Mooch Ado About Bedale

 A recent visit to the lovely North Yorkshire town of Bedale found me mooching in a toy shop.

This display of military action dolls and vehicles drew me in.

This Lookout Out Tower brought back happy memories of my Action Man assault tower.

I do like the look of these modern figures like these World Peacekeepers.

And this Combat Tank for the smaller soldiers appears to be the business! 

And speak of the devil, good old Action Man made an appearance too! A display of modern re-issues. I was SO tempted at £20 each but my gripping hands resisted! 

Would you have readers?

Combat Picture Annual 1962

 

I picked up a non-jacketed hardback copy of this interesting book tother week, in a garden centre of all places (South Milford), which often seem to have a few second hand bits and bobs in a corner these days (do you visit garden centres?)

It's an unusual book, at least to me, as it's a novel sized hardback full of black and white army comic strips dated 1962. I assume it's a digest of comics or?

This example I saw online and had it's dust jacket is rather smart indeed.

The strips include (courtesy of LetsGoCommando)

* 

Addendum:

You can read much much more about this book online by an enthusiast, nothingbutafan.

https://nothingbutafan.wordpress.com/2016/06/20/another-pleasant-valley-sunday/

ED'S HAULERS: Pyro Small Army Flatbed Truck w-Auto

Here's the last of my Army transporters,

Like the Banner transporter, this Pyro truck is quite small. 

Pyro made quite a nice series of small-sized Army vehicles that also included a couple of boats. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, they never made an appropriately sized contingent of Little Green Army Men to go with them.

From Camp Vegas

Ed

USA

ED'S HAULERS: TMT-18420 Flatbed w-Army Tank

I never got around to taking this out of the box and doing a full photo work-up on it. 

'TMT' = 'Taylor Made Trucks' and they made a series of interesting trucks back in the '90s including this flatbed with Sherman tank load. 

They also made transporters with Lionel cabooses, engines, and other cars as loads - none of which I have.

From Camp Vegas

Ed

WAR POST

 With sombre D-Day celebrations having taken place in Normandy yesterday I thought I'd dig out a few mementos from my late Mum and Dad, who both fought in World war II; Mum WAFs, Dad Navy.

Here's an old 1940's Christmas card.

To my Dad, I don't know who the sender is.

Here's another Xmas card possibly by the same sender. The motif on the front says Per Ardua Ad Astra. I assume its the RAF.

A similarly motifed card, this time with a photograph of an unknown plane.

A photograph of an unknown lady riding a military motorcycle of unknown make. I guess she was a friend of my Mum's in the WAF.

The taller chap was the husband of my Parents' old friend Peggy, who emigrated to the states after the War I think. I think this is an American airfield but I don't know the plane.

Post-War excitement blossomed with the Festival of Britain in 1951 in London. At the left hand side you can see the tall spear-like Skylon. I wonder what happened to that Fifties icon? Did you or your parents visit the Festival?

Leaving the Forties and Fifties behind here's me being fed something by my Dad at Butlins circa 1961 with Mum looking on and explaining something to me!

Everyone got white rolls. I still love them!

Around the same time, here's my older brother holding me up with his hands full, a packet of unknown sweets and an unknown toy soldier. I think my brother has a mouth full too!

WW2 Recognition Training Models

During WW2 Recognition models were made to teach aircraft, ship, and tank identification to military and civilian personnel. 

Being three-dimensional, they could be studied from any angle, and would look just like the real thing, when seen at a distance.

Some were made of wood, plastic, metal, or even cardboard. This very interesting short video from You Tube shows a pair of WW2 recognition models of the Brewster SB2A Buccaneer dive bomber, British name Bermuda.

The usual solid black plastic type - with a surprising amount of surface detail for such a model, and a cardboard outline only type, made from heavy black card. A great look at such rare models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us2wIPtDln8

Paul Adams from New Zealand

Bunker Down

Despite the Cold War and Second World War receding into the past their relics seem to be topical again and specifically, shelters.

On the BBC Travel show last night the presenter was taken through so-called ghost Underground  rail stops in Berlin to a truly vast subterranean fall out shelter with huge rooms containing hundreds of bunk beds. It could feed two thousand people and even had it's own air filtration system. Long abandoned, it looked to be in working order to me but the Regierung have decided it's too dear to fix up shelters like these, of which there are many in Germany.

Unterwelt Berlin 

A few years back the Missus, Bill and me visited a similarly complex set-up in York, not too far from Moonbase. Unlike the Berlin shelter, the public can visit the York Cold War Bunker with the National Trust owning it. 

National Trust

It was fascinating to see the web of miniature shelters spread out across Yorkshire, including a tiny military two-manner literally up the road from our house! Recently sold to a private buyer, you can still see old pics of it's interior online.

https://www.subbrit.org.uk/sites/upton-roc-post/

When I was a kid the neighbours had an air-raid shelter in the garden. A remnant of WWII, they kept their two big smelly dogs in it! There were bunkers out on the Ribble estuary too I seem to recall. 

Here's one near Preston Docks as was.

Tony Worrall

I probably made one for my Action Men in the garden. After all, it was only twenty years since the end of World War Two when I was five.

Little bunkers pop up in the British landscape over the place and some much older fortifications stem from much older conflicts including entire sea-forts in Wales left behind from the Napoleonic Wars! 

As I write I'm keenly aware of perhaps the biggest surface bunker I've ever seen. It's literally a hundred feet from where I'm lead in bed writing! As big as a block of flats, the Kuniberg bunker is gargantuan reminder of the futility of war and the paper-thin lessons of history. Massive, monolithic, forbidding, its right next to our bakery! 

Recklinghauser Zeitung

Having just watched Fallout on Prime I suppose shelters are on my mind. Having said that, a quick dose of the global News and the worlds trembling silos I feel like hunkering down too sometimes.

Have you got a bunker near you readers or a relic of some past struggle?

A SHELTERED LIFE

This strange construction is the capped entrance of a cold war two-man underground shelter not too far from Moonbase. 

A sobering structure to say the least, it sits on top of a ridge commanding superb views of a big sky.

For further reading you can go here.

Have you a cold war relic near you?

Bloggiversary Finale: Then and the Art of War: Sea Power

There have been a number of posts recently about ships and boats, but the definitive boat toys for me have to be the Deluxe Reading or Topper Toys range. Topper were responsible for the Johnny Seven gun, the Tiger Joe Tank, Johnny Astro and Johnny Speed toys, but also the wonderful Cape Canaveral Rocket Base and Armoured Battalion sets. All the toys were big, substantial and made to appeal to boys! All the space and army toys bristle with cannons, rockets and missiles and almost all of them launch or fire in some way. The Task Force set is no exception and the stand alone destroyer toy, the U.S.S Battlewagon was the ultimate in boat toys.

 

The Battlewagon is a huge toy, a good three feet of battery powered plastic, which rolled along on wheels, blasting off rockets, planes, shells and torpedoes. You can see it in action on this You Tube link:

https://youtu.be/_7KnQSWB7cw?feature=shared

The downside of this amazing toy is that it is a horror to try and photograph, as it’s massive! You can see it below in my fully featured studio, complete with microwave, that it takes up all the worktop!

But just as the Topper adverts proudly proclaim, “You get all this!” A bank of firing cannons on the front deck, torpedo launchers, jet catapult and anti-aircraft missiles to the stern.

The missiles on the back are the same ‘Nike Hercules’ type that come with the Cape Canaveral Missile bank, discriminated by red nose cones, rather than black.

I was really lucky to find all three ships in a loose lot many years ago on eBay, with almost all the accessories included. I have never tried to start up the Battlewagon, as it takes the really hefty C cell batteries, but all the wiring looks intact. The Anson signal light was missing along with the battery cover, too.

Next we have the Task Force, which consists of a destroyer, motor patrol boat and a target float.

The Destroyer was in good shape overall, even coming with original shells and depth charges. However, the little landing craft was missing, so I had to build one out of an old Aurora ‘Anzio Beach’ model.

The Destroyer has launching depth charges at rear and a large turret on the front, along with a crane to hold the landing craft. All models come with a full crew of figures, each about 1/55 scale, around an inch or so high.

The Patrol Boat has a large red missile on the front and two gun turrets. This was missing part of the central mast, but was otherwise in good order.

Earlier last month, I spotted a pair of Topper boats on eBay, both looking a little weather beaten and forlorn, so I grabbed them and took them home to the shipyards!

As the destroyer was missing quite a bit of the main bodywork, I fashioned a new cabin arrangement and funnel, then replaced the landing craft bay with a new crane and a mini-sub pen. An old Action Man Anson lamp formed a searchlight on the rear. The sub comes direct from Bluebird Zero Hour, which is just a slightly smaller scale at around 1/65.

The patrol boat was again, a bit of a blank canvas, as a lot of the surface detail had gone. I was able to attach a large torpedo bay from an old army playset and reposition the frigates depth charge launcher on the front. Zero Hour accessories in the form of oil tanks made excellent cannisters and some of the small boxes and other parts were used as detail.

The torpedoes were mounted on the sides in classic patrol boat style, but can only be launched from the rear. A few spare radar arrays and aerials completed the outfitting of both vessels and my daughter kindly fashioned some new vinyl decals for both ships, including a new Submarine Hunter designation for the destroyer.

The second boat had slightly different colours too, which made it easier to give it the look of a different model.

And of course, what’s the use of having all these submarine warfare vessels on hand if there’s no enemy vessels to hunt? So I took another playset toy, in the form of a submarine and used that as the quarry!