To tow or not to tow

 This may be something that some of you know all about already but, for some reason, I have missed this in all these years and so, for the benefit of others like me, you will find that some early models have towing eyes cut out of the base and some do not.

Here I illustrate the relevant issues:

200 Ford Consul

201 Austin Cambridge

202 Morris Cowley

203 Vauxhall Velox

204 Rover 90

205 Riley Pathfinder

206 Hillman Husky

207 Standard Vanguard III

The Standard did not get a tin base, all model having the more solid type with a bulge on the rear axle. You will see the black base in two styles, just as the M bases had two styles of text content and placement, as well as a grey base, although this seems only to appear on the later shaped wheels edition with only the top of the roof painted red. I guess there may be examples of smooth wheel editions with a grey base but they'll be pretty scarce.

208 Jaguar 2.4 Litre

209 Jaguar 2.4 Police Car

Subsequent issues all appear to have the tow eye with the more solid base being fitted to 210, 211, 214 and 215 and all from 217.

The 213 Jaguar Fire Service appears only to have the base with a cut-out tow eye, much as one might expect as for the 209 Police Car, being a later issue. Similarly the last of the tin bases, the 216 Austin A40 appears only to have the base with the towing eye.

Generally, I cannot tell the relative numbers of each type and cannot advise which will be the rarer type of base for each of the tin plate models. I would appreciate any help with this, looking through everything on sale and keeping a note of examples found. So far, the Ford Consul seems comparatively scarce with a towing eye because I had to use the image of a very rare blue 200 (not 200M) that I have, all the usual 200 colours having no cut-out. I do expect to find more, though, and doubt that no cut-out can be very unusual.

Again, generally, I would expect the no cut-out models to be less common amongst the 208 and it is possible that none were produced for models issued after 1958 but that's merely my suggestion.

I have yet to examine all the other early issues but so far it appears that the sports cars and Bedford CA vans had no towing eye. That may just be that none I found have one so I shall continue looking before deciding anything on that.

Corgi Toys @ 60: ERF Lorries

Less than a year after they issue the Commer lorry with a platform rear along comes an ERF version.

This lasted well into the mid-1960s but I am only aware of the light blue cab and dark blue platform colour scheme for this model. There were at least two schemes for the Commer but just the one for the ERF over those 7 or 8 years.

There will be a change to shaped wheels roughly half-way through production and both types are common. I have not had a chance to study these in depth, however, and believe that there will be several small differences in the casting to look out for which I shall have to document another day.

The second March lorry was described as a 'van' but I have to say I would have called it a lorry had I seen one at the time. Similar to the Commer Wall's Refrigerator 'Van' from 1956, this is a cab, chassis and large box affair with rear door lines in the casting.

Again, I am still looking for a good one of these for my own catalogue and have not looked at any models closely. I believe that they are all the same colours but suspect there may be some casting differences. Perhaps not so many in this one as it was withdrawn from production in 1960 after just a year or so. I should imagine, therefore, that all these will have smooth wheels.

The advertising is by paper stickers which tend to wear although I have been impressed at how wel the colours have survived over 60 years on most that I see. If they have passed the point of no return, as it were, then some replacements do seem a good match, although they will look odd on a slightly worn model.

Corgi Toys @ 60: The Americans Arrive!

February 1958 saw the arrival of the magnificently named Studebaker Golden Hawk on the Corgi shelves at our local toy shop. Compared to Morris Cowley or Hillman Husky that we may have been pushing around the layout, to be able to announce the name Studebaker Golden Hawk to your friends was a little special.

The chances of seeing one of these cars in the Hertfordshire lanes where I lived were next to zero. Even in the fairly wealthy city of St Albans where I went to school a Vauxhall Cresta was about as long a motor car as we might see.

This was Corgi's first American model. The 211 was available in a solid mid-blue shade with gold-painted fins and the 211M version was white, also with gold-painted fins. All the 211M models will have fixed smooth wheels and I think almost all the 211 models will have these too. In May 1960 the 211S was issued, with suspension, an interior and gold paintwork or silver plating and so it is very unlikely that any 211 models will have been around when the switch to shaped wheels was made.

I would imagine that, if any exist, they'll be expensive.

The 211M model only lasted until the following year as these 'mechanical' models were not selling well and were all withdrawn during 1959. Examples in good condition with nice running motors are now not at all easy to find, nor are they likely to be cheap.

The other issue this month was Corgi's second Gift Set. Appropriately named Gift Set 2, it contained a green version of the 406 Land Rover, now, for the first time, with a tan canopy made of tin. The Land Rover pulled a 102 Pony Trailer that had been issued the preceding month. This may have been red on a black chassis or cream on a red chassis. A pony with a blanket would be in the trailer. Although shown here with a brown blanket, I am fairly sure that the first ones had blue blankets, red and brown appearing somewhat later.

All the first editions would have had fixed smooth wheels and the trailers would have had the wire drawbar.

The illustration above shows a dark pony that is quite incorrect for the set!

Notice how this tray has holes for the pony's feet between the Land Rover and trailer. These are genuinely original but it seems that the tray was later revised without provision for the pony outside the trailer. Unfortunately this old box has seen better days but it is an intriguing item that I had not encountered before.

As readers may well have gathered, the topic of Corgi Pony (or Horse) Trailers is one which I have been surprised to find remarkably fascinating! And here is another chapter.

Corgi Toys @ 60: Two Trailers

January 1958 brought two things you could tow behind your Land Rover or Commer lorry; 101, the Platform Trailer and 102, the Pony Trailer. The Platform Trailer can be found in many combinations of chassis and load section colours but I think there would only have been these three available initially.

These would have had the simple wire drawbar. It would not be until 1962 that that got replaced in a boxed edition, although in March 1960 the records show that a set comprising an ERF lorry with cement and plank loads had a cast drawbar. I am not so sure that is correct, though. You will also see a blue and red trailer carrying a Chipperfields Circus elephant cage and a blue and cream trailer carrying milk churns but both these will have cast drawbars. There is, of course, also the yellow trailer from the Farming Set but that also only appeared later and had a fixed cast drawbar.

The Pony Trailer I have written about on several occasions. What seemed a very straightforward issue - just the choice of three colours, I had thought, turned out to be a lot more complicated! However, here in January 1958 you would have opened the box to find just one of two possible editions: a cream horsebox on a red chassis or a red horsebox on a black chassis. Either would have a wire drawbar, exactly the same as was fitted to the trailers.

In the box would be a brown pony with a blanket on. The blanket would usually be blue. I have seen other colours but believe that the early ones were always blue. If you had one of the very early editions then you would have struggled a bit to get the pony out because there was no 'handle' or protrusion at the top of the ramp to help you in lifting it to unlatch and then drop it down. Pretty soon after the first issue, however, the casting of the ramp was changed and a 'handle' added.

Both the cream and red and red and black editions can be found with and without handles. The red and black one carried on rather longer than the cream and red and even got a fixed drawbar at some late stage. There is no documentation on this but my guess is that it would have appeared a little before the time when the brown and cream Pony Trailer appeared for the revised Gift Set 2. That would correspond with the 1962 debut of the same thing on the Platform Trailers.

Corgi Catalogues 1958 to 1972

You may have noticed that I have changed the site's home page. That has been necessary because I would like to be easier for collectors to find when they search for Corgi Toys. Google now say that web sites should adjust automatically to match the type of device they are being viewed on. So there need to be different versions for big desktop monitors, large tablets, small tablets and phones held one way or the other. They punish those sites that don't comply with low rankings. It's annoying bvut that's life these days. You can imagine that the coding for all that can be something of a nightmare!

Luckily, there are some nice people out there who not only make templates we can use but they also include code that detects the type of device and makes all the adjustments automatically. It's all quite impressive. I can just about manage to figure out most of it but it isn't that straightforward to transfer data from one place to another. So I found it considerably simpler to make a few new pages with the new style and leave all the rest as it was.

I am really hoping that Google will now start giving me some credit for this, although there are still 1000+ pages that do not comply with their requirements. The chances of me ever changing all of them are extremely thin unless someone out there has a particularly bright idea and some spare free time!

The new home page does enable me to show some nice images in king-size view and each one relates to a different section of the site: British cars, American cars etc.

The new 'latest additions' page works in a similar way, with links on the big picture page to the main site description etc.

While I was at it I decided to make the catalogues more accessible to collectors. These are great sources of information and just lovely to scroll through for hours on end. I still feature them under Lists in the main site but they can now be seen directly from the Corgi Catalogues link on the new home page. I have published nice quality pages from complete catalogues from 1958 all the way through to 1972, which I acquired recently.

I used to offer to supply digital copies of catalogues at a small fee but now you can download images as you wish without charge. A customer did ask me if I could make printed versions of these and I can imagine that they would be very popular. However, with many having 40 or more pages I would have to pay for at least 10 double sided pages. In small quantities they would come out at about £8 and setting up the pages in the right order so that they make a booklet at the end of the day isn't as simple as it sounds at all! So they would have to cost at least £10 and, guess what, that's about the price you can buy originals for if you look around! So, until I can find a cheaper print solution I will leave it to people to print their own if they wish.

Some of the catalogues are American or European versions. Sorry if the prices are confusing but these are the best I have at the moment.

Corgi Toys Catalogue 1958

I have recently published nine Corgi Toy Catalogues on my web site (and added a link in the list on the right of the blog) and will take a closer look at each one in separate posts.

The first I have is for 1958 and that may be the first produced. The front cover has a photograph of a boy, uniquely, as all subsequent boys were drawn. All the models, though, are drawn and on this cover spread out as if they're negotiating a part of the ring road round Paris. There's a lot of yellow, bearing in mind that the boxes at that time were blue.

Forefront are the military models and a bulldozer in this slightly bizarre scene where the artist appears to have tried to feature every model and then given up. Inside the quality of drawings isn't great at first but seems to improve as the pages progress, becoming quite accurate depictions once we reach the lorries.

For 4/2d you could buy #102 the Rice Pony Trailer (or horsebox as most of us called it) and 3/6d would buy the Land Rover but without a cover. It looks like you had to buy the Gift Set #2 to get a cover on a green Land Rover. The set cost 8/- which was an extra 4d, presumably for the cover.

You could buy #351 the RAF Land Rover for 3/10d and get a RAF blue cover so that 4d looks about right.

The 'Mechanical' versions of some models are shown - all but one at 1/3d extra compared to the normal counterparts. That was quite a lot - increasing the price from 2/9d to 4/- in most cases. I hadn't realised until reading this that the Bedford M models were different to their counterparts, with only 404 and 404M differing just by the mechanism.

Apart from one lorry in red ad white, all the models were actually available and in the colours illustrated. There is a distinctly utilitarian, public service, commercial and military feel to the selection overall, though, with just three or four pages of cars and the other eleven or twelve not items your dad would have had in the drive.