News, Views Etc . . . Forthcoming Events

Last quiet week of the quiet period, I haven't got anything ready for the weekend, and I'm too busy sorting my stuff to pop-up the library on Saturday, so it's these dates and something late on Monday!

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Toy Fairs

Sunday 26th August 2018

Rayleigh - SRP Fairs

Sweyne Park School, Rayleigh, Essex, SS6 9BZ

Web. - http://srptoyfairs1.co.uk/
eMail: srptoys1@hotmail.co.uk
Tel. - 07739 998 012
10:00 - 14:00hrs

Cirencester - Retro Ronnie Toy Fairs

Bingham Hall, King Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire, GL7 1JT

Web. - www.retroronnie.com

Tel. - 07708 385 061

Tel. - 07900 266 427

Monday 27th August 2018

Bridgnorth - Toy & Train Collectors Fairs (Tony Oakes)

Bridgnorth Leisure Centre, High Town, Bridgnorth, Shropshire, WV16 4ER

10:30 - 15:00hrs

Tel. - 01270 652 773

Mob. - 07825 631 323

Admission £2, accompanied children under-16 free.

Tuesday 28th August 2018

Garstang - Janet Pearson (evening fair)

Kirkland & Catterall Memorial Hall, The Avenue, Churchtown, Garstang, Preston, Lancashire, PR3 0HR

01282 439 009

18:00 - Finnish

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Auctions

Tuesday 28th - Wednesday 29th August 2018

Stockton-on-Tees - Vectis (2-day sale)

Fleck Way, Thornaby, Stockton-on-Tees, TS17 9JZ
Web. - www.vectis.co.uk
eMail - admin@vectis.co.uk
Tel. - 01642 750 616

Wednesday 29th - Thursday 30th August 2018

Newbury - Special Auction Services [SAS] (2-day sale)

81 Greenham Business Park, Newbury, West Berkshire, RG19 6HW

Web: www.specialauctionservices.com

eMail: mail@specialauctionservices.com

Tel: 01635 580595

Fax: 0871 714 6905

Wednesday - Robots Galore!

Thursday - General Sale

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Toys in the Media

Halifax again, one landscape and one portrait, same classic wooden building-bricks!

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If you are an event promoter/show curator/auctioneer and you want your toy, model, collectable or popular-/youth-culture type sale/exhibition/event listed here - FOR FREE - or linked to; please eMail me -

maverickatlarge[at]hotmail[dot]com (corrected!)

- stating the date/s of the event, address of event, contact details, opening/viewing times, admission pricing and any other relevant facts/details or features - parking, travel notes, disability access, availability of refreshments, event subject matter &etc.

And please mention any flyer-art or poster-/leaflet-scans but send by separate eMail, in case they go to the 'junk' folder, from where they can be recovered and marked safe, but only if I know they're there!

C is for Complete!

A real box-ticker; we've looked at these once or twice over the years, but they were among the first things to be sorted together from the two stashes, and it seems that more by luck than judgement I have managed to get all six poses, although two are still tatty examples!

These are they, LP's 'deep-sea' divers, of course, when I was a kid, people still used suits like this for industry (oil & gas) and pleasure or naturalism/scientific exploration, yet now they are archaic-looking set-ups which make you think of Captain Nemo and his Nautilus!

They all seem to come in every colour, naturally as the six poses would fit on a small tool, and other colours are available, including the buff-yellow one someone sent-in last time (I'll try and find the link and put it at the bottom when I upload this), the colours seen here are also all to be found in the 54mm astronauts, along with a dark green.

Plastic Warrior magazine (No.166) showed some Lifeguard-branded four-figures cards from 1970 in Zenith (New Jersey) importer's packaging, with silver highlights instead of gold, black gloves and new plastic colours, but they may turn-out to be copies; as have Lucky's astronauts also been much plagiarised?

T is for There's Some Rack Toys in There Somewhere!

Traffic was up on the other two 'stash' posts and as I've been busy with other stuff, Rack Toy Month's plans have all gone a bit pear-shaped, so here's another sneak preview of stuff heading to Small Scale World in the weeks and months ahead.

Cowboys; enough of them, but nothing terribly exiting! I don't know why that 'bendy' is on top, he should be in the bag with the other three . . . maybe he's a last minute 5th? All the stuff from the last Birmingham show (2011) and quite a bit of the big-purchase in Portsmouth (a year earlier) was still unsorted when it all went into storage, and some of that will on top of these loose 'to be sorted' piles.

Injuns! A surprising amount of Crescent (or Kellogg's) in evidence, the rest pretty run-of-the-mill.

Siege Engines; emphasis on the small scale, but MPC's boxy hideousity is there and the Lone Star sets along with two early Kinder's (little bag bottom left) which Peter Bergner (PB Toys) gave me years ago.

Red-but-not-dead-yet commie rat-finks, sah; loads ov'em! Polish, Italian and East German-made figures along with Russia's own take on Warpact troops, two tubs of arctic stuff and Toyway's Greeks. All good box-ticking stuff!

I think I got most of the Toyway stuff in a single feebleBay purchase in 2009/10, which is ironic as I've started collecting them again in dribs and drabs here; they'll all be spares now!  But I seem to recall I needed some bases, so they may end-up baseless spares . . . Doh!

Next layer down, more Greeks, some barbarians (with presepi?), more Russians from France and Czechoslovakia this time along with Italy again, and two tubs of Natives/Africans, some African exploiters explorers, colonial troops and a German with a butterfly-net . . . natch!

Ditto! With added backwoodsmen and Vikings, sans butterfly-net! Two more layers can wait.

Another box! Nappie-types, 7 and 30 YW, ceremonials and Mounties along with some West Point'ers. The blow-mould is Fontanini's Hussar, right-royally ripped-off, wearing what looks very similar to HCF's little, gold, sticker, but printed with HK not 'Empire Made'

More of the same with some Mexicans!

Mexicans swapped for Greeks!

Again, there's two more layers of goodies underneath, and more boxes, I haven't even spotted the WWII boxes yet, all the 8th Army and DAK to come at some point . . .

I is for Asian . . . Rack Toys

In the words of he who keeps following me ['very closely'!] "There seems to be some interest in these at the moment"! I'm not sure if these were sold to tourists in numbers; mostly sent to British Asians by their relatives, or collected by them on trips back to Asia to remind them of the mother country, but you see them occasionally at figure shows, car boot's or on feeBay; usually a half-dozen or so (I suspect they came as 10 or 12-figures in an assortment?), and I'm sure there are other poses to find.

We'll start with the girls as for many years I wondered if these were Thai or Indonesian, Burmese or from somewhere further afield (Malaysia?), but one of the deciders for my current thinking - India - was the pair on the left with their distinctive tea-baskets - as anyone who did geography in the 1970's will recognise! But Malaysia is very much in the frame still, especially the checked-sarong guy!

The gent's too seem to place us in India, as while you find tea-pickers in similar dress in Sri Lanka and Muslims in fezzes elsewhere, to find all the costumes in these sets in one place I think you'd need to be in India; the coloured plastic pair are Buddhist devotees, the guy on the left might be representing an educated Anglo-Indian, or someone from the ruling/political class?

The other two I don't know off-hand, but they seem to be more ceremonial or area-specific in their ethnicity/cultural-dress? The above two groups are all flats, around the 60mm area and with 'penny-bases'

Here we have two drummers; one with a matching penny-base but ribbon-twisted to give a level of dimensionality to him, while the other is again a full flat, but with a different base. Both have had drums added with a blob of glue.

This group are from the second bag (along with the 2nd drummer) and there are three more of the square bases and two tatty snake-charmers. I used to wonder if they were from a different set/maker, but I think they are all from the same source and are now kept in separate bags because they won't fit in one, but there aren't enough to move to the tub-stage!

Again, arguing for a different source you might associate the first figure on the left with Burma/Myanmar or Thailand/Siam, but the figure on the other end of the row looks like a sun-roasted, unshaved 'Sahdu', and the only place where you get all these together (with Cobra charmers!) is India . . . or Malaysia? The final figure is a villager with hoe.

The hoe is painted onto the base, while the 'Sadhu' has an axe glued to his shoulder.

It looks like he's killed the poor lizard, so not a Sadu at all! I don't know if he is planning on eating it or indulging in some ceremony with it? Sadhus are supposed to be vegetarian aren't they? Maybe he's a denizen of the jungles or forests of the great wildlife parks or the river-delta's of the North-East and not a Sadu? If the figures came from Malaya, he might be an Iban tracker from the jungles of Sarawak?

I need to do a bit of a mend on this chap, who should be carrying the pole with the two baskets suspended on the cotton-treads but suffered a breakage where the glue was originally placed, he too; has the ribbon-twist to suggest a greater level of 3D!

These two - who came in separate purchases (but one of them with some of the above), are slightly different, with heavier bases, one tapered upwards and the other downwards with a prominent rim. These are the figures which raise Malaysia to the heady heights of SCW's tag-list, although they tend to wear a lower black hat?

As they seem to be copy-versions of the chap in the second image from the top (fez, checked sarong, umbrella) there is a tendency to think they are from another source, but as they are the only ones to turn-up, both in the same pose, and given the two drummers and the similarity between several of the women I suspect they're from the same extended set, but keep them both in a separate, third bag, just to be safe!

News, Views Etc . . . Airfix Paratrooper

A late edition to the early Airfix figures missed photographing before going into storage, he's joined the rest and can be found here (at the bottom of the post), along with a comparison of the recent sailor with one of the older examples.

R is for Rockin' Rack-toy Ravers in Raffia Rah-rahs!

So, I dug into another box! Actually I was looking for something else, fount these three bags and thought "They'll make a nice rack-toy month post!", so here they are!

Straight piracy of the Britains Hawaii pair but with one of the more ornate Hong Kong palm tree's you'll encounter, all mounted on a little base as a vignette, and while it may have been available as a novelty toy all over the place, I guess sold in larger numbers as a Hawaiian tourist trinket, or in similar territories for the same reason?

The 8 components; the girl is attached to a small spring, which is wound into the larger base-hole (so she can jiggle and wiggle her little tush with a flick or a shake) and she has a separate skirt - I don't know if they come in other colours - while the tree is well-burdened with coconuts!

Other piracies of Britains native dancers are available, and here Maid Marion has popped-over to see what all the fuss is about! She has a green base so probably also belongs with the more normal Robin Hood cake-decoration copies (we've looked at a bagged Friar Tuck here in the past) but was in the bags with the Hawaiian pairs as triple-figure sets, again - like the Robin Hood figures - cake-decorators seem to be the target customers.

I have a darker-skinned girl (should that be duskier? Do the 'PC-Brigade' even allow "dusky maiden"? Probably not!) with a damaged foot (no spigot), she has a yellow-plastic skirt too.

While on the end of the line is a very poor 3rd/4th generation copy, probably from the same source as some of the equally-poor African Warrior copies you find; certainly she has the same uneven 'made in Hong Kong' letter-stamped on her base in a sort of 'typewriter' font.

News, Views Etc . . . Compton Verney's Automata Exhibitions

A friend mentioned a toy inventor (Rodney Peppé)'s exhibition the other week and kindly popped down to Compton Verney and picked-up a brochure for us to look at, it turns out there are two exhibitions running side-by-side, both of toys or with a connection to toys.

The main exhibition is the 'Marvellous Mechanical Museum' collection of automata and working novelties through the ages, and while there are tinplate, clockwork and later plastic versions of this elephant out there for you to find, the one in the picture is by Faberge, is from the Royal Collection and is outside of your pocket's range . . . or mine!

The exhibition has been running since the 30th June (if you've been; the Blog would love follow-up shots!) and will end on 30th September, it's free with entry to Compton Verney's Art Gallery and Park.

Pricing is complicated but for those with no gold or silver membership packages the minimum entry for an adult - during exhibition periods - is £13.60 (£15 with gift-aid), and a family ticket is £30 with kids under five getting in free.

Other events are free or priced separately and include a Marvellous Mechanical Museum Family Trail (free) which involves using an activity sheet to guide you (or your younger companions!) round the exhibition thematically. There's also a Daily Guided-Tour (free) which sets-off at 12 noon or 2.30pm every day.

We've missed the curators tour (4th July) but there is a talk on Automata in Literature and Culture on Wednesday 2nd September from 2.30-3.30pm, delivered by Franziska Kohlt, this costs £25 to non-members but includes entry to all the other attractions.

Alongside the main automata exhibition is Rodney Peppé's World of Invention, which looks at the public oeuvre of Mr. Peppé and his many creations, books and inventions - it's all in the blub above!

In addition to the above events and exhibitions, Compton Verney has a fine park garden and there are other activities every day somewhere in the grounds or house. It's cheaper than Legoland and - it's brain-food!

Compton Verney is midway between Banbury and Stratford-upon-Avon and can be easily reached from junctions 11-to-15 off the M40 (12 or 15 recommended), with trains stopping at both towns, and Leammington Spa.

Compton Verney Art Gallery & Park

Compton Verney

Warwickshire

CV35 9HZ

Web. - comptonverney.org.uk

eMail - info@comptonverney.org.uk

Tel. - 01926 645 500

Tel. - 01926 645 516 (group ticketing; Emily)