The Triang Zone: Tanks for the Memory

Back in the late 1950's, some years before I was born, my dad began a small work which I would years later, take up. He had always been a keen railway enthusiast and collected magazines and books, made models and copied copious details on the various rolling stocks of the UK in volumes of notebooks. When in 1962, I was born, he must have realised that here was a crying, squealing excuse to start buying toys and model trains for my futurity, but more importantly, for his own enjoyment. Whilst touring the model shops and toy stores, he picked up reams of catalogues and leaflets, storing them away in a cupboard at home. Thanks to his magpie instinct, I have been left now, some ten years after his passing, with an invaluable archive of ephemeral paperwork. He would often let me browse through the box of old Airfix, Matchbox and Hornby catalogues as a boy, but it was only when I had unrestricted access to the books that I began to discover the less obvious inclusions in the collection.

One noteable item is the apparently diminutive Triang Minic catalogue. Just about 3" high and about 1.5" when folded, it opens out into a concertina arrangement of panels showing the whole Minic Clockwork range.

 The early range of toys covers all manner of cars and vehicles and the catalogue also shows some of Triangs early plastic toys such as the Jabberwocky, Loch Ness Monster and Spider.

As a boy, besides space toys and rockets, I also loved Army vehicles. The Minic range included a small armoured car and a Sherman Tank. As I was not familiar with the old Minic toys, I assumed that the majority would be small clockwork models in the vein of similar clockwork tanks I had as a boy. A few years ago, I found a Minic Sherman advertised on ebay for a few pounds and bought it. It was only when it arrived, that I discovered to my surprise that it was in fact a huge, weighty toy - some eight inches long with a mighty clockwork motor and a bellows arrangement inside that blew powdery smoke. The model I bought had damage to the motor and the main spring had burst open the body and was in bad repair, but it also came with a dilapidated box too.

Shortly after I found a later version of the tank too with an eye to make one whole working version, but I only managed to recover the tracks.

On further inspection of Triang catalogues from the beginning of the sixties, I noticed that the tank was a regular feature each Christmas.

This undated catalogue (presumably 1958-1960) has some wonderful monochrome illustrations of the toys and also includes Triangs very first foray into the space theme, the tinplate and plastic 'Space Cruiser'. This carried a flying propellor on the back in the style of the much later Nuclear Pulse. Also visible on the page are vehicles from the 'Push and Go' series such as the aeroplane transporter and Missile Carrier.

The last catalogue shown here certainly displays the variety of toys made by Lines Bros at the time, everything from the new Comet Airliner to a clockwork Crab! Its interesting to note that early releases of the Sherman Tank have a standard US Army star on the turret, but the later release shown in the Xmas special brochure above, designed to promote a dedicated TV commercial on the new medium, shows a different 'atomic' style logo. This logo would appear again on several other toys as we shall see shortly.