Oddities

 

I have had a couple of interesting queries in the last few days and maybe some readers will have some useful advice to assist in reaching a conclusion on them. Usually the 'odd' models which collectors show me have a pretty obvious explanation but these two have troubled me.

The first looks really quite simple at first glance. You might also jump to the conclusion that an owner of the Commer Construction Gift Set 24 illustrated below has simply remodelled the right hand section in the middle to incorporate some tyres.

If you look at the original issue, as shown first above, you'll see that there are two problems with that conclusion. First, the centre 'posts' for the tyres do not appear to be in line with where the dividing piece of polystyrene might have been and, secondly, the depth of the right hand section there looks much less than it would be on an original piece.

In favour of someone remodelling the polystyrene, it isn't a particularly neat job, although cutting a circular section and leaving a pillar is not that easy, and there is no room for the bench and milkman on the left. I cannot imagine any official Corgi production or sample with those two pieces fighting for space, nor do I see any point in their including tyres, which might even be the wrong size anyway (although I am not sure about that). The white tyres are, of course, definitely not Corgi but I allow for the possibility of someone replacing those two at some point.

All in all I do think that this must be something that someone has worked on. It might have been a factory worker who had a piece of polystyrene rejected because it hadn't been formed quite correctly. He or she made some adjustments and added some tyres and found a box lid, took it home and somehow it gets on to the market. (The owner doesn't know whether it was bought new or not but does assure me that it was his brother's and believes it to have been bought in the 60s or 70s). It could also be what I first thought - his brother managed to reshape that area and somehow move some of the polystyrene to create the pillars and more shallow profile in places.

It's not obvious though, so views welcome!

The next one is more intriguing. A Chipperfields Circus Public Address with a dark olive rear section.

My first reaction, looking at the dark colours of the box, a somewhat fuzzy image in places and what looked like flaws in the casting and paint work, was that someone had rebuilt a model and the rear section must have been the colour available from a parts supplier.

When I asked for some better photos, however, I had to rethink this. Firstly the rivets appear intact and are very much like one would expect to find on this model. Secondly, what I thought was some non-Corgi silver painting due to some splashes underneath the front bumper may be original after all as I have since seen many with a similar slip of the brush or masking.

There does appear to be some missing red paint inside the rear of the wheel arches which was one of things which made me initially suspicious that this had been repainted but the rivets really are sound and, although it is not easy to see, I am pretty sure I have noticed similar lack of red paint there on some others.

I took another look at the box and it does seem to be quite dark compared to all the boxes I have encountered but all originals have the same fuzziness in places in the image and I have to conclude that the box is OK. The genuine-looking label looks real and a reproduction box wouldn't have the partially erased number. It looks like a $US price label (although I have no idea what currency 52.00 might have been!)

So perhaps a batch of boxes for export were made in a bit darker colours. The box is hardly relevant but had it been a reproduction that might have supported my view that this had been constructed by someone.

The current owner says that he acquired this in the late 1980s or early 1990s - rather earlier than most restorations, I think, so I am inclined to discount that.

One possibility is that this could have been a Corgi production sample but weighing quite heavily against that conclusion is the fact that this comes many years after the colour scheme of Chipperfields blue and red had been settled. So to have this strange dark olive colour for a sample seems unlikely. The section does appear to be identical to the blue or yellow ones with similar type of plastic. The green colour is in the plastic not painted on it. Both characters look original and the clown can really only be replaced by dismantling the model. (I suppose he could have been broken off and reattached with glue.)

Factory samples, however, tend not to appear in a box, usually being kept in a drawer or a box of other samples - and certainly not in a box from an American store! So I am not keen on that explanation.

I did consider a colour change through exposure to light or even some liquid. That would not have left such a consistent colour, though, and somewhere we would be able to detect a little light blue or a shade more in that direction. So I feel the colour is as it was made.

All that remains are two possibilities. One is that, at some point, someone decided to repair a broken model and managed to replace that plastic element and the clown with a part that he or she obtained which was in this strange olive colour. The other is that Corgi had a batch of these rear sections supplied in the wrong colour but they went ahead and used them. One would have expected to have encountered another in such a case, although, if they did all head west across the Pond then it is just about feasible that we might not have seen any. Neither of these appeal to me as great solutions to this mystery so, again, any ideas welcome!