Corgi Toys @ 60 : Gift set 35 and an old Daimler

 It's July 1964 and our local toy shop gets a Daimler to add to the shelves. I had hoped at the time that it might be a Daimler Dart or something I could play with but, no, it was the third 'Classic' old timer model in the shape of a 1910 Daimler 38HP, no 9021.

With a chauffeur at the wheel and three passengers it is a busy model. There are three horns along the bottom of the windscreen and two gigantic headlamps either side of the radiator with a nice emblem on top. I had always thought that colours in the early 20th Century were drab but here we have a bright red car with bright yellow wheels!

It is well-made and very detailed and a credit to Corgi's production at the time but not for their marketing sense as, like the other 'Classics', sales were not great. You just couldn't play with these models. Without suspension, they were awkward to steer round corners and lots of bits were vulnerable to breaking. As a consequence, many seldom left their boxes and can now be found easily - with excellent examples for very small prices.

Something that can't now be found so easily is the Gift Set 35 - the 'London Passenger Set' which was also issued at this time.

This featured the 418 Austin Taxi but with two differences - it now had a driver and it now had free-spinning wheels. Although one has recently come to light*, every other example of the 418 prior to Whizzwheels had fixed wheels, smooth or shaped but always fixed.

The driver would be the old chap in a uniform at first, actually the Cato character re-employed from the 269 Green Hornet. Later he will be replaced by a Fred Housego character looking much more relaxed and very much like the Thunderbird driver of old.

The bus was the usual 469 model with a Corgi Toys banner in early editions, later changing to Outspan Oranges.

There is also a policeman on point duty, rotating on a white plastic podium. This part is very difficult to find now so making up a set is not an easy task, even if you do manage to find a good reproduction box.

With the rather different scales of the bus and taxi, this set does look a bit strange on display. Not very many were sold and now complete sets in original boxes are valuable items.

*Discovered by my collector friend, Andi, in France. We think that it may have been a model intended for a Gift Set but the driver was accidentally missed at the factory. It is feasible that free-spinning wheels could have been fitted to the normal 418 but one would have expected many to be available if that were the case.

Corgi Toys @ 60: new models, revamped models and a launch ramp.

Here are the new items on the shelves at your local toy shop in October 1960. Quite a selection! I guess this might have been some sort of planning for Christmas too as no further models were apparently released that year.

The first is the launch module for the Corporal missile. It's a highly detailed and wonderfully well-engineered little thing, with stabilisers or feet which screw down individually to ensure correct positioning on uneven surfaces. The wheels can be removed and the support arms fit into grooves on the side of the missile. It has a tow bar and would usually be pulled along behind an International Army Truck with which it appears in Gift Sets. This item would in most instances have been obtained in one of the Gift Sets with the missile and maybe with the Missile Carrier vehicle too so it is unusual to find it in its own box these days. Very few were sold individually, one in a good box now being well worth getting hold of.

Another Corgi Major and the first Chipperfields Circus model arrives in the shape of the International Truck now with a re-worked rear section that carries a jib. Compared to the army models this is rather basic and crude engineering. The jib is bare metal and raised by hand in three steps on a simple ratchet device. There's a large and not very pretty handle to lift or drop the hook.

The six wheels are now painted Circus blue and the old truck gets an extension to its life. Indeed, it will even get suspension later, which the army version never does.

Amongst the commercials Corgi produced another Bedford CA Van with a single screen and revised front end, appropriately bearing Corgi Toys transfers. It gets a new catalogue number, 422, following on from 421 for the Evening Standard version. To the confusion of children then, but much to the delight of collectors now, Corgi seemed to be unable to make their mind up for some time as to where the blue should go and to what extent. So you will find this half-and-half model as well as one that is blue but with a yellow roof and another that is yellow with a blue roof.

The last combination is the one that is by far the most common, the other two being really quite expensive to acquire now. Indeed, I have had to steal a photo of the 50-50 edition from QDT as I have always been beaten in bidding to date and it has not turned up in any collections I've handled.

The wheels are usually smooth on these models and, from my research, exclusively so for the two less common types. The yellow model with a blue roof has shaped wheels on its later issues.

418 is the Austin Taxi. It appears here for the first time in an extremely long run as it will stay in the catalogue right through to the 1970s when a 1:36 scale version eventually replaces it. I think that makes it the longest-running model without a change to the body. Land Rovers and Minis have a good life too but they get quite a few adjustments made along the line. The Austin Taxi stays just as it was in October 1960, getting only different wheels, interior colour, screen tint and a couple of drivers at various points.

Another commercial and another outing for the Karrier Bantam, now as 413, a Mobile Butcher's Shop. It's very similar to the 407 Mobile Shop, little changing over three years and this has the same style of metal with illustrations visible at the rear and paper stickers at the side and front. Early editions have smooth wheels, later ones have shaped wheels, all fixed.

Two cars are issued too this month - the TR2 gets a re-worked front end and becomes a TR3. It is always in a pale metallic olive-green with red seats. Early editions have smooth wheels and later ones shaped wheels but always fixed. Although production continued for some years I don't believe any got free spinning wheels.

The final items on the October agenda is the revised Jaguar 2.4 Litre, now as 208S and with an interior, suspension and a coat of pale yellow paint. Again, early editions have fixed smooth wheels and later ones fixed shaped wheels. This doesn't get free spinning wheels.

Black is black: the trouble with taxis

When 418, the good old London Taxi, first appeared in 1960 it was quite clearly black. And it stayed that way through the 1960s, despite being dropped from the catalogue and stocks lists sometime in 1964, continuing, with either Kato or Templar (or was it the Thunderbird chap?) driving, in the London Traffic Gift Set 35 for a while after.

In the early 1970s, however, the same casting gets Whizzwheels and most of these get a red interior in place of the lemon. Now, I had always thought these were mostly black. I had seen adverts for various shades of deep maroon but considered that they were the scarce colour, black remaining the dominant issue.

A little while ago I encountered one with blue tinted windows. That looked very black too, if it is, indeed, possible to add a comparative term to black. Shortly after I saw a distinctly washed-out maroon which was most odd and obviously an oddity, especially with the lemon interior. I got hold of the black one with blue tinted windows and knew the seller of the miserable maroon shade but the model was in a pretty poor state so I didn't bother buying it. Taxis were, and still are, generally cheap and plentiful and I reckoned something like that in decent condition would come along soon enough from someone who just looked up '418 taxis' and found them selling for only a few pounds.

I also started looking for this mysterious deep maroon colour. I found several quite quickly and bought one in almost perfect condition, in a box too for about £10. It might have had a purplish tinge in the photo, I can't remember now, but it just looked black on my desk. So I bought another advertised as dark maroon. That looked just the same and just as black to me. Third time lucky, I thought and I spent another tenner on a third 'deep maroon' edition. It still looked black so I gave up.

I had managed to get one with a red interior and one with a lemon interior along the way so that was something, and they'd not been expensive.

I didn't think a great deal more about these until a collector friend in Germany said he'd bought a 'very dark shade of maroon' taxi and, because the seller didn't post abroad, it was on its way to my village. It arrived today and I was intrigued to see just what this 'very dark maroon' might look like. It looked pretty darn black to me. So I got out the other models, lined them up and, for the first time, added the one with tinted windows that'd I stored somewhere else.

Now it became clear.

For all this time, the only one that had actually been black was the one, third from the left, with tinted windows. The others are all deep ruddy maroon! 

The shade becomes more obvious when you add a bit more light to the image using some software. My friend's acquisition is on the far right and, whilst slightly darker than the others, qualifies as dark maroon like the rest.

So, after all this time, it has been an example of a 418 with Whizzwheels in black that I have not got and now I need to find one with each of the red and lemon interiors. (I understand that there are also variations of grey or black steering wheels but I may skip that variety for now).

This has made me wonder whether I am going to find that most Whizzwheels 418s were, in fact, deep / dark maroon and not black at all.

The Jaguar Box and a Black Cab Wheel

A colleague of mine has recently started collecting Corgi Toys and finds what are usually very familiar models to add to his shelves each month. On my visit to St. Albans yesterday, however, he had a couple of quite interesting items. First is this box which came with a nice and unmarked Jaguar E Type. I have seen one or two plain boxes, with no model image, but the number is either printed in the blank area at the end or, in one case I've seen, written in. The use of a label like this is new to me and I would be glad to hear from anyone who might have more information.

Perhaps this label was, indeed, an alternative to the printed number - this being simpler to produce, of course. It may also have been produced by the shop, which would explain why I might not have seen any anywhere before.

The normal 307 box was, I thought, a little bigger, allowing space for the chunky circular cardboard that protected the delicate plastic hood.

The box itself looks original and has the sort of ageing I'd expect although it seems a little more brown than the grey I am more used to seeing. It may be simply the case that the grey card was used for the illustrated boxes and the browner shade for the temporary ones.

The second surprise was this 418 Austin Taxi. It is the pretty common Whizzwheels version and he has found himself an example in excellent condition too. The steering wheel, however, is black whereas all the models I have had have been grey. I doubt that the black steering wheel is any less common than the grey one and guess that it may just be a later replacement in the life of this very long-running model. I should have known about such things but, clearly, I am still learning!

An Almighty Jam in Eilum

A Dinky Mighty Antar and a couple of old Jeeps seem to have taken a wrong turning on their way to a collector in Eilum, Germany. The 'Fred Housego' edition of the #418 Corgi Taxi is a lovely example of quite a hard to find model.