T is for They Don't Come Much Bigger Than This!

Oh yes they do! [5th December 2015]

I photographed this (likeness of Mr. Thomas Radford?!!) in a tobacconists in a little arcade in Reading the other day...

I didn't measure it, but it was about two or two-and-a-half feet tall, so about 1:4th scale? I'm guessing it dates from the 1970's or early 1980's, and has survived remarkably well given the frangibility of both the 'clay' pipe and the cane.

The blurb on the back, although Radford's was once a British tobacco brand, it seems that the whole concern is now (or 'was'?) a German based concern, it would be interesting to know if the statuette was made in [West] Germany or commissioned from Hong Kong or somewhere similar?

I can find trademark stuff and an address (John Brumfit & Radford Tobacco Ltd. Dieselstraße 1-84144 Geisenhausen, Germany) but no website?

T is for Two - Timber Toys

Have we had that title before? Probably...hey-ho!

Returning to a recurring favourite of mine; wooden toys - Traditional, timeless, lots of play-value, robust material that ages with more grace than plastic or die-cast alloy.

Still going strong, now as a managed cooperative (History here) Dregano was one of the main marketers for the craftspeople of the Erzgebirge region of North-eastern Germany, falling behind the Iron Curtain for a while, they none-the-less managed to export abroad to 'the enemy' as this English language boxing shows.

It's a whole story in a box, how cool is that! Pigs can be visited, pigs can be fed, pigs can escape! Pigs or people can hide behind trees, the child rides the big pig quite well...of course I tried! Loads of play value, and something like this was pennies when I was a kid.

Another export piece. If you follow the links there are lots of catalogues to download as free PDF's, and while neither of these pieces are in there, plenty of stuff is including my favourite tractors! They still make them with all the different trailers/loads, although they seem to have more modern steering wheels, and no flywheel, but then some of mine don't!

The range of wagons with 40mm drivers are all good for 20/25mm war-gaming once you've unglued the figure and haven't changed in a hundred years, while there are some lovely sports ski-shooters in the monochrome range. The trees are lovely, and the little matchbox range is vast, but they don't seem to carry one of my childhood favourites any-more - the little sets of architectural building bricks in a matchbox?

A is for 'And'....And now for something completely different...

Occasionally you see something exquisitely HO-OO (as Airfix would have described them!), but way out of you comfort zone price-wise, not because they are old and rare but because like these from Link's of London; they are made of something valuable...

Silver and silver-gilt (gold-plated silver)! I photographed these one cold night back in 2007, walking up through Guildford from the station. I had to take scores of shots due to the reflections off the shop window or the display cabinets and the problem focusing through the glass, which the camera kept detecting etc...

As a result every time I've looked at them in Picasa I've just thought "can't be bollocked!", but as you can see; in the end I've been through them and rescued what I could.

Basically - if memory serves - there was a large and small Noah's Ark, Noah and his wife in front of their new house...old house? Lots of stand-alone pairs of animals, something nativity-looking and one or two other pieces with prices starting at around £20 for a pair of smaller animals.

Highlights are in gilt, or a gloss black I assume to be an enamel (proper kiln-fired [or blow-torched?] enamel, not 'hobby' paint). They also serve to reminded me of the number one item on my 'Wants List'...

...as you enter the British Museum, the Egyptian room is straight in front of you up some stairs from the main foyer. After a couple of large chunks of carved masonry there is (or used to be) a small glass cabinet about the height of a man, centrally placed, with several glass-shelves displaying little treasures, among which are an 18-20mm Pharaoh and his Queen sitting on their thrones, just like the Atlantic ones, but nicer, and made of pure gold...I want them! But I can't have them! Wouldn't you like a Noah's Ark with all the pairs of animals? I would!

Any generous millionaires reading this; you can get my bank details from Natwest...for donations to the Aspergics Toy Research Foundation! What do you mean, you've never heard of it?

D is for Diversion - from Normal Programming

A mate has recently been shut-down on Facebook, it happened to me a while ago (last autumn, and seems to be happening to everyone, over time....so it may well happen to you if you're on Facebook and it hasn't happened yet.

They (Facebook) lock you out of your page (while sending you all the normal updates and notifications!) and demand 'Government ID' before they let you back on.

Sometimes it seems to be random, sometimes it's because someone has reported you or your Facebook page - that's what happened to me, I was fighting a neo-Nazi site (which proves last months Troll to be the hopelessly ignorant, misguided look-at-me type he/she is!), and they fought back by getting us all closed down temporarily.

There is a site which will give you more information (ghacks.nett), but you'll have to wade through some mindless drivel from the 'conspiracy theorists' (to be honest, I'd ban some of them!).

I dealt with the situation by finding a couple of emails for senior Facebook executives (Google has it uses) and then sending the following eMail to them...

Dear Madam 

With reference to your demands for my personal information; 

1) I believe the information you are asking for is not to be given to you under UK data-protection legislation without good reason. As I hold a Facebook page under the name I was born with, the name I use to register most of my Internet accounts/memberships with; the fact that you're telling me my name is 'not allowed' is NOT (in my own opinion) a good enough reason for me to pass private information or images of private documents to you, without more assurances than the vague claim of subsequent destruction you make.

2) I believe this matter is either down to; A) the attempts myself and several others were making for the last few weeks to get the fascist National British Resistance sites of Mr. Joshua Bonehill shut down…something you were as reticent to do as you have proved with to be with Jihadist or animal torture sites like dog-fighting, or; B) an attempt to obtain - BY DECEPTION - information you can then use for commercial gain.

3) You already obtain commercial gain from me by the advertising you place in front of me, and on my timeline as viewed by others. There was no problem with my name when I registered or for the subsequent 13 months I have been using your service?

4) Therefore I have to assume there is no REAL problem with my account at all, but rather a manufactured one for either of the points in 2 - above. As you have floated yourselves on the market, your need for users (of your service) is greater than my need for Facebook, which I resisted for years, only joined to stop a few friends whinging and find to have some poor interfaces and a less than clear structure/format vis-à-vis settings. It is also cripplingly heavy on data-use for someone like me with a pay-as-you-go dongle.

5) Please either unblock my page ([Redacted]) OR send me an eMail detailing the specific problem you have with the name I use, which I was born with and which I also use on Blogger, Google+ and Amazon OR return all my images and original copy, and close my account, providing evidence of its having been closed.

6) If you chose the last option in 5) above, please accept fair warning that following the deletion of my page, by you, any and all subsequent notifications, requests or advertisements by you, your agents or nominated representatives, by electronic or traditional mail, text or in person toward or directly aimed at me will be considered further-harassment and invoiced by me to your London Office at £100 damages per action/incident, to be recovered - in the event you fail to pay the invoices by the due date/s - in the UK's County Court service via the fast-track, small claims facility.

7) I retain the right to republish this image, or a text version of the words upon it as and where I see fit.

In the redacted section I placed my [Facebook] name, date of birth, place of birth, National Insurance and Passport number etc...no documents or pictures/scans of documents were provided.

I sent this over the weekend and was back on Facebook (for better or worse!) by the time I got out of bed Monday! feel free to use this text if it happens to you, but I would suggest rewriting it to better reflect your own 'voice'.

the subsequent email from Facebook made no reference to my eMails, just spoke of a 'Technical Fault'...the truth is probably that it's got something to do with the dodgy relationship between Facebook and the US security apparatus and their collective paranoia about terrorism, activism and all the other chickens that are coming home to roost after a century of corporate capital raping the planet, and our governments three-faced machinations in the the Middle East.

But...whatever the reason, no one should be sending private information, or government documents to a corporation listed on the stock markets!

So ends today's Public Information newsletter!

L is for Lone*Star's Liveried Lads

I have a soft-spot for these, we had a few in the figure toy-box when we were kids, bits of them reappear in the Giant oeuvre of small-scale Hong Kong piracies. also; when I was working for a toy dealer a few years ago I came to appreciate how many paint and plastic-colour variations there are.

I got a bunch in the big purchase a while ago,  the odd one has come in with bits and bobs and I  have Mike Melnyk to thank for the rest. We have touched on them before and the 'King' figure has been looked at in detail, next to the French copies.

So, on the top row we have 'simple' or reduced paint versions, these were late Lone Star and tend to get a wash (heliotrope pink one), or all over colour (black one) with a few highlights...the middle one's just 'been shown' a paint brush!

Middle row are early re-issues by Marlborough? Or Dorset? Or both? Then the figures found their way to Toyway who sold them in Gold (bottom row) under Timpo branding, with or without the stab-and-hope silver 'highlights'!

The 'High' period - proper paint schemes. Most of the figure-production was in a gun-metal/silver plastic with a painted base-coat of silver or gold armour, but other plastic colours were used (bottom rank). I wish I could get a tin of the metallic green used on the King figure, I've tried making it by adding olive to silver but it doesn't dry right!

Some fresh, clean, bright examples of the silver figures. The out-painters seem to have had a guidance sheet, but freedom to vary colours. The silver paint on these is nice and shiny. I can't believe I just wrote that line...this is becoming a rather banal post isn't it? They're self-explanatory, you know them...box ticked!

Like all early Lone Star these are getting quite brittle now and the spear-man on the right broke as I was putting them away...boo-hoo...hay-ho! Weird thing: No Archer? How can we celebrate Agincourt in October with no sturdy yeomen of the bow?

Variations on a theme - the last chap came-in the other day and is another plastic colour, but with poor paint. I'm not sure how many poses there should be - there are 8 poses in all, above - or if I have all of them? It's in the Plastic Warrior specials on LS, but mine are away at the moment, can anyone tell us?


Elsewhere on the blog;

Bagged from Cavendish
Fake Frenchies and More
The King (scroll to bottom)

B is for Blast...From the Past

Or...rather a bit of a fizzle...there was something a bit disappointing about the Atlantic sets. We had seen the little outline or silhouette adverts starting to appear in comics in the mid '70's, and had been dying to find them. When we did they had fantastic action pictures in comic-art style on the boxes, matched with Airfix style line drawing on the backs and we couldn't wait to get them home and opened...

...but when we did...huge bases, gawky poses, massif figures...disappointing! There were some good poses and some good sets, but overall; disappointing.

I bought these in the little Totto-Lotto shop at the crossroads in Neuhausen ob Eck (then a large hamlet - now a small town!) in about 1976 or 1977. I bough the Russians and Germans first and went back for these and the Americans a couple of days later, two boxes of Japanese and the Indian Brigade followed when I managed to talk my long-suffering little brother out of his two-Mark piece - they were a mark each, which at around 5 Marks to the pound was about equitable with the 18 or 19p they were going to cost in 'Blighty' a year or two later.

I was disappointed with them; they were clearly too big, and there were some duff poses, the 'being shot guy' is the obvious dancing loon, but the grenade thrower is none-too-hot either, the prone crawling seems to be doing press-ups and the carrying-casualty vignette never went together the same way twice, nor ever looked like the line-drawing on the back of the box.

But they grew on me and one day in about 1983 I put paint to figures. Dug-out the other day for some comparison shots on the Airfix blog, the paint has survived well over the years, the soil has mostly rubbed-off the bases, but I used to pour it onto wet (ish) paint, so that's no surprise and the paint is going shiny with over-handling. They are a bit too green but otherwise I'm still happy with them - they used to have their own bit of shelf as they wouldn't really go with anything else.

Q is for Quiralu

Ease-back into posting with a quick one...my Internet is intermittent at the moment! But I have been busy off-line, getting stuff prepared for both the blogs, with 19 articles lined-up for here, and content for all the HO figure pages over on the Airfix blog. And another PW review is overdue!

Certainly re-painted, so more a curiosity of the box-ticking variety than anything else. And a big chunk of French Aluminium! Quiralu, Jeep and crew, re-painted.

F is for Fould or Foulds Figurines

I am around, just been indulging in real-life (how selfish!) and this week I've been busy over on the Airfix blog, adding stuff!

This is all I know about these figurines;

Edgar Rice Boroughs E'zine...scroll down about half-way.

But...I'm not even sure that's right, I mean; clearly the figurines go with/are for the toy theatre, but I can find nothing else about 'Fould' without an 's' and the order-form in the link isn't enlargeable to check spelling. As I have squirrelled away all sorts of stuff over the years I know that a company called Foulds & Freure (with an 's') were importers of Japanese and European toys (to America) between the wars, I suspect these (the link's subjects) are them? There's nothing on either name in Garratt.

The figures illustrated above, will be originals. probably from Germany (?), and are about 8 inches high, hollow, slip-cast bisque (or;Parian Porcelain) mouldings in the style of Fairings, which they may well have been issued as over here...there..Europe. Doh!

29th Jan 2015 - Paul 'Stads' Stadinger has sent a link with further information....

Hakes Dot Com

Thanks for that Paul (both Pauls!)., and it's a different Foulds altogether, in fact it's Gem Clay...when it's not Heinz!

"In 1932 the Gem Clay Forming Co. produced a series of Tarzan plaster statues which were offered by various sponsors ........ The insert sheets/sets varied for the different sponsors. One side features images of the 10 numbered statues along w/color chart and offer blank. Opposite side advertises Foulds/Heinz products. The main difference is the statues offered. Most are same from set to set, with a few exceptions. Foulds offers "Three Monkeys" and "Witch Doctor" statues while Heinz offers "Kerchak The Ape" and "French Sailor" statues and sheets have different layouts".

J is for...JE SUIS CHARLIE

The complacent, the disinterested, the politically ignorant/politically uneducated/politically 'old-school' dogmatic, the climate change deniers, yeah; even the liberal elite are going to have to get off their comfortable, fat, well paid, well-fed, grey, middle-class arses in 2015...we are blundering into the end of days, led by money-driven monkeys, thinking science will save us from ourselves, believing our kids and their kids will be 'all right', hoping technology will find/provide the answers before it's too late...really? I mean; REALLY?

T is for Twelfth-Night

Which is tomorrow - unless you want a year's bad luck! Stag-on Green Bearskins, your work is not yet done!

F is for Follow-up Fellows from Spot On

As with the Vitacup the other day, figures come in in dribs and drabs, occasionally allowing for a new article so further to the Original Post these are mostly new poses or new colours of Spot-On figures for die-cast toy vehicles...

The two green ones and the school teacher are straight duplicates, and the guitarist and two top right have appeared before in alternative colours, the rest are additions. These were looked at in some detail in a recent issue (155 spring/summer number) issue of Plastic Warrior, and I'll come back to them in detail when I've tracked down the last few!

T is for Two...Toy Tractors!

The other side of midnight and a link with the past as I cheat Old Father Time by tying the old year to the new! I nearly called this "T is for Two...Taffy Tractors", but some would have seen vague colonial racism, and the link to Taffy Toys is tenuous to say the lest!

One of the first things I got from volume two of the new Farming in Miniature books I will be reviewing in full in the New Year is the fact that the tractor and accessories I blogged way back, are not as simple as they seemed at the time!

There are in fact; two versions of the tractor, and the implements I showed, don't all belong to the Paramount tractor I was blogging. I suspect the Thomas Toys is the original, purely on the tolerance of the front wheel spigots which are the correct length to hold the wheels tight, the Paramount spigots are longer, so the wheels travel a bit.

Most of the other differences are annotated in the comparison photograph above. I shan't correct the old post yet, as firstly I feel you should go out and purchase the two volumes if you wish to know the differences for yourself, and secondly I need to track-down a few bits before I can do both family's justice!

- Farming in Miniature Volume 1: Airfix to Denzil Skinner: A Review of British-made Toy Farm Vehicles Up to 1980

- Farming in Miniature Volume 2: Dinky to Wend-Al: A Review of British-Made Toy Farm Vehicles Up to 1980

A couple of head-ons to show some of the differences above in greater detail, in my original post on the Paramount tractors you will notice a lack of the two front brackets on the bumper (fender) undersides, as the two bagged ones are the same, it would appear there is an intermediate third design.

The Paramount version was also issued as a premium with Oxydol washing powder, these were sellotaped to the powder boxes (there was ONLY Sellotape in the 1950's!) and then stacked in the stores, so get crushed AND ripped, it's a tough life being a premium!

Tractor fans might enjoy this collection pictured in Tasmania...few too-many row-crops for my liking! And thanks again to Adrian Little (one of the co-authors of the above books) for the opportunity to photograph these together.

T is for Two...Tiny Tractors

Do you remember my erzgebirge rant a few years ago...E is for Erzgebirge? Well, I picked-up a couple of the tractors the other day...taking my fleet to 7! There are a couple of differences though, so made in another village, up the road!

The basic tractor is the same but they both have fly-wheels for driving static equipment like Thrashing engines, saw-beds or straw-elevators and they both have a little driver. The big difference between the new machines and the old ones, is that these were made for export and as well as having the 'foreign' moniker in English on the base, the Mobeltransport has been translated to 'Removals'...lovely!

Sadly this isn't mine; although I'm keeping my eyes out for one! Shot at Sandown Park back in the spring, this is a French (CIJ) soft-plastic clip-together kit of a Renault Tracteur Agricole! Isn't it a peach? Nothing to add; it's all in the picture! If it wasn't for the card you'd think it a cereal - or other - premium, but I suspect just a pocket-money toy?

More on the Brand at Wikipedia

B is for Blackrock

Time for a little small-scale of the current rack-toy variety I think! These can be found with various Jobber's/Importer's stickers on them, and have appeared time and again over the last decade or more in several sizes and various materials or finishes.

This is an unmarked 'generic' which came in a mixed-lot from a mate last Plastic Warrior show, I think in the larger sizes they were originally Applause sculpts (or Supreme/SP?). These are 21/22mm'ish soft vinyl, and I bought a similar set from a newsagents in Guildford a few years ago with unpainted figures in silver and black, in a polyethylene.

G is for Gratefull for what you've Got

So, you've unwrapped your pile of high-tolerance production, injection-moulded plastic shite and/or given a like pile to offspring, nephews or other younger members of you circle...spare a thought for those less well-off...

What an African child - converted to the Western Church - might find under his tree this Christmas, no actual tree of course, and he probably made it himself, or had it made by an elder sibling...if they didn't sell most of them to fat European tourists in ill-fitting khaki-shorts to get some hard cash in a usable currency!

Made from a Doom insecticide can with twined Coke-bottle tops for wheels, the ingenuity involved (and probably a bit of blood!) in these is lovely, no glue, no welding, no screws, nuts/bolts or nails, everything holds everything else in place with folds and bends.

There was a popular musical video in the run-up to Christmas showing on the soma-channels which showed one of these with rudimentary steering (lots of 'give' in the wheels) and a wire attached to the roof so it could be pushed along like a Fisher-Price puppy!

This could, however, be the future of toys here...the jobs aren't coming back, indeed Chinese companies are already moving production to Africa to avoid upward wage-pressure at home! Political ignorance is allowing the Right to dictate increasingly draconian policy, and the idea that Western civilization hasn't had its day is risible. 20 years from now things like this may be under the trees on our sink-estates, if they (the estates not the toys!) haven't all been sold to Arab investment companies and Chinese sovereign-wealth funds?