LET'S START AT THE BEGINNING .......

I'm going to go back a few years now.

My whole life I'd been carrying round memories of the cool Project SWORD toys I'd had as a kid in the Sixties. I adored those sleek big rockets back then and still did in my head.

But what to do with those memories? 

It was the coalescing of two icons that nudged me towards the answer.

In 1989 I saw Batman at the cinema, the Burton Keaton masterpiece and noticed all its fabulous toys in the shops afterwards. I remembered that I loved toys! Later that year I found an old battered Dinky SPV in a junk shop and bam! It dawned on me that nostalgia was tangible and my old toys were still around!

But, was Project SWORD?

I think it was 1990 when I got the reply to that. I was 29 and had begun to visit my first toy fairs. It was at a small Normanton Evening Toy Fair, where, incredulously, I found a boxed SWORD Space Glider. It was £20, more back then than it is now, but I shelled out willingly and came home as happy as I was on Christmas Day in 1967, when I'd just turned 7 and first got the Glider.

Around the same time as finding the Glider I discovered Model Mart Magazine, having it delivered to my home like I did Look-In comic back in the day! It was great fun and on cold winter bus rides to work I gleefully devoured Model Mart from cover to cover every month. It was in those hallowed pages that I first came across such vintage toy luminaries as Andy Foley of TV Toy Zone and the late great Jim 'Mr. Star Wars' Stevenson and their marvellous listings, which also included .... Project SWORD toys!

Having then bought a boxed Century 21 Zero-X from Andy Foley - for £60 - I advertised in Model Mart for further information about Project SWORD [and SpaceX] from its readers, as I was now hooked. As a result Chris Avis, a fellow toy fan, based in London, contacted me and over the next five years or so Chris was able to find every SWORD vehicle I needed for my growing collection, including big stars like the Cape Kennedy Set and the Apollo Saturn Rocket, together with the those three elusive Scouts 1,2 and 3.

The internet hadn't yet properly arrived so finding out about Project SWORD was not that easy. I had written to Century 21 Toys and received replies from Keith Shackleton, but sadly he didn't recall much. I also wrote to Martin Bower, Phil Rae, Bill Bruegman, Marc Frattasio, Fanderson and Dennis Nicholson.

I also got hold of the Annual - which I loved as a kid - and the two Make a Model Books. TV21 and SOLO comics still eluded me but new information was now trickling through as a result of hooking up with fellow enthusiasts Bill B and Paul V - both looking into SpaceX toys - and Will O.

Will O. sent me photostats of a contemporary trade article featuring two 'new' SWORD vehicles, the Moonship and the Lunar Climber. Having never seen either of them in the flesh I was thrilled to get a tinplate Moonship from my contact Chris A, together with some larger LP Spacemen. We were both convinced that the Moonship was THE Moonship and the spacemen were from the never-seen Moonbase Set. But as I say verifying anything pre-internet was difficult and we didn't know that we were wrong on both counts! Some small comfort was gained later from knowing that the original article from 1967 was also wrong as neither the Moonship or the Lunar Climber had anything to do with Project SWORD!

During this period, in the mid-1990's, I'd begun work on a Project SWORD Checklist and eventually had enough information to publish it online, simultaneously on Kelly Lannan's TV21 site and Brian Hayes' Alphadrome site, where I believe its still available!

Some things were simply not known to me back then, for instance I thought Tarheel and T in a Circle were the same company, as they both had T logos. I also firmly believed that the SWORD Nuclear Ferry and the Moonbase Playset didn't exist.

This Checklist was followed by a small Project SWORD Toys website on Yahoo, which garnered some further contacts with fellow fans. I'd also begun work on a more complex site to include SpaceX, Roxy, LP and so on and was being tutored in a programme called Dreamweaver by my daughter's boyfriend to get it online. Alas, this came to nothing for some reason but glimpses of it remain here on this blog.

It was around this time, in the early Noughties, that I turbo-charged my basic Moonzero Toys mail order thing and had begun to buy and sell vintage toys in earnest, standing at toy fairs, selling on Ebay [I was a PowerSeller!] and eventually gave up my job to do this full-time [I didn't like my job anyway!], which I carried on until about 2007, under the moniker of Madaboutmonsters.

I recall meeting Will O. for the first time in the flesh at the Castle Donnington toy fair, where I was standing at my stall with my friend Mark. I had a good selection of Moon Prospectors on offer; the Argentinian Chibi and T in a Circle versions. I think it it was the Chibi that caught Will's eye and we got talking, only then realising that we had been corresponding with each other for years and that Will was indeed Will and I was me! I think Will bought the Chibi Prospector!

Selling old toys full-time isn't easy and making a living from it even harder. Only a few make it I imagine. I'd already had to get a part-time job to supplement Madaboutmonsters and eventually ran out of steam and capital around late 2007.

In 2008 I was out walking the family dog Blue. We had gone to our favourite spot, an incline within the local woods. I would kick the ball down it and Blue would hurtle after it and pelt back up and place the ball at my feet again! Like Captain America Blue could have done this all day and it was during one of our walkies that the idea for a Project SWORD blog was born. I'd already messed with a basic horror-based blog page on blogger called The Towering Peaks of Monsterdom, so the switch one night to Project SWORD was easy. 

At midnight on Monday 15th September 2008 I posted my very first thing on Moonbase Central, a SpaceX toys photo archive by way of a test shot https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2008/09/spacex-archive.html. 

Then after a decent night's kip I posted my first proper article around 10am and, coming full-circle, it was one that I had written as the foreword to my original Project SWORD Checklist ten years earlier!

The post was entitled Dream Rockets and with the help of Bill B, Scoop, Paul V, Arto, The Philosophic Toad, Darth and Andy B in those very early months in the winter of 2008/09, the rest, as they say, is ...........

So thank you.