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| Original Britains Totem |
Its funny how small events can lead to much bigger impacts over time. When I was a kid, my dad was always bringing me toys and models home, either with the intention of encouraging my education, or as I would prefer to think, so that he could enjoy them himself too. One such toy was Britains and Timpo Cowboys and Indians. When I was about 6 or 7, TV was always showing westerns, such as Bonanza, High Chapparal and countless john Wayne films. Being a big space fan I always found these tedious and uninteresting and basically the same plot, rejigged and shown over and over again.
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| Brass copy of Britains Totem |
Nevertheless, Dad bought me a handful of cowboys and indians to supplement the army of soldiers and spacemen that I already had. These toys, however I always found a bit misplaced, as I couldn't really engage with them, apart from standing them up and admiring the garish colours, or swapping about the torsos and legs to make even more garish combinations of bank robber or high plains drifter. The highlight of the series for me was the Indian canoe, which I could actually float in the sink and play with. This was accompanied by a wigwam, a chief figure in full headdress, a medicine man and a squaw with tightly bundled papoose. All these terms I had culled from tv and film westerns and which as far as I knew, were correct. Also, I assumed, every indian camp had to have a totem pole too, so my little plastic camp also had one of them.
The original pole must have been self coloured plastic, as by the time I got it, my dad had fetched out the Airfix enamels and painted up the thunderbird and other figures on the sides, in suitably vivid colours - most notably a bright cobalt blue, which came in a lovely tapered bottle with a screw lid and sat in his paintbox with another bottle of bright yellow. I suspect these were probably left over from his kit building days, making Kitmaster railway kits. The pole, as it wasn't a figure, always bemused me slightly, as apart from looking a bit weird, with its monster like figures, it wasn't much use in terms of play. So for years, it languished in the toybox along with the wigwam.
Fast forward about 15 years and my aspirations had moved on to artistic pursuits and other weirdness. My mum was always keen to encourage my pursuits as much as my dad and having visited the local market in Speke one day, she spotted a little statuette on a junk stall and bought it for me for a few pence. When I got home from work that evening, she gave it me and told me it was a totem pole, like she had seen in Canada, some years before. It was black resin and carved in a similar fashion to the Timpo one, with big eyed creatures and sinuous figures. I displayed it proudly on a a shelf with my other nick-nacks. It was perhaps twelve months later, that I found another from the same series, inscribed on the base with the makers name, 'Boma'.
Around about the same time, with the advent of the 'New Romantic' movement in music, Spandau Ballet released their second single 'Paint Me Down', which apart from disappearing into the bargain bins, included some wonderful west coast Salish art on the sleeve.
I was intruigued by the strangely contemporary and fluid style of art and tried to find out a little more about it by visiting the local library. Needless to say, there wasn't much information available in 1982. I did manage to locate a single book, the excellent 'Primitive Art' by Frank Boas, but the dense and academic text didn't really tell me what I needed to know.
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| Marx Totem |
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| Marx HK Copy |
Fast forward another decade and the advent of the internet and ebay, meant that the dark and dusty corners of my collecting habits could be examined in much greater detail and one day, feeling a bit bored, I searched for 'Boma Totem Pole' on ebay. The doors of my perception were not exactly blown off, but were certainly oiled and given a slick new coat of varnish. Suddenly, I discovered that the little black totems were part of a range of tourist gifts, sold in Canada and Alaska and that the majority of totems were not found on the plains of Arizona and Utah, but on the shores of the Pacific West Coast of Canada. The style of art as exhibited by the Haida, Kawakiutl and other peoples was amazingly modern and sophisticated, given its history and these model poles were as ubiquitous as representations of the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower or Empire State
So another rabbit hole yawned before me and before I knew what was happening, I had dived in and was picking up model poles for a few pounds on a regular basis. Almost all of them are made of a black resin composite, designed to look like the mineral 'argylite', a soft black slate like material, used by the indiginous peoples to make jewellery and other artefacts. Other pieces were a brown or amber resin, to reflect wooden carvings. Very rarely, I found an carved wooden piece, with a name inscribed in the back, some of which were practice pieces and others made purely for the tourist industry. The workmanship is always very fine and meticulous and some of the artists can command high prices on the current market.
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| Original Boma Totem |
As with the little Timpo pole, other manufacturers made toy totem poles to supplement their figure ranges and after I had exhausted the ready supply of Boma pieces on ebay, I began to look at toy versions. The Timpo model had been copied endlessly by Hong Kong and Chinese makers and I even have a brass version of the same design. Marx made a simple yellow and red pole and many other rack toys included an odd looking pole in with a handful of cowboy figures. Kelloggs included a small stackable totem in their cereals in 1970, Avon made a fine ornamental bottle for their 'Wild Woods' aftershave and Playmobil included four different modular totem poles with their figures.
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| Kelloggs / R & L Totem Tribe Premiums |
So the possibilities of collecting totems, toys or otherwise went from very small beginnings to a huge range of memorabilia, which is still very popular today, with Boma still producing products today.
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| Playmobil Modern Totems |
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| Avon 'Wild Woods' Aftershave 1974 |
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| Japanese Mi-Ken Clock Totem |
The very latest addition to my burgeoning collection arrived just today, from the extremely generous Tony K, a rare and unusual plastic totem from the Madelman toy range, and item which has somehow managed to elude me for several years!
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| Tony K's Madelman Totem Potlatch |
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| Britains Indian Camp |
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| Swoppet Cowboys and Indians |
