C is for Carded Combination, from Cavendish

Another bag/card combination from the recent Plastic Warrior show, and another bag/card combination which is considerably more substantial than the contents, although the ratio of spare space to packaging is not as wide as it was with the Tudor *Rose set we looked at the other day!

I had in my listings for Cavendish an entry which read;

Knights (ex-Timpo or Lone*Star?)

- Knights

It now reads;

Knights (ex-Timpo and Lone*Star solid foot and Timpo Swoppet mounted, carded bag of 3/5 foot and/or 1/2 mounted or similar sized mix of figures, header card artwork by Peter Harris)
- Foot Knights (ex-Lone*Star)
- Foot Knights (ex-Timpo solids)
- Mounted Knights (ex-Timpo 'swoppets')

The artwork for this card was actually designed by Peter Harris...those close to the hobby will know that Peter is a well known collector/dealer most famous (perhaps unfairly) for a couple of landslides involving his stock tables a few years ago! An indication of the amount of stuff on his tables! Sadly; I believe he was 'only' a graphic designer back then and failed to ask the questions of the client he might do today, such as "Can I have one of everything and what are you going to do with those moulds in the corner?"!

I suspect that the early silver swoppet knights by Timpo may also have been issued in these bags, as Toyway seem to have inherited all of them together?

News, Views Etc...Khaki Infantry Updates

I've now added the UNA section and hope to do VP before the end of the day, I've also updated the Zang / Herald / Britains and section and Trojan courtesy of images from Barney Brown, who has also allowed the addition of a small Phoenix section. I've also migrated the stretcher team from Speedwell to Trojan and fixed a few other bits.

Khaki Infantry Page;

Khaki Infantry

A little later...

VP now done, Unknowns, Hong Kong, Brazil and Poland to come.

News, Views Etc...Khaki Infantry Page

I've now done the text for the Trojan section and added two images to the Charben's section (which was bereft) courtesy of Gareth Morgan who kindly supplied them when I asked him at a recent show.

Gareth's blog (where he annonces all his new figures and carries details of the rest of the range) is here;

Morgan Miniatures




Khaki Infantry Page;

Khaki Infantry

News, Views Etc...Khaki Infantry Update

I've added some images kindly supplied by Barney Brown to the Speedwell section of the Khaki Infantry page, and the images for the Trojan section including more pictures from both Barney and David Scrivener. I haven't done the text yet, but am working on another page (abbreviations) which has taken all day to format. I hope to have it up later tonight and will get the Trojan text done later today or tomorrow.

UK Khaki Infantry

Barney's e-Store




Later...much later the same night/next morning

Abbreviations page is now up;

http://smallscaleworld.blogspot.co.uk/p/abbreviations.html

It's not quite what I was hoping it would be, but if I kept working on it in draft until I was happy with it; it would never have gone up! There are a few manufacturers in the listings, but the bulk of them will be added to the Marks and Markings page when I get round to that one! Additions and corrections will be gratefully received and fully acknowledged as it's a resource for all to use.

Next page will be on Composition, but I must get the Khaki Infantry page finished first!!!!

P is for Polythene Plastic Products

Another 'best of day' from Plastic Warrior's show in May, the chap had three or four of these but this one had a nice selection of figures. Some time ago I did a massive photo session which sits in Picasa in a folder called err...photosesh! It was all the European combat infantry (no German, US or desert figures) in the larger scales, all the Hong Kong carded small scale with a bit of Giant hived-off and all the mediaevals and crusaders.

But because I came to collecting large scale late, there tend to be some quite small samples of common figures/makes for some of the sets, so I'm always looking for ways to make a post or two out of them. Spotting this has allowed one of those posts to happen, and the pictures can now go off the laptop to moulder on the relevant dongles!

It's an odd set, 80% card and bag! but nice nonetheless...three foot figures and a mounted figure, some of the other sets the seller had had foot only, poor colour mix or tatty cards, so this was the better of the bunch. I suspect it was a seaside-booth seller for sand-castles?

The card has two slots in it which may be for a rubber-band to hold the figures up (no visible remains), or may be arrow-slits as part of some folding backdrop feature of the card/fort which is not obvious, although the door is also operable?

Note: "The Tudor Rose" and "Almost Indestructible"

The figures are copies of the Marx first type 54mm mediaevals, and are probably piracies rather than licensed, Tudor*Rose did do a lot of licensed mould/swapping along with their sort of sister company Kleeware (who they took over and would eventually merge with), but those deals were with their other relatives in the Islyn Thomas stable, not - as far as I know; Marx.

They are a well-copied set and here are a few more (bottom left), with various small samples of Marx originals from the 'photosesh' images.

I've labelled them pretty effectively, so I don't need to bore you too much with the minutiae, but note the Hong Kong figure is in a dense polypropylene, I don't think much of the paint in any of the images is factory original, but it might be (a hard plastic painted issue has some like the crusader type), and; a couple of Vikings have snuck into shot!

The four Marx first type (top right) have the deep illegible engineer-stamp style base-mark which is shared with the red plastic Indians (wild west type), which are - I think - Swansea production. The two silver ones and the blue chap (bottom left) may be Marx or Tudor*Rose but are unmarked, as are the HK one and the figures in the bagged set.

Y is for You're a sick puppy buddy - get help!

W is for Watch with Mother

Photographed at the recent Plastic Warrior (I only have Mrs. Bear and a couple of lose arms and legs and they're in storage!), these are among Lone Star's more esoteric output.

Once TV had got going children's programming followed the pattern of 'Listen with Mother' on the old home service (by my childhood; renamed Radio 4) with a midday section of programmes which started with simple things for infants and got progressively more sophisticated to cater for the the elder children. There was a limited number of programmes, which were endlessly repeated over the years (1950's to 1970's), meaning the characters all became very well known and there was much merchandise produced.

One each of the main characters; PC Plod (top right), Mrs. Bear, Big Ears, Noddy and Golly (left to right - bottom row) along with three paint variations of the evil (well...'naughty'!) Goblin. The figures are about 50mm and polyethylene with Lone Star's usual flaky paint and a 'swoppet' style of plug-on arms, legs and heads.

These days the Gollies have been whitewashed out of both new TV productions and the reprints of Enid Blyton's books, but when I was a kid he was just 'Golly'...not 'Gollywog' and a lot of kids had soft toy gollies, with no racist intent. There was however a believed racist history behind the term and a definite racist history behind the character in general culture, and modern mores demand he slip from the public conscience. Also, while Mr Golly was a good character, I seem to remember the other gollies tended to be the wicked characters if the goblins weren't around?

M is for Musketeers...or 'Mousquetaires'

Good old 'The Works'; how many times have I named them here now? Currently carrying a whole bunch of board games by Rio Grand / Ystari, only one has useful figures, and at 9.99, you might argue a bit pricey for the five, but if you're a board game geek...a bargain!

The box...that's it; it's a box! I think I took too many photographs for covering something I know so little about!

The other contents...I'm not a board game geek, but have had enough experience with board games to surmise that this is going to take longer to learn than to play...once you've learnt it. Therefore this is mostly going straight in the recycling, the dice will go in the dice bag and the timer looks useful...for eggs?

But the figures are really quite sublime sculpts in that 'gamers' size of around 28mm (I didn't measure them and they're in the loft now!) They remind me of the figures Charles Stadden sculpted for Tri-ang Minimodel's 'Spanish Gold', with the swords and things sticking out everywhere! The lady is the sort of baddy!

A close-up of the detail on these figures, they are a stiff PVC (or soft polypropylene?) which holds a lot of fine detail, and are multi-part assembled in the factory.

Available now in The Works who are also stocking the astronaut/shuttle pencil-top I covered a while back. Some of the other games they are carrying at the moment have wooden 'flats' of figures, and if you are a BBG, you need to get down there as you'll probably like most of them!

N is for Not Meccano!

I bought these the other day, bit of an odd one as the company conserned has no connection with figures or war toys of any kind, but over the years I have picked up a tin of bits in mixed lots and often wondered what they were from...

I used to get confused between these people and Rosedale/Tudor Rose, but they are in fact different companies, although both made dolls. I had been watching these get cheaper, the last few visits to the Sandown Park toy fair and the last time I was there they were cheap as chips!

I'll look out for the other set ('Set A' seems to have the four little wheels and long bars needed for anything complicated or mobile to be modelled), and then probably off-load them as a group in a year or two with the loose bits. I just like that they are early plastic and have a nostalgia value!

There's no date on them, but artwork would place them late 1950's or early 1960's? Soft ethylene and only the three colours.

T is for That There Interweb Thing

A return to our irregular round-up of Toy Soldier related 'stuff' on the Internet...

Knitted Toy Soldier

Life-sized Card Toy Soldier

Personalised Toy Soldier Mug



Toy soldiers in art from 1876, I can see French Zouaves and Cuirassiers? (Lucotte/Mignot?)

Antonio Mancini - Boy with Toy Soldiers



For hollow-cast fans; auction news of a major collection coming-up for sale next weekend in the States;

OTSA - present the James A. Henderson collection



British Pathe visits Peter Cushing with his model soldier collection...

Peter Cushing and his Toy Soldiers

R is for Ro-Ro - Roll-on, Roll-off

So; a return to another perennial favourite! Why do I keep coming back to this little car?

Well firstly it keeps turning up in new versions/configurations, second it looks a bit like a Morris Minor, of which we had two when I was a kid, a small powder-blue/grey hardtop...very boring, and a darker 'morris-green' soft-top which my brother and I would stand-up in the back of, as if riding a chariot (or reviewing the troops?), until some idiot pulled-out in front of us one day on the A30 duel-carriageway between Hook and Hartley Wintney and we both nearly went airborne over the windscreen as Mum jammed the anchors on! After which is was sitting only!

One of about five 'best purchases of the day' at the recent Plastic Warrior show (I'm like a kid...running back to the stall every now and again "Best of the day" I go, 20 minutes later...."Could be best purchase today!"), this is the marked Kleeware version of the Pyro Ferryboat, issued in the military green, it's more commonly found in the bright primary colours of the 'infant' / dime-store toy it was.

There are four of the little cars we have now looked-at about three times already (and will doubtless return to!), and the design is the sort of - non ocean-going - ferry you find running river or lake routes the world over. I have photographs of similar ferries on the Bodensee (Lake Konstanz/Constance) from our holiday in 1969 and they were still there in the late-1970's when Dad was stationed down there.

When I gave it a clean, the previously invisible residue of the 50+ year old sticky-tape that held the cars in on display suddenly made itself known, fortunately it came off with a dry cloth!

I've taken the right-hand photograph three times but the shiny plastic just won't allow the focus to er...focus! But you can just about make out the Kleeware mark about the sprue-scar. This also highlights the carpet-wheels. The cars do have differences in internal roof-marking, but we'll look at these another day when I marry the ones I've picked-up in the last few years with the ones in storage (and any others I pick up!).

There was also a military version of the petrol station, this has been seen with the little Humber trucks from Kleeware, but I bet they did a version with the cars as well? There would only have been three in that set. These have some minor damage (a windscreen spar and tow-hook missing) so I will have to replace them with the spares.

The other brilliant thing about this - for the inner-child in all true toy collectors, is the simple fact that...IT FLOATS!

"Your mission Captain Willard; is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy Ferryboat. Pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, follow it, and deliver four new staff-cars."

P is for P..p..per...Pick-up a Penguin!

Another quick follow-up to recent posts...

I picked-up two additions to the Vitacup sets, a penguin which wasn't in the list of animals still to find in the previous post, so there may still be more out there to track down? And a variation of the little deer/buck.

When I first saw him I assumed my existing example must be damaged, so bought him, but when I got him home and compared the two figures it was clear that both are complete mouldings, they are not glued on as an afterthought; it's two differing mouldings. Which came first is anyone's guess, they may have removed the antlers to protect children's fingers (1960's? I doubt it, you learnt from painful mistakes in those days!), or they may have added them to differentiate between the two deer, sex-wise?

The rest are here

U is for Ugly Underside of Undulating UFO

Someone was asking about the underside of the flying NSDalek I CAD'ed a while back, this is for him, if you know CAD you'll understand, if you don't - please come back when I post something more interesting to you!

I filled the holes with blue 'glass' 5mil shorter than the cavity, and faced the cavities with an off-white light source, it looks better on a PC with a better graphics card, the Laptop simplifies the effect. H

P is for Profiteering in Plastic

This screen-shot from the latest eMail on Airfix's D-Day range is the most blatant piece of profiteering I've seen in a long time, I hope people will be as equally disgusted as me and share this around the communities of modelling, war-gaming and figure collecting...

Issued as part of the 'D-Day' tie-in, those who are new to those branches of the hobby that consist in the main of gaming horse-and-musket or earlier with white-metal figures may not know this item...for the rest of us (90-odd% of the various branches of the connected hobbies) it is as familiar as a bad penny in the saucer by the door!

It is an old, tired moulding, first issued by Airfix in the 1960's. and which through the 70's and yeay, even unto 1980/81 still had a pull back, spring-loaded, firing mechanism that allowed you to shoot little green shells about the place until the hoover and the carpet monster had eaten them all, after which it was matchsticks!

The mould paid for itself in about 1972, the contents of this box contain a non-working gun, which is based on the sort of deck-gun the British Navy employed on gunboats at the turn of the last century, not anything the Germans employed on the Atlantic Wall.

The plastic in this box is (by the law of pound-shops) worth about 65p. They - Hornby-call-us-Airfix - have also released a set with two landing craft, a jeep, the new howitzer and a set of 2nd type US Marines. If they are all market rated at £5.99, then that's £25+ for £16.99....a bargain...but this?

This is a rip-off of the highest order, a staggering amount of money for a boxful of shite! They should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for this, the people who died on those beaches died to make a better world and save us from totalitarianism...yet we seem to be losing our democratic voice and sliding back to the time of the robber-barons with complicit or powerless legislature and a business class determined to squeeze the last penny from our cold hands..I can't put my anger over this into sufficient words...Sixteen-fucking-ninty-nine?!!! Outrageous!

M is for Mysterious Moonmen

Can anyone put a name or other details to this? Adrian had it on his stall at Plastic warrior the other weekend, and it's hard to pin down. Seems to be French, but was trilingual on the other sides (English/German), figures are 1970's in appearance and don't have a 'style' or if they do it's more German or 'Kinder Egg' Italian than either French or Spanish?

They are about 54mm, with large square, rounded-cornered, flat bases. Each has four spigots on his chest, attached to each spigot is a small length of insulating wire, the other end of each is then attached to either his backpack or a piece of separate equipment.

The figures are also 'swoppet' like, with separate heads and helmets, swivel arms and the plug-ins. The scenery is card with separate pieces slotted into the base-card and with no obvious weapons in evidence are clearly meant to be astronauts not 'space men'!

Any ideas? the 'de luxe' brings to mind Starlux, did they experiment with ethylene swoppets toward the end?

07th Nov. 2015 - A little bird tells me (from an anonymous Blogger ID with one 'profile view' - mine!) that they are JEM/Norev, so they were French! Tag list adjusted accordingly. Thank-you anonymous!