S is for Sometimes . . .

 . . . I can be a silly-old Hector!

 

Having nearly (there was the forgotten skeletons shot!) managed to get out all the Halloween posts, on Halloween, which included some I was working on the same day, and others which were all together in the 'Halloween 2023' folder which gets added to all year, plus any contributions, the 'special' days become a panic and lead to a sigh of relief if they mostly come off, and having got everything out of Picasa, I was happy.

 

But, I just noticed a folder on the desktop which simply said 'Halloween' and I thought "Oh no, I've forgotten a/some contributions?" (as they tend to end up on the desk-top!), but thankfully it is two fanatsy lots, I'd put on hold for Halloween, and they can go anytime, so here's one!

 

Issued in the mid-late 1980's, you are supposed to get four polyethylene figures in a polystyrene 'toob' made to look like a lookout tower (just the sort of random 'folly' role-players like on the gaming table!), but mine had five if you include the dragon, which we saw here once before, so I must have two, as I know I grabbed that one at random, at the time, and posted it as unknown!

 

The figures are based on old Ral Partha figures I think, or some similar range, Aureola Rococo (minifigs) or AD&D? Pretty sure I had the lizard with a club in that dark-grey whitemetal, it used to oxidise to! And they were sold like this, the lid taped-on over the label, so a counter-top 'outer', with maybe 16 or 20-odd towers?

The four figures from my set, I do have some more, lose, somewhere, but this stuff is all in storage now, however, as always we can rely on Shaun at Fantasy Toy soldiers to show the rest! And a second series, which has escaped me entirely! He also thinks the contents sometimes exceeded the stated number, good way to get kids to go back for another set, I guess - convince them they are getting a 'forbidden' bargain?

The other side of the dragon!

BB is for Blue Box

Except that prior to BBI nobody used BB except Mr. Sell, who abbreviates everything! An uninspiring heading, but a simplified one I don't think we've actually had before, and it's a rather uninspired article I'm afraid, unless you're very new to the hobby, in which case you won't even get the Sell reference, but might get a lot, or something, from these images!

 

I shot the mounted Japanese officer as I was putting them into storage, but the shots didn't add much to what had gone before, so the folder just lay there, I got some more unpainted ones as 'bi-catch' with a lot of British Infantry (the only 1960/70's Blue Box figure I still need from the four sets now, is a decent British mine-clearer, they are always either broken or short-shots!) so shot them again, and at some points I spent a few minutes shooting the mounted figures again - twice!

 

So there were all these images in a folder, none of which add much to previous posts on the subject, therefore it's not a follow-up, it's not a box-ticker, I guess it's just a Picasa-clearer! I'll throw them up here, move a couple around and with minor captions, let the images tell their own story, remembering to thank Nazar Marchenko who filled the original gaps in my fledgling sample, eight years ago.

Painted officer, mounted

 

Comparison between painted and unpainted officers

Horses are different colours

 

More! More officers, more horses, another horse colour

Unpainted set of foot figures from both sides

Random shots and a base-mark with the '3' cavity numeral

Top image is plastic-colour variants isn't it!

Mostly unpainted against a few painted

Must have been a late-in trio?

All the unpainted's from both sides and the officer

An evilBay lot, which appears to suggest, as I'd mused . . . mooted (?) in the past, that they all had an issue, at some point, with the plug-in 'farm/zoo workers' base, as that's Aussies, Japs and Germans now found either with the green oblong base, or, in this case, needing them!

 

With three horses and only two riders, a long term goal is to find a third rider and paint him up, with a set of the infantry.

B is for Box Finally Ticked!

I've had a bunch of these playing pieces in a matchbox for the longest time, but never had a clue as to what game or set they belonged to. The suspicion was always that they were from a board game, but it wasn't until I was looking for something else that I finally encountered them about two-and-a-half years ago, and it's our old friends Merit!

 

I know it's considered a bit non-U to name-drop, but sometimes you have to, and I'm pretty sure General Horrocks used to come to the house when we were little, certainly it was a name I heard a lot, and I recognise the little black & white thumbnail of him, above, but I would have been very young, 6-8'ish, or birth to 8'ish maybe, and all sorts of people did come to the house!

 

Mum used to do dinner parties, for which she would often get help from the MOD, or even one of the unit chef's to help prep' up, in the afternoon, as they were official or semi-official dinner parties, given Dad's position, and while I think Sir Horrocks was among them, he could have been a face on the TV, filling the spot more recently filled by Sir de la Billière, who's knee I apparently sat on more than once, so who knows!

 

But . . . if he did come to the house on occasion, and if ten-year-olds can pick up the game and play it with "gusto", why didn't he bring me a copy? Yeah! You See? There's a question for the great man to answer, what happened to my free copy of Merit's 'game of skill' - Combat? I wouldn't have spent all those years wondering where my little matchbox of crude tanks (no aeroplanes) came from!

General rules (in black & white) army-specific rules (which I haven't read, in order to locate the differences?), cards and a dice, all the usual paraphernalia of a board-game with some degree or elements of complication/sophistication . . . which a ten yer-old can play with gusto!

The uncut sheets of topographical, geographical and foliant* elements of the battlefield. They are produced in a kind of smooth, but floppy PVC, which could be adhered to a similarly smooth surface, by the physical properties of friction applied though something called 'Lateral adhesion'.

Relatively common when I was a kid (car showroom price labels were a major application), there was quite a variety of novelty items in this material (including Merit's own Pocket Battleships - see here before at Small Scale World), think Fuzzy Felt without the fluff! And on the right, the gaming board!

*There doesn't seem to be a collective noun for greenery, but rather lots of type-specific ones, so I invented a word which looks and sounds good (after all Agent Orange was a de'foliant?), but it turns out 'foliant' is a type of book (with folded pages - like atlases), borrowed from German or Dutch, so feel free to insert one of the following: Canopy, Carpet, Forest, Landscape, Gleam, Grove, Hedge, Thicket, Verdure!**

**It's 'vegetative elements' isn't it? . . . Doh!

Having not read the rules yet, I have no idea if this set-up is even legal! But I gave the Red forces a decent arrow-punch to split Blue, but gave Blue superior air-assets in theatre, to devastate from above, and come back from the northern flank, rolling red toward the viewer! It's anybodies game, we just need to read the rules . . . or make some up!

 

This is what really interests me! Diesel-punk tanks in two sizes, one (the larger) looking like something the Russian's probably lost in the snows of Finland, the other looking like something the Russians expected their Paratroopers' to protect their heads from! Look to the Skies . . . Oooooffff!

 

Alongside which are aircraft with no visible means of motive power, but which still manage to look like scaled-down versions of those 1950's food premiums from Germany, probably made by Manurba!

F is for Follow-up - Remembrance Sunday

Which this is, all day! Brian Burke sent me some fascinating images yesterday, by way of a follow-up to the poppy post I left up yesterday morning, while waiting for my pick-up in the early hours, for onward transport to the toy show!

I think this is a lovely poppy! This (left) is an American one, and in Brian's own words;

 

"On the right UK, from some years ago when in the UK in October, on the left USA from two years ago. Hard to find here where Veterans Day is not the same meaning as UK and Poppies are sold by Veterans of Foreign Wars members (VFW Posts)"

 

I had no idea the American did them, albeit as a minority thing? And I love the little beady centre to the poppy, and the fact that it's got a more environmentally friendly wire stalk with green paper wrap, like those bunches of mushrooms, grapes or mini-baubles you can get for Christmas trees, flower arranging, cheese-boards &etc., and which are among the oldest surviving decorations still findable.

 

So many thanks to Brian for that speedy follow-up! I also think, Australia/NZ do them as well as Canada, are any of them different to the Haig Fund/British Legion ones, they must be, even if it's only the message in the centre?

And it's funny, I 'ummed & ahrred' about my last paragraph in the previous post, but decided - with everything else going on - to leave it in the post anyway, I do wear my heart on my sleeve, as well as a poppy on my breast, and subsequent events involving Tommy Yaxley-Lennon Robinson Wanker and his Right Wing mates attacking the Cenotaph (as Madame Cruella and the tabloid press, as good as invited them to) while the 'Left Wing' Ceasefire in Palestine march behaved itself elsewhere in London at the same time, only proved I was right to do so, that I was correct in speaking out.

The Left is right, and the Right is wrong, always has been, always will be . . . all of Human History is about the slow progress (oh so slow) of the Left, of tolerance, of liberal values, of science over 'belief', and the sacrifices in all wars are for that aim of a better world, not a worse one. In the last 15-odd years, the Global establishment as been dragging us into a worse world, and a bigger war is coming. Please, this day, of all days . . . Remember them.

A

R is for Remembrance

Those who've stuck with the Blog from the start will know there have been one or two false starts with other Blogs, one of which is still lying there dead, another was Other Collectables, a blog which was imported and subsumed by this one after about a year and a half, and 20-odd posts, to which I haven't added much since, although the idea is to have other collectables from time to time, and of which this could be seen as an addition.

A collection by default, and I'm sure many households in the UK (and Canada?) have this box, tub, tin or drawer somewhere on the premises? For those who don't know about 'Poppy Day', here in the UK, and Canada I believe, we commemorate our war dead, by wearing the Haig Fund poppies for a week or two leading-up to the nearest Sunday to the 11th Hour of the 11th of November.

 

Services of remembrance are held in most churches and/or at most war memorials, on the Sunday, for those who wish to join in, while more personal tributes can be undertaken in relative privacy away from (before or after) the organised activities, and small crosses can be left, wreaths &etc., which remain up until the end of November in some cases, while two-minutes silences are held nationwide at 11 a.m. on the 11th (of the 11th Month, the time and day the armistice came into effect, at the close of the First World War), whether before or after the Sunday.

 

These are the poppies we wear, they represent the poppies which thrived on the war-broken ground of Flanders fields and the mud of no-mans-land, as they always do on construction sites and spoil-heaps, to this day.

 

But having made your contribution, and worn your poppy, two things become pressing upon its disposal, one, you must have the morality to buy a new one next year, not reuse your old one, and two, there seems something disrespectful in throwing away something which represents our own dead ancestors - so in the box, tub, tin or drawer they go!

 

This enables the above picture, which shows the evolution of the Remembrance Poppy in my lifetime, with a heavy, felted-card one on the left, a bit like blotting-paper, but it didn't immediately disintegrate when it got wet (which was quite common back then), it comes with a long-stalked and quite thick 'stem'.

 

Then four sub-versions of the current one, the flower now in impressed cartridge-paper, first with a shorter, thinner stalk, then the addition of a piece of foliage, thirdly, a side-branch/catch was added to help keep it in the button-hole, and finally the side-branch then got remanufactured in heavier plastic as they had a tendency to pull-off

 

Alongside the final version is the all paper one which has been gaining usage in the last few years, and will probably become the norm, as we try to phase unnecessary plastics out of common use.

 

Top right I have doubled-up an old sun-faded pink one, something we used to do with the old ones when we were kids, you could get two or three under the button before it started threatening to pop-off, which this was, as I shot it, I think the two pieces of foliage were one too many!

The four stalks, oldest on the left, current on the right, the message in the centre of the button changed from Haig Fund to Poppy Appeal sometime in the 1990's I think, and the whole exercise is to raise money for the British (or Canadian) Legion, a charity which supports ex-servicemen, and provides social venues open to the whole community, but specifically aimed at ex-servicemen.

The oldest and newest on the left, with two versions of the all-paper one on the right, a selection is provided at each collection stand/table (often manned by ex-servicemen or their widows), and here we have one with a sticky patch and the other to be pinned-through with the dress-makers pins provided.

Other poppies exist, I have a huge eight or ten-inch lump of polyethylene vehicle-badge somewhere, which were common for a while around the turn of the century, attached to the radiator with a cable-tie (mine was on my Cittrowaan, a BX19 GTI RocketShip!), and they are still available I think, but the famous 'reserve' of the British has rather rendered them a bit naff and/or show-off'y, and due to their cost, people assume the owners are reusing them every year - shock horror! Also, the changing design ethic of motor-vehicles means more and more of them have nowhere to locate the poppy!

They were originally silk, and hand-made by disabled veterans, and there must have been other designs over the decades between 1919'ish and the 1970's when my felted big-boy was made and procured, probably compulsorily at school! But if you chose to collect them, I'm sure you could have years of fun tracking them all down?

 

A lot of the officers wives' used to have jewelled-silver broaches from Garrards, but they knew to wear them on their dress or blouse and make sure they had a fresh Haig on their coat or jacket, and you can get the enamelled 'pins' from the sellers every year, if you are a pin-head - what pin-badge collectors call themselves!

We'll be at the Sandown Park toy fair today, and at 11 a.m., there will be two minutes silence, wherever you are, please remember them, because they died for a better world, not the intolerant fascist one Rishi and Cruella are trying to create. Not the illiterately idiotic one Truss nearly foisted on us, and not the murderously immature one, Boris and eye-test-man ran for nearly two years, but then . . . none of them have served five minutes in the forces, yet they've all gone down to Lullworth, Warminster or somewhere, to drive a tank!

G is for Gun Again!

Pretty sure we've seen both of these before, but I managed to shoot them together while they were off to storage a while back, and it's a quick reminder that BP Fairs Sandown park toy fair is tomorrow, all day, and it'll be a good one, because the weather forecast is fine, just the place to pick-up vintage Merit guns!

Slight colour variation between batches, but the important element is the change from wooden to plastic wheels, and that's it really, Merit Gun, the Merit tag will reveal the box somewhere as well I think.

C is for Clipper and Cable Car!

A couple more novelty, card-packaging vehicles, and first we'll have another bus, but it's not flogging chocolate bars this time, rather tea leaves! Although, why do they call them tea leaves when they are little crumbs of tea-leaves? Leaf-tea I get, tea-leaves I don't!

 

You can make a decent collection of this stuff, and that's how I've ended up with a dozen or more (no, I only scanned these four, so the rest can wait for another day!), I'd bid on a junk lot of railway accessories, and when it can time to pay for and collect them, it turned out there were two boxes under the table, with the same lot-number, full of miscellaneous bus-stuff!

 

Our scalers are a little younger now, school-kid sized, next to the conductor, who's around the 40mm mark, and again we have a product-related number-plate. The '49' still runs from Clapham Junction up to Shepherd's Bush and back, I have myself ridden it once or twice, but not for over a decade. Clipper - who still seem to be going - aren't actually on the route, being from the West Country!

While the Cable Car contained four Wispa bars. I think these might have been a present from someone who didn't know me too well, as I hate Wispa bars, a cheap, claggy rip-off of Aero, and with hardly any bubbles, quite disgusting, and I thought they'd ceased to exist (Caramac just died, so it's Gold Bars or nothing kids!), but was disappointed to see a heap of them in Sainsbury's this afternoon!

F is for Farm Follow-up to the Farm Follow-up!

I found the March 1955 Tudor Rose leaflet sorting other stuff over the last few days, paperwork; don't yah just hate it? And it has the farm set! Which (previous Post) is about six Posts down this page.

No wonder the animals have been coming in so slowly and so few at-a-time, allowing for losses and damage, you need to find the remains of a lot of sets to find all the animals in all the possible colours, although it's starting to look like the fencing was only ever manufactured in brown.

 

The wagon is a version of the nodding-horse wagons, popular at the time, but instead of the cam-wheel under the horses, a more complicated arrangement of sliding draw-bars seems to have been employed, presumably to get round someone else (Thomas/Acme, Dillon-Beck, Hardy?)'s patent/copyright?

D is for Double Deckers and Double Decker's

Which is important because one of them is a single decker! B is also for a Blast from Christmases Past!

 

Christmas (and Easter) is a time when all the chocolate manufacturers, some of the biscuit makers and a few other snack-food guys like to play with the packaging (and pricing) as part of the consumer-fest which is the Western holiday season, and Cadbury's iconic Double Decker bars used to pull all the stops out, I haven't seen anything like this for years though, now it's all more blatant 'multi-packs' . . . sniff!

 

The actual, big red double decker 'London' bus, even though it's actually in the distinctive orange of the Double Decker bars, and it contained four bars so it's a bit broader that UK roads would allow-for, especially with all the cycle lanes we have now!

 

Posed with two of the 30mm copies of Commonwealth national costume ladies/dolls of the world, and calling for a bus to stop with an Alpine Horn wouldn't endear you to a British bus crew, no matter how multicultural the area!

 

Please note: the mug says 'I think, therefore I am not a Daily Mail reader'!

The weird thing about this is that it came out long before the UK had 'bendy-busses', yet was almost certainly a UK specific issue? It's also presaging the corporate colours of Stagecoach, many years before the chaos of privatisation! And I hope you've noticed the number-plates, on both models!

This too, was four bars, but two in-line stacked pairs (double-decked Double Deckers!) so is better proportioned. The Esquimau is slightly overdressed for our climate, and waving a raw, unwrapped fish is not going to go down well with the other passengers, these girls aren't really helping themselves fit-in with the locals, are they?!

B is for Bright Red Bonus!

Getting into the Christmassy spirit with this little charmer, I think this in the third or fourth piece of horse-drawn, washing-power premium we've had here on Small Scale World now, courtesy of Bonux in France, and there's not much to add to what will be on the tag, via the previous posts, so enjoy . . .

 

The horse is a variation of the old Britains Hollow-cast horse which gave us all the Bergan-Airfix-Riesler-Reamsa-F&G horses, but in a less active pose, and the red is almost orange, so I guess 'scarlet' is the term!

Grabbed this from an evilBay auction back in May '21, you can see Bonux issued all sorts of pocket-money stuff, you'd also expect to find on carded rack-toy sets, individually in Christmas cracker, or lucky-bags, or even larger capsules in 'gum-ball' machines. We looked at some of the 'planes way back at the beginning of the Blog, and I keep meaning to track down a couple of the trains to compare with Kinder and Hong Kong's efforts!

U is for Updates - Various

I've added, or started a wants/swaps page above, as and when I will add things I'm after, and things I have to swap in the hope of mutually filling gaps in collections, it's not got much on it, but it will grow, and the pictures of the swaps will disappear once a deal is done!

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/p/wants-swaps.html

 

 

I added a Type 3 copy Astronaut set from Grandmother Stover's to the Giant Blog, a week ago, here;

https://butisitgiant.blogspot.com/2023/11/grandmother-stovers-c3-spacemen.html

 

 

And a whole bunch of HO-OO additions went in on the Airfix Blog a few weeks ago, can't remember what they all were now, but about 12 pages got new text, images or scans.

http://airfixfigs.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

I've also dealt with a couple of recent comments over there and will check the other Blogs later, at the moment I'm not getting the notifications, and tend to only cheak this 'Home Blog' daily, it's because of the Hotmail problem, so it's still maverickatlarge[at]gmail[dot]com for the time being!

 

 

And here's a gratuitous picture of something . . . I'm just going to find in Picasa!

 

Hamley's 1972

K is for Crescent!

Because they're Kellogg's of course! Quick box-ticker here now, we've seen them before, again, more than once I think, but they are fun nevertheless, and most kids had some in their biscuit-tin or cigar-box of such things!

Complete set, all with the Kellogg's bases, and therefore sold (given away!) unpainted, six Native American Indians, relatively generic I think . . . mid-plains Indians? And pretty nice sculpts, with three fighting, one dancing, one . . . dancing with fire, or fighting? And a 'How' character!

 

Crescent marked on the left, Kellogg's to the right, he may have lost paint or be a late issue, late Crescent Wild West could be unpainted, or one paint. There are subtle differences between the two sculpts, but it seems Crescent had multiple cavities for at least these, and both 54 & 60mm Combat Infantry sets, maybe others?

 

A painted and paint-loss Cresent above, Kellogg's pair below, I used to think the pointy bases were an early thing, but Cereal Offers have both with the kneeling firer (link below), so it's obviously just a cavity thing?

More here;

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2017/06/t-is-for-ticking-boxes.html

 

And Cereal Offers has them here;

http://cerealoffers.com/Kelloggs/Frosties/1950s/Indian_Warriors/indian_warriors.html

T is for They're Only Robots!

I know, I know! It's not Christmas yet, but everything else is out of the way over here (they've still got 'Thanksgiving' over there), so we can begin to get in the spirit, can't we? It's not like I've put a tree up or anything, and, b't . . . THEY'RE ROBOTS! Remember we had that trio of heavy, resin lumps of Robot, Christmas tree decoration from Poundland a year or two ago, well, check these plastic puppies out!

In Homebase now! And they are ridiculously cheap at a Pound, or even 90p each, I can't remember, but it was pin-money! They are only blow-moulded plastic, and normally I try only to buy glass ornaments (tradition), but we had that blow-moulded astronaut from Primark a few years ago, so why not, especially 'cos they're ROBOTS!

 

There's three! There's three of them, and did I say: they're ROBOTS!

F is for Follow-up & Farm, S is for Seen Elsewhere, T*R is for Tudor Rose

Third visit to these I think, but that may be my posting elsewhere, whatever, these are examples of the colours you can find, the early, hard, glassy styrene Tudor Rose farm animals manufactured in.

Seen elsewhere, a while ago now, so far cows are in the lead, but I think when this sample (now in storage), the original sample (always in storage of some sort, so far) and the last shot here (below) are brought together the pigs will win by a nose!

 

The cows in their corral!

So, we now have a white pig, but I wonder if it will be a long wait for a grey one, which will leave sheep as a joint first (assuming they don't have a pink version), but if neither have a brown iteration, it will be four-all across the board!

And we now have a black pony, although I think there are one or two in the never-seen sample? Finding the colours has become a fun game, as they only ever come-in in dribs and drabs, and colours within each sample seem tight to two or three, so they may have gone-out as batches. There are also several shades of white, which I'm ignoring for now, and so fare the fences have only been seen in brown, but white and black should be believable?

J is for Japanese Machine Gun/Gunners

Paul Woozley kindly sent these in, in response to a conversation on one of the old Almark  / Minimodels posts, with reference to my comment of never having seen the Japanese MG and team;

They had to be there, as both figures were on the Almark reissue runners, but they aren't on the four-page gatefold flyer, and I'd never seen one despite sorting a large collection of these for someone else, a collection with had multiples of the US mortar and mule, and the German version gun-team, indeed I think the baseplate and MG are the same as the German one?

But it's nice to see them in the distinctive Minimodels paint scheme and plastic colour, so many thanks to Paul for sending them, and if anyone can help Paul with a replacement/spare machine-gun, I can get you both in-touch.