C is for Corgi Civil-Response

When you ring 999 in the UK the nice lady or gent on the other end of the line always says "Do you want the Police, Fire or Ambulance service caller?", so we will look at them in that order...

We've looked at the police several times in recent months - well; going back a year or more (where the hell does it go?!), and the mounted one was in the first Corgi post the other day, The other two - badly sculpted - propylene pairs came with a late Corgi Juniors play set toward the end of Corgi 'proper', there was a third pair in day-glo orange (fire personnel?).

The day-glo traffic cop at the rear came with several vehicles as my brother kept getting him and his set of traffic-cones and folding road signs in a plastic crate - Range Rover, Ford Transit van...and others? He is also designed to match the ambulance crew from the same era (late 1970's-early '80's) shown below.

The firemen came with the superb Corgi No.1143 American La France Aerial Rescue Truck, one of their best sellers despite also being one of the pricier "...wait 'till Christmas..." items in the catalogue!

The US cop is perhaps a Noo Yoiker with that hat, or LAPD? and in the flanking shots both he and a medic type are on the mystery card we will look at again...

A round-up of the stretcher cases and bearers from Corgi over the years. I could spend a while trying to make sense of them but won't for several reasons. Firstly the websites I visited in researching the figures don't always seem to get it right themselves being more interested in the vehicles as stand-alone playthings or mint-boxed investments. Secondly some of these seem to be interchangeable with late Dinky (who were bought by Mettoy) toys, thirdly; I will post a vague list at the end of these Corgi posts; some of the contents were subject to change and finally; some of the items came with more than one vehicle or in more than one set.

The carded example is giving a clue if you know UK domestic brand trade-marks! Note also the scale-down top-right.

The late sets all went with this day-glow set-up, all part of the craze for motorway emergency vehicles as the M3 and M4 started to open up the nation to visiting other bits of itself with a little more ease!

Some being moulded in orange-red vinyl, sometimes painted, the green one is a softer synthetic rubber and is probably another Hong Kong copy. Again there was a smaller-scaled version.

G is for Guards - Standard Bearers

From the left; a Hong Kong, PVC (with ethylene base and head) copy of Britains Herald, a Timpo 'solid' with moving arm, a Reisler polystyrene Danish Guard and a massif lump of lead which I assume is a home-casting...or very minor make!

C is for Corgi Circus

We briefly dipped into the circus figures the other day looking at those BTS resin things from Hastings or wherever it was! The Corgi Circus has been one of their longest running successes, from the Chipperfield's branded sets of the early 1960's through to the Jean Richard circus set of 1978. Quite a few were also re-issued in the recent Corgi flood years, although I think figures were either thin on the ground or poured-metal 'Corgi Classics'?

The later figures top left are a styrene human cannon-ball'ess flanked by two 54mm vinyl characters, the clown replacing the earlier model, then; a diver from a set we'll be looking at again in a day or so.

The smaller unpainted polypropylene girl with the ring is from a 'Dolphinarium' (on a lorry!), the horses are common as they came six (or 8?) to a set with a circus horse-box, while the elephant (a lump of PVC) was also issued as a hollow-finished styrene kit, along with a packing case in the accessory range.

The clown and chimpanzee from the advertising Land Rover, I have one missing the mic, the other missing the hat, so lined them up to get a 'composite' shot! Again; faces get very different treatments, one being 'whited-up' with the shirt's pale blue.

G is for Guards - Lone*Star Musicians

Er...that's it...Lone*Star musicians...9 of them, three similar pairs, some Toyway reissues, some originals some intermediate...musicians...from Lone*Star.

C is for Corgi Cowboys (No Indians!)

I think I promised this one to somebody over a year ago, can't remember if it was Sam or Gog, but it was one of them! Anyway, Sam has since published a better review of these but as I'm doing all (most...) of the Corgi over Christmas, they've got their five minutes...

There were only five or six items in total, these two (stagecoach and generic wagon), a simplified locomotive and carriage, and two larger play-sets, wagons and train, both with the three buildings. The only thing to note is that the red buck-board/prairie-wagon only seems to have come in the set, so you should always grab it if you see it - not for scalping a profit, but to fill the gap in your collection!

G is for Guards - Cymbalists

Lets put'em together and make some noise people!

Charbens x3; late, late mould-shrink and early with a Sacul on the end.

Another Sacul on the left and two Lone*Star, one website says smooth-bearskin'ed LS guards should have oval bases, but things are never that simple, the textured bearskins are later.

Various treatments of the Crescent/Kellogg's figure.

C is for Corgi 'Crocks' - Edwardian Style

A small number of the Corgi range are of what we would call 'old fashioned people' as children, now - of course - I know they are Edwardian - and still not that 'old fashioned' when I was a nipper! As far as I can tell, several of them were also supplied to Dinky...

...of whom the couple in the main picture to the left above are some along with the seated pair to the right in the upper inset. The first couple are very much typical Corgi in a hard'ish PVC, but the other - pinkish - trio, are a very soft, almost silicone-like synthetic rubber. This may be a clue as to which is Corgi and which Dinky?

The other chap is starting a car with a starting handle...who remembers doing that, when I was a kid I well remember starting cars with a starting handle when the starters failed on cold mornings, and as a teenager trying to start a tractor without breaking my arm!!

The other couple; bottom right, are the inimitable Jeeves and his daft charge Bertie Wooster.

The other figures from the range in Edwardian dress ore the characters from the film Chitty-chitty Bang-bang, which was produced in two sizes, the Husky/Corgi Juniors box-size, which in this case is a good OO gauge-compatible 20-odd mm's. The larger Corgi model is around 1:48 (I think Corgi stated 1:43 for their models?) and the children are separate mouldings, rather than a single piece.

The reason they are in the same pose in both sizes is probably down to the licence agreement tying Corgi into the use of a single  recognisable pre-movie press-release image?

And yes...that's a banana...I didn't have a piece of flower-arrangers oasis and couldn't find my pumice-block!!

G is for Guards - 60mm Figures

There were three 60mm sets of guards produced in the classic factory-painted, soft-ethylene, 1950's toy soldier style that I can think of, the two below and a set of non-musical Cherilea figures one of which appeared in the En Garde post the other day.

The other Cherilea set were musicians and I only have the three at the moment, they will re-appear over the next few days in more of these thematic posts.

The other set was by Crescent, these came courtesy of Mike Melnyk (who has helped with a lot of these guards/ceremonials) and arrived about a year after I took all the other photographs, so they are not in any of the other posts (I think I've queued-up 16), so the standing firer wasn't in that post the other day, and the officer was missing from 'his'. There were 3 other poses and when I've tracked them all down we'll have another look at them. They have more than a hint of the Charbens sculptor about them and are very different from the 54mm set by Crescent.

C is for Corgi Combat

There were not many figures of a military nature from Corgi, they weren't that keen on military stuff, remaining more of a civil vehicle producer with a growing range of licensed cartoon, film and TV character related products.

The previous sentence obviously divorcing the modern brand 'Corgi' (who churn-out military stuff like it's going out of fashion) from the old Corgi Mettoy.

In the Husky range there were a few vehicles given a military finish, a Citroen Ambulance, a petrol tanker and such-like, all without figures. Once the Corgi Junior brand had replaced Husky, there were a few more military vehicles issued, of which my favourite was the rather large-scaled Daimler Dingo, top left with an MG gunner who matched the figures from the play-sets (dark chocolate brown ethylene or polypropylene) and was pivoted in a manner that allowed him to spray bullets like a demented-demon!

A Jeep had a similar matching driver and two of the figures (on their distinctive shared base) came with a small gun which I think is aiming to be an air-portable US pack-howitzer, and  it achieved that aim to a far higher standard that the Matchbox offering we looked at the other day!

My other favourite (and who wouldn't like a vehicle made by someone called Cadillac-Gauge?) was the V-200 Commando, that icon of cold-was television news bulletins, being used, sold, licensed, supplied or copied to just about everyone not in NATO (or the Warsaw Pact), who had an army or police force! Indeed remembering a gloss-blue one at Stuttgart airport in 1977, some members of NATO took them as well.

So the few figures of a military nature from Corgi; The chocolate brown ones ran for a number of years (decades even) and apart from the odd change in shade of chocolate, there's no surprises. The pair front-centre are the more common as they came as crew with the pack-gun, the rest came in the play-sets which - due to their higher cost - shifted less units.

These near-25mm figures and the late Corgi Junior vehicles (V-200, Jeep towing the howitzer, Helicopter, Dingo, Land-Rover ambulance and Land-Rover pick-up truck (wrecker) were issued in the late 1990's or early 2000's by the then Woolworth's owned (and - then - recently resurrected) Chad Valley label.

The figures have the feel of Polypropylene, but the poor-detail suggests a high-density ethylene.

Below them are the roughly 1:48th scale figures that slightly pre-date them, on the left; the crew of the AMX Armoured Recovery Vehicle; you got two of the squatting pose with a pair of trestles and an AFV's spare barrel, all in a dense PVC. On the right and in the same ethylene/propylene as the brown 'Tommies' is the MG-gunner from the Sd.Kfz.251 Half-track. One wonders if it was intended to produce some German 'pairs' to combat the Brits?

It's interesting to ponder for a second why Corgi went with an AMX ARV while Dinky sat on the opposite self with a Leopard ARV despite the fact that at the time (mid-late 1970's) Britain had several indigenous ARV's, BARV's and AERV's and the like -  the old Centurion and newer Chieftain engineering and recovery variants? I can only suppose that both companies were pandering to wider markets than the domestic?

At the time of the marketing campaign I call 'the Corgi flood' (turn of the century and a good 6-8 years either side), there were several military ranges, in various packaging, some were given as a set 1:48th scale, the others (budget range!) were less forthcoming on scale but several of them came in at 'war-gaming' size, and two of them are shown above, a Churchill and a Scorpion (taken from my old Imageshack account so lower-res), the vehicle box is somewhere else at the moment! There were two Shermans from this range and that missing box in this post; S is for Sherman

We looked at the two recent sets in another post a while ago...Here while the old plastic-chassis forward-control (FC or F/C) Land-Rover from Husky can be seen Here. I will do Husky one day, but it will be a while.

G is for Guards - Band Majors (Drum Majors? Pipe...)

Wanting to be clear of the facts before posting I thought it would be a good idea to get my head round the difference between Band Majors, Drum Majors and Pipe Majors...

...almost the first result on Google was a handbook for pipe band drum majors! That is; a Drum-Major in a pipe-band, so I gave up...someone with more sense than me might explain it to us, in the meantime I'm guessing they're all Drum Majors? Oh and they're not majors they're Sergeant Majors!

Left to right; Lone*Star (re-issue); Sacul - from hollow cast; Charbens, soft plastic, Charbens, hard plastic.

C is for Corgi Canines

We have seen this policeman a couple of time in the last year or so, these things often overlap! A quick overview of the canine component of the Corgi population;

There is at least one missing from this collage, the corgi mentioned the other night which came with the jubilee Landau. Clockwise from top right; St. Bernard with in-built alcoholic revival system and handler; Chipperfield's circus dog-trainer with poodles, some require the bases to stand-up properly, they form a small pyramid, there were standing black ones in the set and the white ones can be found in cream (probably because they've been left in sunlight);Farmer's sheep dog; Two dogs from the four that came with a Kennel-club truck.

Paint finishes on the Circus trainer and the policeman with his Alsatian, this dog was another of the four that came with the kennel-club vehicle.

The hand-painted faces all end-up with their own distinct character, and Mary Chipperfield was no exception.

All the above were vinyl except for the performing poodles who come in styrene and have often lost the rear-paws and locating stud.

G is for Guards - En Garde

"Halt; Who goes there, friend or foe?"

"Friend"

"Password?"

"Answer"

"Advance one and be recognised"

[Member of the other party advances]

"Pass Friend"

Left to right; Britains Deetail, newer, older, Cherilea 60mm, Cherilea...er...not 60mil!! Crescent 54mm

C is for Corgi Cavalry

These are one of those exceptions that prove a rule; getting exited about scale is a waste of time...

The figures being 50mm, while the horse is perfectly compatible with 54mm stuff. These came late'ish to Corgi if I remember correctly and included a horse-box and Land-Rover Country LWB. The little blonde girl being from the 'Corgi Pony Club', the other two being obvious!

The scarlet-jacketed postilion (?) is from the '1902 State Landau - The Queens Silver Jubilee 1977' set. He plugs into a plinth which also had a small corgi dog.

The last shot shows the size in comparison with a Britains Guardsman, as you can see the figure looks a tad diminutive, but the horses are quite alike, if anything the Corgi steed has a bigger butt as our friends across the pond would say!

G is for Guards - Unknown Swoppets

In some of the previous posts last week and in some of the posts to come I refer to these as 'Unknown (Charbens?)', but as there are other 'swoppet' guards of a non-Timpo persuasion; I'm not sure if they are Charbens at all?

So - any of you large-scale collectors know who these were made by? Lone*Star? Cherilea?, I know they are not the Crescent ones (my favourites - and I don't have any!!), the reason why I'm not sure is that there are some other more Timpo-like swoppet guards, with very similar (to Timpo) bases and separate rifles that are a sort of Charbens brown? The annoying thing is I have known in the past...Doh!

probably meant to be six in the range, the shouldered-arms guy fits three legs and the officer would go on marching legs if I had both as spares.

News, Views etc...New Pages, New Website

New Pages

I've added a couple of pages, they are the first of many, while the cross-reference one is still a woeful version of what will sit there in the end, time waits for no man, and I've had other stuff on my plate!

The first (added about a week ago) is a list of company status terms some of which are present on toys and figures or their packaging as marks. The other (added just now) is a list of foreign terms with a brief translation into English...this is not a dictionary, but rather what the word or phrase equates to.

Anybody who would like to contribute suggestions, corrections or additions to either page, or any of the forthcoming pages can eMail me at the usual address; maverickatlarge[at]hotmail[dot]com. All contributions will be gratefully received and acknowledged.

'Pages' are the floating words immediately below the border of the banner-header at the top of this page.

New Website

Barney Brown has a new site devoted to Herald toy figures and animals which can be found here;

Herald Toys and Models

There is also a sales page here;

Catalogue


I will add the site to the side bar at some point along with the ones in the Plastic Warrior review the other day.