Corgi Catalogue 1960

 

Having recently acquired a whole lot of Corgi catalogues from the 60s through to the 80s I thought it would be a good idea to take readers through some of them. Each has fascinating content when you look more closely and it is a nice way to look at review models once more that often get overlooked in articles. Whilst I do have the very early catalogues and leaflets, I will start with the 1960 catalogue and let's see if you can identify all the models that the artist has included on the front cover! (Answers at the end of the article).

This catalogue is one of very few in portrait form, most being landscape. The images are all drawn but quite accurately showing models and one assumes that the artist was working with actual models provided. So it's interesting to see that the first page shows an Austin Seven in what may well have been 'primrose yellow', quite scarce to find now. 

The British cars are mostly the second issues in two-tone finish or a new colour and are a combination of the old and new, with the Minis, Jaguar and Aston Martin having suspension and interiors, the old just windows. The Aston Martin appears to have a slightly different style of wheel - likely to be the cast 'spoke effect' type which I believe was actually the style of the very first issues.

The inclusion of the Austin is surprising as the model was not available until early 1961.

Note the Austin A40 is in red and black, normally used for the Mechanical edition. None of the Mechanical editions would now be available, having been discontinued in 1959.

In the 'Continental' section we see the Fiat 1800 with a dark blue roof.

The 'American' section has the old Thunderbirds and Plymouth but a 211S Studebaker as well as the three Impalas.

The Sports Car section shows the scarcer all-yellow 304 Mercedes-Benz and silver 151 Lotus. None of the sports car have suspension yet.

On the Utility vehicles page note the later screen Bedford CA vans are now featured. The 412 Ambulance shown, however, is another scarce model that can be hard to find now.

The next page, however, shows the 405 Bedford in green with a single screen which was not issued. Instead we had the 423 in red as shown on the previous page. The 416 RAC Land Rover has the headboard and canopy with logo only, helping us to date the change to the version without a headboard and with text on the canopy to sometime later than 1960.

Once again we see a scarce issue on the next page - the 422 Bedford CA Van in 50-50 finish. 

Corgi Cargoes appear for the first time, all four being launched in 1960.

And there's another nice 50-50 finish Bedford! Try finding these now!

 

The next few pages don't tell us a great deal that we don't know already. The little Skip and Churns that fits on the back of a Massey Ferguson Tractor is not something you see often now and I always thought it a bit odd that the churns were so much larger than those in the Cargo for a truck. Now I think about it, though, the lorries were still produced to a much smaller scale, around 1:55 at this time and so it may make sense after all for the churns to have been smaller.

Chipperfields Circus collectors would have to wait a while for the items shown. Military item were taking priority in 1960, as the next three pages show.

 

These were all remarkable models and these can be good reference pages to all the model numbers and what was contained in the various Gift Sets too. Despite all Corgi's efforts, though, military equipment did not sell well, some of these items having the lowest of all Corgi models sales in the 1956-70s era. That makes them very worthwhile keeping now, of course, and much more sought after than they may have been initially!

The penultimate page has some useful summaries of what were contained in the Corgi Accessory Packs and also which spare tyres were available then. This particular catalogue comes from USA but its content appears identical, other than prices and distributor references, to that issued in the UK.

At the end you get the good old Service Ramp, something Corgi had in its original Mettoy days, with the outlined Studebaker looking a little too small. Or perhaps the main section is too long. It gets withdrawn almost as soon as the catalogue reaches collectors, however. 

On the other hand there is the brand new Jeep FC-150 with lamp standard and a nice hydraulic device with an electrician too in the box. 

New arrivals this month, including Noddy's Car

 Some very nice models have arrived recently, some for my own collection and others that I hope a collector will consider purchasing.

I'll start with the Corgi Major 1133 Troop Carrier. I have tried many times to figure out not only the differences between 1118 US Export edition and 1133 but also which 1118s and 1133s had the solid or 'see through' chassis. I have sort of given up and this one disproves another idea I had - that 1133s had a canopy with an indent where the star was placed. This example I am satisfied is an original, bought by its last owner new in America. It has a canopy with no indent and a star but comes in a 1133 box and, hopefully consistent with all 1133s, has the text along the side of the bonnet.

So I shall have to update my Catalogue entries - again! I think it is correct that the 1133 has no insignia on the front or rear and the star is applied to the two doors as well, rather than the bonnet. This has a nice, complete original box - the 1133 issue being the thin card type with flaps as opposed to the thick type with a lid.

Next is this lovely old Bedford CA van, here in Fire Department guise as #405. Note this is not #405M, having no friction motor and a tin base. This is quite rare as the #405 models were usually green with AFT transfers (as the box text declares). 

It has an original metal ladder in black and the later, slightly updated grill casting. The box is not something that is easy to find these days and has survived nearly 70 years pretty well!

At the opposite end of the Corgi spectrum we have the penultimate use of the Citroen casting, now quite disfigured with Whizzwheels and some chap with a megaphone standing in the back together with a row of spare bicycle wheels.

This one did have an aerial that was intact but movement in the box due to the missing inner tray led to it breaking on the way to me. I still have the broken part and it could be reattached by someone with a steady hand and strong glue. I did manage to get the thin pole for the parasol on the Corgi Kit Motel Chalet repaired so will have a go at this and report at some point in the future should no-one buy it in the meantime. I don't think there is anything special about the inner tray by way of design or printing so I may reproduce something as the outer box is perfectly sound.

In its glorious liquid metallic blue finish, the Toyota 2000GT is a lovely looking model, although the Whizzwheels do let it down. I fitted some wire wheels to one a while ago and that made a huge difference. However, I shall try and leave this all original as it has a nice, complete, original box.

The aerial is also in place, as are the jewels front and back. The white ones at the front can often go missing. The box is lovely and has the correct inner section with a cut-out for the screen.

In a less impressive and solid blue comes the very scarce Whizzwheels edition of the Chevrolet Camaro, issued as #304 for a very short period on dealers' order lists in 1972.

This also has a nice original box.

Lastly, and now for something completely different - Noddy's car! I remember buying one of these when I was at St. Andrews University in 1970. Not because I was still collecting Corgis then but Noddy was very cool at that time in that environment, in similar way to the Magic Roundabout, for which Corgi also produced lots of models and characters a little later. These, incidentally, included the final throes of the Citroen casting as Dougal's Car in November 1971.

Whereas mine had a nice original Golly in the back, this one has the politically correct Mr Tubby Bear. Of course, now even the suggestion that Mr Bear might be a little larger than his BMI figure would be regarded as 'inappropriate' or some similar word by the woke community. As for Noddy's friend, Golly, he has now been virtually 'disappeared' like some resistance campaigner in some countries run by the Communist Party. I was ordered by Ebay officials to remove photos of a model, with an original friend, from listings and I am not too sure they were happy with the name Golly either. 

This was, as I recall, the very first signs of wokeness or political correctness, not that either expression was used in conversation or articles at the time. I remember having this feeling that something wasn't quite right about effectively 'banning' a Noddy Car with the first Golly in the back. He had a jet black face, just like Noddy's friend in the stories had. Corgi changed that by painting it grey, which struck me at the time as an even more insulting way to deal with the character! The grey-faced Golly did last a few years, though, for some strange reason being more 'acceptable' to whoever decided these things. Finally, however, he gets dismissed entirely and the fat bear takes his place.

An original with the black-faced Golly is now one of the more valuable Corgis from this era and very hard to find. Amusingly, Steve Flowers at Model Supplies does a reproduction Golly for £6 and I am not sure it is easy to distinguish from an original lump of plastic or rubber. He used to advertise both the black and grey-face options but now I don't know which is supplied. I may enquire. it is easy to remove Mr Tubby and this might make the item more interesting.

As it stands, it is still a nice addition to the Comics collection, for those who like that sort of thing. The box has a tear at the top and bottom on the right but is otherwise remarkably complete and clean. The cellophane invariably gets torn as one or other of the hats scrape by on their way in or out.

It's nice to see both chrome lamps in place. I recall that my own Noddy's Car lost one lamp in a matter of weeks.

So there are some new items in my cabinet here, For prices or any more information click on an image or drop me a line.

Corgi Chevrolet Impalas

 

You will, of course, be familiar with this recent issue of the wonderful #248 Chevrolet Impala, the second edition of the saloon model, this time in a butterscotch and cream flavour, as opposed to pale blue or salmon. What you will not be familiar with, however, is the finish on this delightful example, which really should be described as Impala à la Pearson, having being expertly polished so that what the Club sent us by way of a strange satin-finished model (and attempted to assert that this was how it was intended to be issued to boot!) now looks much more like it should.

My 'satin finish' Club edition placed next to Chris Pearson's shows the difference clearly.

Mr Pearson also likes to replace the rivets with something that better matches the originals.

Mr Pearson tells me that his Aunt Iris worked at the Corgi factory from 1958 to 1983 and he would sometimes accompany her as a child and he recalls seeing a number of 'prototypes', not that he would have known they would have been prototypes at the time. One was the #481 Chevrolet Police Patrol Car with a white lower section. The other was the #482 Chevrolet Fire Chief Car but with a black lower section.

As luck would have it, the two issued models can simply be taken apart and the sections swapped and there we have very nice copies of the 'prototypes'! It has since occurred to me that what he saw at the factory may just have been some 'mistakes' or someone having fun with the two halves with #481 and #482 probably rolling down the production line at similar times in 1965/66. I feel this is more likely, certainly for the Fire Chief model.

My research indicates that the Fire Chief car is unlikely to have existed in the 1959-style. In 1959, General Motors completely broke the mould with a wildly low, wide, and aggressive space-age design. The massive protruding rear "batwings" and sprawling trunk lines made it a styling masterpiece, but highly impractical for utilitarian city fleets. Because of the extreme rear fins, municipal fire and police departments overwhelmingly rejected the 1959 Impala sedan for official duty.

 Instead, the rare 1959 Chevrolets that did make it into fire service were almost exclusively 1959 Chevrolet Brookwood or Kingswood Station Wagons (which flattened out the wild fins to carry ladders and equipment), or stripped-down, lower-trim Biscayne sedans. Corgi took considerable artistic license by reusing their existing, highly popular 1959 Impala civilian saloon diecast mould (originally released in late 1959 as Corgi #223) to create the Fire Chief edition.

I have been able to find just one example of the 1959 style Impala in genuine use as a police car, this image, courtesy of the Ypsilanti, Michigan Community archives at https://www.reddit.com/r/ypsi

Nevertheless, the two variants that Mr Pearson very kindly sent me are very well constructed and fun to add to my own collection. I have always been a fan of the Impalas (although not the final throes of vehicles for kennel services or poodle display).

Here they are for your admiration.

Lastly, I am not at all sure now that there was ever such a thing as the 1959 Impala as a taxi in either all yellow or the later yellow and red, other than, perhaps, much more recently, in Cuba! It was the Police car that came first, in December 1959, and I can see that there will have been some evidence of a vehicle they could reproduce. After that, I do believe it was a matter of making the most from an excellent casting.

One might say that the Corgi Model Club are doing the same, and I am not referring necessarily to the Impalas here. Take a look at their forthcoming issues:

R345 MGC GT

R303S Mercedes-Benz 300SL Open Top Roadster (cream edition)

R246 Chrysler Imperial (Kingfisher blue edition)

R275 Rover 2000TC (white edition)

R302 MGA (teal edition)

R318 Lotus Elan S2 (copper edition)

There is also a store-only issue of an MGA in off-white in October by way of celebration of Corgi's 70th anniversary. I quite like the idea of a variation of one of the early models for this purpose but with the teal edition already in the pipeline at about the same time I feel they would have been better advised to choose one of the actual 1956 releases, not this one, which was May 1957, nearly a year later. There is, of course, a fair case to be made of economy of scale, using resources in several different ways but the frequency we see now does make me wonder whether all is well back at the Corgi ranch. I know that just about everybody who reads this has enjoyed collecting diecast models but I am not so sure there is such a certainty of a continuing robust market for people collecting new diecast models.

It will be quite nice to see fresh-looking examples of the Chrysler, Rover and MGA, the Chrysler and MGA being extremely hard to find in any condition. The Rover is not that common either. So I can see that the Club provide a way for people to fill missing spaces. I am also quite content with the production of models that were not actually issued, such as the Lotus Elan in copper and the MGA in off white. These are interesting and could be collectible as a group on their own although, having said that, it could be argued that every Club issue would fall into this category as none are ever quite right!

Corgi Toys @ 70

Whilst I shall continue my Corgi Toys @ 60 series, I need to mark what is now the 70th anniversary of the launch of Corgi Toys. For those who do not wish to go way back to my post in July 2016, here is the list of models released in July 1956.

200	Ford Consul
200M	Ford Consul
201	Austin Cambridge
201M	Austin Cambridge
202	Morris Cowley
202M	Morris Cowley
203	Vauxhall Velox
203M	Vauxhall Velox
204	Rover 90
204M	Rover 90
205	Riley Pathfinder
205M	Riley Pathfinder
206	Hillman Husky
206M	Hillman Husky
300	Austin Healey 100/4
301	Triumph TR2
403	Bedford Van ‘Daily Express’
403M	Bedford Van ‘KLG Plugs’
404	Bedford Van Dormobile
404M	Bedford Van Dormobile
405	Bedford Van Utilecon Fire Tender
405M	Bedford Van Utilecon Fire Tender
452	Commer Dropside Lorry
453	Commer ‘Walls’ Refrigerator Van

The models with a suffix M to the catalogue number were fitted with a friction motor. When pushed along, a heavy flywheel would start to rotate at speed and continue to propel the model for a few seconds. In several ways this was quite unsatisfactory to us children, principally because the speed they reached was dreadfully slow and nothing like as fast as a good push would produce for the normal edition, even on a carpet of reasonable pile and nowhere close to the speed or distance you could achieve on lino or floorboards. The models also cost 3d or 4d more.

The M models were deleted from dealers' order sheets in 1959 and good examples, with working motors, are expensive now and well worth collecting after all!

The model with the greatest sales was the Austin Healey 100/4, around 533,000 due to it staying available until 1965. Apart from the M models, the Triumph TR2 had the shortest production period, discontinued in 1960 and replaced by a TR3.

Corgi Toys @ 60 : a new tractor, replacement ambulance and a mail-order Transporter Set

 

It's July 1966 and, at last, we get a new Massey Ferguson 165 tractor to replace the 65 that first appeared in 1959. This is a fine-looking model, no. 66, with a device mounted in the front axle housing which creates a noise when pushed along. This does mean that you won't win many races with this model but then, a tractor, I don't suppose you would have tried.

This tractor has a nice solid exhaust pipe, although the thinner top piece is still a bit vulnerable. I am not aware of any variations of this.

Also issued in July 1966 was the revised version of the Superior Ambulance on a Cadillac chassis. As with the Commer Police van, the method of making a light flash was not working well and Corgi made a new insert which carried a bulb that should flash on its own when switched on.

The colour scheme was completely changed but the model number remained the same at 437. The decals and window treatment also get changed.

Whilst there were two main variations in the colour and style of the plastic repeater lights in the first issue, I believe there are just the clear type with angled ends on this model.

Lastly July 1966 saw the introduction of a new Car Transporter with a load of six cars. Initially this was only available as something you could order by mail or abroad as it was the export edition and numbered Gift Set 41.

The contents were almost always as shown below:

There will have been changes, however, over the years although the line-up of three Minis, Ford Cortina, Hillman Imp and Rover 2000 seems consistent for this Gift Set 41.

The cab is the Ford H series and this is very detailed, first seen with the Express Service truck in September. The Transporter on its own was available as 1138 Corgi Major from April 1966.

Unless you have the box and packing for mail order and some other evidence, it is now not possible to tell what was originally issued from what may have been re-made as a set at some later date, with Gift Set 48 being the number allocated to the home release to come at the end of the year.

Unlike the Express Service model, I am not aware of any 1138 Car Transporters getting the large shaped wheels, all that I have seen having the detailed large cast variety. Of course, someone may swap the cab and I have seen some trailers being pulled by a dark metallic blue cab, although that also had detailed cast wheels.