing poses can be found in datable Skybirds collections/Skybirds packaging, and there are so many paint variations, particularly of the Civilians, that I can’t tell you what’s a ‘Douglas’ and what isn’t. I suspect the Douglas were issuing inherited ex-Skybirds stock, as I’ve seen trays and trays of both mint painted and unpainted casting go through auctions, and someone, somewhere produced baths-full of these figures, which is not to say they are all as common as mud, some are, some aren’t, but there will be more to find…

Various pilots who can be used as either civilians or early/WWI allied military pilots, with the civilian passengers/onlookers in the central image. Note the wide array of colour schemes. Bottom right is the female pilot I always think is meant to be Emilia Earhart (is that surname right? No Google!), or - more likely - the Brit; Amy Johnson!

I love the guy with his hands in his pockets, waiting for the dawn mist to clear or his ground-crew to sort his ‘string-bag’ out. The paratrooper can be found with the shroud-lines in place, but inevitably there are only little scraps of what looks like tissue paper trapped in the knots at the ends of the lines where a parachute is supposed to be! This is not to say you can’t get one with the parachute, but that’d be mint in pack which is beyond my normal budget in these things!

The Khaki troops, if you want to see a Douglas Miniatures figure, it may be the left-hand figure in the top right-hand shot! This portion of Skybirds range seems to have more than a passing resemblance to the large-scale hollow-casts by Johillco (John Hill and Co., known as ‘Hilco’ to the plastics fraternity!), with Hill’s products pre-dating Skybirds by a few years, the ‘homage’ would seem to be in their favour!

The searchlight (a civilian one is seen here - and a recent purchase) was the same unit as one soldered to the backs of slush-cast lorries by Benbros (I think? Or Charbens…Morstone?), so were probably bought-in from another sub-assembler. The green sandbags are home-painted, not a colour variant.

Various military-looking mechanics and/or ground-crew, I suspect a fair bit of home-painting among the senior NCO with swagger-stick lot, but again, the possibility of some being Douglas miniatures?

The Germans are coming! [National motto of the French, or is that; ‘The British are winning’?]. These come in a variety of greys from the quite dark one on the left in the top photo to a pale grey (officer with pistol), and there were only ever the three combat poses, so if Douglas were going to add figures this would have been where to do so, and they don't seem to have done so.

The lower poses are half-German specific (two on the right) and a paint variant on the running pilot from the first image in this post; there are also grey versions of the ground-crew in the previous image. The blue figure may be civil airline or naval officer, but looks like a Luftwaffe staff officer to me, so he lives in their bag!

Stop Press -Taken this weekend on the floor of the NEC, these are all available from Mercator Trading (link to right or Google), I wish I could afford them; both my bikes are damaged and I don’t have the AA gun, while the tanker-lorry is just beautiful, no? A catalogue of the sets at the heights of Skybirds flourishing was reproduced in an early issue of Military Modelling or Airfix magazine, or - I believe - can be found in Meccano Magazine, which is now online somewhere.

Another from Sunday just gone, again all still available from Mercator (who has three ‘Flybirds’ as well - slightly larger at around 1:60), although one of the German Bi-planes might have sold on the day? Much discussion on their first outing led the assembled ‘fans’ to decide these are probably factory finished with home-applied markings, or possibly home-made from kits! Does it matter?......they’re Skybirds!; a few bits of balsa and some wire, with two wheels and a ‘prop’ in a little bag!

The Airport building was part of a large (and changeable) range of military and civil aerodrome accessories some based on actual buildings from Croydon or Hounslow (early/pre-Heathrow) airports, typical of the products of firms such as Hugar or Horton (see farm post above), early Faller or Hornby ‘O’ gauge tinplate era train-set accessories or the handmade buildings of Timpo or Trix, they might have been bought-in from a larger company that would specialize in finishing such things, leaving Skybirds to concentrate on making their aircraft, sending out aircraft kits and expanding the metal parts and figure ranges, but, they certainly had the equipment and skills to produce all the scenics ‘in-house’, so it’s only my opinion (not even an opinion really, more of an idea?), based on the conjecture that they were quite a small company?

J is for Just call me Wikileaks!

I found these stuffed inside a hollow log the other day, and felt that in the wider global interests of true and lasting peace, justice and democracy they should be made available as public documents...there was blood on the log...

J is for Johnny Reb!

Another ACW article, this time a smaller size but not the smallest, these being in the 30mm bracket. The plastic figures are - of course - Spencer Smith, mostly based on old SAE or Tradition figures by Holgar Eriksson, while the metal figures are probably by Minikins (or AHI, see comments).

Mostly shots of a Confederate ‘Advance to Contact’ over carpet crops, I like occasionally to organize a bit of a war-gaming type setting, strangely; the last time I did so it was also an article of Spencer Smith! I guess the sculpting/pose type that makes Eriksson so distinctive seem to lend themselves to a bit of scenery! There’s a resoluteness to the way they march forward.

Students of the smaller scales will also recognize in the Spencer Smith foot Officer shades of the Giant Napoleonic Officer, itself taken from an Eriksson SAE 7YW figure.

Defending a rather pathetic fence is a larger sized group of 40mm Merten, home-painted Union (most of which are actually catalogued as Confederate!), which I grabbed at the last minute, requiring a bit of judicious camera angling! However they do have Spencer Smith Cannon.

The ‘Minikins’ [AHI?] figures photographed from both sides, this attribution is purely guesswork based on two facts, 1) The mounted figures are marked ‘Japan’ and 2) they appear to be die-cast mazak or a similar hard alloy which Minikins are known for in larger sizes. Whoever made them; they are clearly based upon Spencer Smith/SAE being semi-flat and posed as Eriksson posed his figures.

This woefully unclear or over-complicated (I must get back ‘Publisher’ for Windows!) image is part of an ongoing project of mine to produce a print-on-demand book on the smaller scale stuff from Eriksson, and is trying to show how the range has morphed over the years, so - for instance, looking at the top left, originally all 7 foot poses came in bags of 80 figures, then after a few years hiatus, they were re-issued in bags of 30 separated in to Kepi (P1) or Slouch hat (P2) with the same officers and buglers [I think the totals for those two poses are wrong for the 30 figure bags?], before the more recent single pose issue, which has now become a metal only series (link to right somewhere) with an additional figure - C8.

Likewise the current metal figure ‘dismounted cavalryman’ (CC3), was originally one of the backwoodsmen poses. Notice the similarities between the kneeling firing backwoodsman, similar posed Indian and the 1950’s infantryman previously seen on this blog (click Spencer Smith or SAE in the Tag-list below or the ‘Index’ in the right hand column).

The artillery is less clear and I’m writing to the current purveyors of Spencer Smith separately to see if they can help with identification of the various catalogue descriptions given over the years for both the ACW and AWI/7YW range, but the main piece IS the ACW gun, I’m just not sure whether the other barrel is the other one - sometimes - available in P7 or if it should be the short barrel from the AWI carriage. My P7 contained two identical grey guns as illustrated and no alternative barrel.

I added a quick shot of the poses mentioned above, back-left to front-right; painted SAE, unpainted casting (Prinze August?), Spencer Smith ‘Combat Infantry’ and two Comet/Authenticast (one early US Comet?, the other later Irish Galterra? Or; AHI? See; coments).

This may be a better way of explaining the number changes? I think I did tweak it some more after taking this screen-shot here, but it'll do! (28/06/11)

B is for Blue

A birthday picture for Mim, a while ago now, we went for a walk on the flood-medow at Hungerford, and I kept trying to Photograph the Small Blues that were flitting about, but by the time I'd got focus they'd move off again and I ended up chaseing one for Hundreds of yards, and failed to get a deceny shot of any!

Well, crossing the Golf Course at Welford on the way to Great Shefford the other day I found lots in a wild-flower medow and managed to get both sides, along with a couple of others.

G is for Grass!

My Celtic spiral, the photograph doesn't do it justice but you get the general idea!

E is for Erzgebirge...

…or is it? Before we look at the post (which I think I said I’d do in a week or two about a year ago!) let’s look at this increasingly used term for all things wooden and toy-like, and/or vaguely European and/or all things vaguely 19th or early 20th Century made of wood.

One friend of mine uses it all the time, but in his defense he does tend to stock a lot of early European wooden toy soldiers or farm and zoo animals, indeed I think I picked it up from him as a collective noun.

Yet, while you will find it in Penny Toys (1991) by Pressland and other more recent works, you won’t find it mentioned in any of the 1970/1980’s Toy Soldier works by Garratt, Harris, Rose or Ruddle, you won’t find it in early books by Joplin or Opie either. In Garratt’s encyclopedia, there is no use or mention of the word in either of the longer entries under ‘Wood’ or ‘Germany’, and it is using those words in conjunction with indexes that has failed to produce a use before Pressland’s work in several dozen books over this past weekend.

The Toy Collector by Louis H. Hertz (1969 & 1976) talks of the Germans trying to rename the collective oeuvre of wooden toy production “Bavarian Guilders Toys” in the 1860’s and 1870’s, and elsewhere in the book he looks at the subject of the mass production methods without using Erzgebirge once. Note; I find the work quite anti-German, overly pro-American and pompous to the point where it should have been titled ‘The Very Rich, Very-Early-American-Toy Collector ONLY’, and while it is an academic work full of useful stuff, if you’re anything like me you’ll get so angry reading it you’re better served reading one of O’Brien’s more modern guides to US toys.
So, if by now you’re interest is up and you’ve got internet there, try Google’ing either ‘Etymology of the word Erzgebirge’ or ‘First use of the word Erzgebirge’…did you get more than four results? None of which were much use at all? If you did you may know more than me, as I might have missed a few pages through the Library service’s filters! The word is pronounced ertz-ge-beer-ga for those not familiar with German pronunciation!

The point I’m making is that this word seems to have been re-invented or become attached to wooden toys - in general - in the late 1980’s at the earliest, having been taken from the ‘true’ antiques trade (where it pertains to larger 'household' items in the main), and is hopelessly inaccurate for the task allotted it, taking - as it does - the name for a range of hills (the Ore Mountains) in the eastern elbow of the German border region adjoining the Northern Czech Republic, in which some wooden toys are made, specifically the Christmas window displays of candle bows and pyramids and the chunky figural and other nutcrackers (among which the ‘Toy’ Soldier features, by dint of cross pollination with the fairy story’s; The Nutcracker and The Tin Soldier), and having to carry all wooden production in a region 10 times the size, under its banner.

An area taking in - as a minimum - the whole of Bavaria (Bavarian Alps, The Bavarian Forest and Munich), Barden-Wurttemberg and Barden-Barden (the Black Forest to the West and everything between the Black Forest, Stuttgart and the Bodensee/Lake Constance), the Hartz mountains to the North and - to the South; pretty much the whole of Switzerland, most of Austria (the Tyrol) and Northern, Alpine Italy (Mont Blanc and Courmayeur - Piedmont and Lombardy) and areas of France and the Ardennes Forest further North-West (Vosges and Luxembourg) and the Rhine valley west of the Black Forest running north to them.

This is not to ignore the fact that these items also came/come from what is now Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics including areas well south of Erzgebirge and other areas that have nothing to do with the above described area. So; If you consider yourself a serious collector, or wish to contribute to the sum total of knowledge and research, rather than muddying the waters (which happens a lot on the internet!), catch yourself before you casually label something Erzgebirge, remember that a favorite ‘Erzgebirge’ item, the Noah’s Ark with its little sets of paired animals is as likely to have been made in Britain or the US of A than to have originated in some medium sized hills on the Czech border!

And that those very animals, also supplied with nativity scenes and farm sets, little villages and such like were (are) made on lathes, to the same design all over the developed world, and with each village copying the next town, with each family copying the local Co-operative, and with small companies copying large companies in order to get their product sold alongside the other, they have developed into two distinct and universal types…which after my rant in favor of historical and semantic accuracy; we will now look at!

Note that the beautifully carved larger pieces, brown bears, squirrels and such like and the iconic ‘shaved’ trees are as likely to be Black Forest as Ore Mountain!

Lets start with the set I originally said I would cover a few days later, some time ago! This - typically - IS an ‘Erzgebirge’ piece, being from the former East Germany (and a company called Dregeno) where the only ‘alpine’ craft area was the Ore Mountain region to the South.

I fell in love with this set the moment I saw it, it was on my mates stall at a price outside my budget, and he was as happy to break it up as keep it together (no crime, it’s only a 1960’s/70’s shop-stock carton when all’s said and done), giving the box to a late-comer, which might have been me, as he gets annoyed with things at packing up time, and often says “Here, you have it then!”.

As it happened, no one payed the slightest interest in it all day, and next time it came out…it was within my budget! So having taken some photographs when I thought it’d go to someone else, I was able to take it home complete and paw-over it!

Isn’t it brilliant? Six little tractors with their trailers, roughly 1:72 scale (HO railways you see!) mostly wooden construction, but for some reason (a poorly organized soviet-style collective factory?) some of the wheels are composition, pinned-on with a small picture-framers tack, some of the wheels are wooden, glued to the dowel axles.

Strassenbau means ‘road-construction’ (a water tank or tar?) and the AFV enthusiasts among you will recognize Mobelwagen from the boxy Quadruple Flackvierling conversion of a Pz.Kfw.IV as ‘Furniture Van’. If you like them as much as I do, feast on the pictures and then we’ll put them to work…

The little green and red tractor is this sequence, is a perfect illustration of my rant above, it could have been made anywhere toys are made. As it was bought in the UK, it was probably made here, there have been/are lots of wooden toy makers in the UK, mostly small concerns coming and going over the years, many using the slice method to make components and then stick them together into recognizable things like a tractor. This one is made from a slice of routed timber (the body) and various slices of three different diameter dowel, big (back wheels), medium (front wheels, seat and steering-wheel) and fine (exhaust stack and steering column).

The pigs in the middle-right shot are also from dowel, with wire tails and leather feet, the feet can be found as nails, wood-splints, hardened leather or sections of cocktail, or kebab-stick sized dowel. This is the cartoon or less realistic type of common animal design, the other shots show the other common animal type, slice-cut from shaped strips of timber (imagine picture-frame or banister rail, but in a continuous ‘silhouette’ of the animal). They used to be cut on bowl-makers lathes so that one end of older animals is slightly thinner than the other.
The two modern trees in the bigger shot are likewise slice-cut while the routed-dowel figures are very common, both are still made all over the place and neither can be described as Erzgebirge at all.

Of interest re. the Noah’s Arks that so many wooden animals originate from; In Victorian England (and a contemporaneous America?) it was considered poor form for children to play with toys on a Sunday (Bloody Protestant’s, sometimes they’re worse than Bloody Catholics!), but they were allowed to play Noah…because he was in the Bible!…religion; don’cha just love it!

The shot bottom-left has some interesting bits, the figure with the paper-hat could well be Erzgebirge as he has some resemblance to the folk-dress of the Ore Mountain miners, but could equally be from Greece, or somewhere more Balkan? The sitting Nun, again, might be Erzgebirge, but is not representative of work from that small region of the wider wooden toy production belt so should correctly be called a craft or folk-piece.

The buildings and slice-cut figure at the rear of the group have detail pressed into them, which I believe (think, imagine?) is done by softening the wood with steam, whether this would be done before or after they have been cut into their little slices I don’t know/haven’t worked out. But like the slice cutting and lathe-work, this would presumably be a semi industrial process, involving a weighted drop-forge sort of affair, like making coins!

So whether you were a single family, or a larger concern, hundreds-an-hour can be cut, stamped and painted, they would/will then go to another part of the factory, or the village collection point or a regional wholesaler, who divvy’s them up into sets, fills orders and sends them to Macy’s in time for Christmas, or to feed the tourist trade; I’ve seen these in huge displays in shops round the ‘Zoo’ and Ku-damm in Berlin, and down the bridge-end of Bad Tölz* high street as well as the ‘Traditional’ section of Hamley’s!

[* Where my brother and I once took turns sitting at Rommel’s desk and; no, I don’t know what Rommel’s desk was doing in a US Ranger CO’s office in an ex-SS barracks!]


The small shots show some of the common wooden stuff we all had a bit of somewhere in our toy box or playroom as kids, maybe inherited from older members of the family, or kept by Granny for us to play with when we visited (in a tin with Bluebirds or ‘The Haywain’ on the lid!), or maybe found in a mixed lot from the Church Fete or a charity stall at the Jubilee Hog Roast of ‘77.

Again, mostly sectional slice construction with the people being routed dowel. Detail is here either screen-printed or stamped on. The little slotted blocks under the trees top-right are a carry-over from paper toys, and help the items stand-up on an uneven carpeted or flag-stone floor.

The large image is a variety of mostly turned trees and ornamental shrubs; the large one with paint missing at the base may be a fancy finial from the dormer window on a dolls house or something? Dressing-table mirror? The windmill is another example of something which might have been Erzgebirge once, but now comes from all over the place, exactly the same – Same design, same paint scheme, same door and window placing, same sails…as everyone tries to make his product look like the next guys.

So, let’s extend the Erzgebirge region from the already vast area I mapped out above, this set - admittedly - slightly different in design; comes from Spain. This is one from a large range of over 30 sets by Goula, in their ‘Urban’ series. Plastic flats help populate the town with both people and trees & street furniture. From the artwork I’d say 1960’s? Can any Spanish reader put a more accurate date on it?

I need to thank someone for finding this for me, but can’t remember if it was ‘Timpo’ Dave or Matt Thair, (White Tower Miniatures, link should be to the right, but is currently down the bottom somewhere, blame all the changes from Blogger in recent weeks!), so I’ll thank them both as they’re always finding me nice little esoteric small-scale pieces!

Again from the Artwork I’d say 1970’s for this German boxed set; ‘My Little Town’, a very commercial piece, with thick glossy finish, note how the scale between the cars and wagon are miles apart and the finish on the horses is a different style from the other accessories with an over-printed detailing, this set probably originated in three or more workshops and was assembled by Hamba (Haoba or Haba?) once they knew what stock they had for that season and could design the box and tray.

This Tobar (UK Webpage) set was bought in the Army & Navy department store in Camberley, Surrey, sometime in the last 7 or 8 years (if that; 4 or 5?), timeless designs, timeless overprinting, people and animals from three sources in three design types, if you were to take them in the garden and get them a bit worn and dirty, there’s not a toy expert in the world who could tell you if they were made in 1909, 1949, '69 or 2009, or where!

To try an explain the terms I’ve half invented above (after ranting about other people’s casual use of terms…what am I like!), I knocked these sketches up to illustrate the slicing method with a modern strip and the older late Victorian or Willhelmian/Edwardian turned blank. Basically it’s just like slicing bread!

It would be really nice if someone could either provide links to images of Wooden Toy production, or better still; if someone from the industry were to find this, drop us a few comments, especially on the relief detail methods, (steam?).

Because of the craft/folk nature of this stuff and it’s timeless designs, patterns and manufacturing processes, it’ll never be as collectable as say early Elastolin composition Nazi’s, Italian Spacemen or pre-war Britains Yeomanry Regiments, indeed in the wider world of collectables it will never command the respect given to US Cast-iron coin-banks or early Bing Dampfloken (Trains), yet it has a charm that should guarantee at least a little ends up in every serious collection. While the ‘flat’ nature of the trees and fences make them ideal for backgrounds on narrow display shelves.

Go on; save some wooden toys next time you’re at a show or auction, your kids will thank you and it might even be genuine Erzgebirge…sssh, don’t use the word.