About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

WD is for War Department...

...the precursor to the modern Ministry of Defence (MoD), and the title of the range of WWII figures Almark produced in part from ex-Minimodels plastics moulds and by returning to the original sculptor to expand the range with Germans (small scale) or fill gaps (54mm range) in metal.

Two sets of British Infantry were issued and two packaging types appeared, always sold on the sprue there was an 'infantry' sprue and a 'support weapons' sprue. Much anticipated and covered after release by Military Modelling, they appeared [1970/71?] several years after the Triang Battle Game [1968'ish] that had first featured them.

It must however be assumed that the idea was always for someone to market them, as the Set WD-2 sprue was never utilised for/in the earlier Battle Game? Maybe the Battle Game was dreamt-up for Christmas while they ironed out teething problems with the mould for the second set?

Poses and contents - Set WD-1 to the top left; WD-2 - top right. Below them are the Triang playing-pieces with their locating studs/spigots, and right at the bottom; a couple without helmet paint which probably came from an outworker somewhere in the Havent area, being bought at a car-boot sale on the A3 out of Portsmouth.

The helmet paint code was dealt with on the Battle Game post, but I'll repeat it here, green is troops, brown is engineer, red were the NCO's and white the Officer.

The latter [1972/3?] German 'foe' were available as 5 poses each of regular infantry (early war uniforms) or paratroops, sculpted by the same Charles C Stadden who had designed the plastic figures. Initially sold on the same (now sticky) vacuum-sealed cards as the plastic figures, they soon moved to the more common type of shop stock-box that Minifigs, Hinchliffe and others were using.

It has to be said; these knocked the socks off Airfix 1st version Germans and Combat Group, and probaly led directly to the Airfix 2nd versions being released a year or three later [1974-77'ish].

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