Four of one and four of the other

 

The little Triumph Herald Coupé was a remarkable model and a little more interesting than you may have appreciated. 

Firstly, in November 1961 it was only the second car to be issued with free-spinning wheels from the start. The Bentley Continental was the first, of course, but the Triumph was the first with the smaller wheels. The small wheels first appeared on cars in January 1960 on the Morris Mini-Minor, followed by the Austin Seven a year later and the Chevrolet Corvair in July 1961. All these three, however, started with fixed smooth wheels, then they got fixed shaped wheels and finally the free-spinning variety some time later.

The first Mercedes-Benz 300SL models with suspension, 303S and 304S also had free-spinning wheels which were a little curious, being smooth on both sides. The first Triumph Heralds had a similar smooth free-spinning wheel, in the smaller size. Later the shaped style is fitted and these wheels are smooth on one side and shaped on the other. I can imagine that mistakes would have been made on the production line, with some wheels being fitted with the smooth side out but the two models shown here are not mistakes. The blue one has wheels that are the older type, smooth on both sides.

I had thought for a long time that the first issue must have been gold and white and that all of them had smooth wheels and all the later blue and white issues had shaped wheels but I learned some time ago that the other combinations existed. They're not that common, though and definitely worth a little more than the usual pair.

There are also two type of construction, as I discovered when I took some damaged models apart, mixed up the parts and wondered why they didn't go together again! It seems to concern how the bonnet hinge and radiator grille interact and the bases are quite different, with what look like filled holes painted on one type and just one rivet at the rear.

Both my models have the three rivets unpainted which I think is the earlier type.

I have seen many blue models with each type of base, whether with smooth or shaped wheels. However, every gold one I have seen to date has the three rivet type. I am sure there must be some gold models with the single rivet type but I have still to find one. It took a while to find the shaped wheel edition but, as is the case with so many Corgis, as soon as you find one variation, another one presents itself as a possibility and the search continues!

I probably wouldn't have it any other way.

Some interesting Corgis

 

A couple of interesting Corgis arrived this week. Firstly this delightful VW1300 Corgi Driving School car in really lovely condition. The blue paint on these is very prone to chips and even a strong draught can take it off if you're not careful!

The interesting bit is that this has the base with 1200 on it whereas the vast majority of models you'll find have a raised plate with replacement text including 1300 as the second illustration below shows.

The '1200' version is quite scarce so I shall hang on to it as part of my own collection unless someone persuades me to part with it for a vast sum. The early issue in April 1974, when it was #400, may have used the base that would have been around from the #373 and #383 production (although a silver base was not a common feature amongst those issues and this is substantially different). I am not convinced about that, though, and just reckon that this was the first base produced for the model and, for some reason best known to Corgi, it got changed to 1300 pretty soon afterwards. Maybe someone noticed that the box read 1300 and they had to make a quick adjustment!!

I would love to get the German version (or any other if there are any?) some time if anyone over the Channel can help. Incidentally, I am pretty sure the German edition is still Right Hand Drive!! That's a little surprising as they took the trouble to produce two versions of #256 despite there actually only being one version of the East African Rally Car! And I am sure #492 must have been Left Hand Drive?

The next one is an old favourite, although this one does look a little worse for (play)wear.

I find these #248 Impalas difficult to resist. they just look tremendous when they're in top condition, the colours so Corgi and 70s (although it was issued in the 60s, I know.) The thing about this one is, of course, the cast wheels. The model was not available for very long anyway, not much more than a year, and the cast wheel version seems to be particularly scarcer than the shaped wheel version.

Even with chips here and there, this is still quite a valuable model.

Lastly, I don't know what to make of this Triumph Herald. You can see straightaway that the bonnet has a different shade of gold to the body. I hadn't seen that in the photos published by the seller which were not very clear and it was not mentioned in the description. So when it arrived I queried this but I'm still waiting for a reply. The chap said he'd think about it.

There is absolutely no sign of the model being tampered with underneath. These are phenomenally difficult to put together anyway and this one is original in that the two rivets are untouched. The base is the same colour as the main part of the model. I can understand that the bonnet could have been painted at a different time to the body and so it is possible, I suppose, that there was a change in paint supply and this model got an unfortunate combination of one and the other. That being the case I would have expected to have seen a few of these over the years but I haven't.

Neither this being all original nor someone somehow being able to paint just the bonnet without some paint going somewhere it shouldn't around the engine or hinge areas in particular seem likely, yet one, presumably has to be the case.

It only cost me a few pounds so I am not worried too much. If it is some after-sales work by someone then the chap can have it back as I wouldn't want to sell it or keep it. If it is original, though, then I'll keep it as one of those oddities that I have so many of!

On the subject of Triumph Heralds, what I am trying to locate is one of these in white and gold (ideally the same shade throughout!) but with shaped wheels rather than smooth. They appear from time to time but they're definitely not very common. Similarly, I'd like the blue and white one with smooth wheels if that exists. Maybe it doesn't.

These re the sort of things that make Corgis forever interesting.

The Corgi Model Club: 231 Triumph Herald Coupé

 

Arriving this week was the Corgi Model Club re-issue of the 231 Triumph Herald Coupé. Another marvellous model and a delight to have. The colours are spot-on, as is almost everything about this model. I say 'almost' as the large chunks of red paint on the rear lights spoil it. The originals had quite small splashes and whilst I accept that the Chinese robot will always produce a very much neater job, this time the program has been written to create far too large an area painted. That is a minor moan, however, and this another super piece of work by the Club.

The box is good and I have now learned how to open it without tearing the small end tab. Inside is just the car and a square piece of polystyrene which looks remarkably like the piece I had with the last Oldsmobile issue but this time I am not sure what it is intended to protect. Possibly the box from the sharp rear fins or maybe to keep closed the opening bonnet.

The opening bonnet shows the engine and they have included a black plastic oil air filter too. This would rotate or could be removed on my original models but I found this one very firmly attached and decided not to risk breaking it. It did feel like plastic so it probably will move.

Closing the bonnet does not produce any satisfying click as the original seemed to, although the holding mechanism seems similar. I found that I had to press quite firmly to keep the bonnet closed in line with the body.

Here you can see the very heavily-painted rear light section. It may not be that inaccurate in real life but looks wrong on the model.

This issue is in light blue and white. The original also appeared in gold and white and I understand that there may be a second issue of this model in those colours at some point in the future. I have often thought that it would make sense to re-use the expensive work in casting, interior production, boxes etc. with variations of finish and I am sure that we will see this happen with many models. When I first heard of the project I suggested that they look at making the scarcer varieties which many collectors cannot now find very easily and may well have to pay a fortune for an original. Much as we all like to get fresh copies of the common versions of what we once had in our collections there would be an ever greater demand for the less common.

Corgi Toys @ 60: Triumph Herald, gold plating and an ERF they'd forgotten about.

 

November 1961 saw lots of gold- (or silver-) plating going on to Corgi models. Well, I suppose it had been going on for some time but this was when we got to see the models if we were lucky. I say that because the Golden Guinea Gift Set 20, which I always thought should have been more aptly Gift Set 21, was produced in very small numbers. Corgi quote 23000 which is fewer than the almost impossible to find 351S RAF Land Rover!

Either they've made a mistake in the numbers or people are not very fond of them as I have found quite a good number for sale and usually at very reasonable prices. The coating can look unattractive if it has started to come off and there is often some corrosion or reaction going on on the mazak surface too but if you can find an edition of the Bentley, in particular, then this is a fine model indeed, worthy of a place in any collection - and possibly a profitable investment if the numbers do prove to be accurate!

The three models chosen for the Golden Guinea treatment are an odd selection. The Bentley seems a natural enough addition and really suits this treatment but the Ford and Chevrolet are strange partners. The Ford is more or less as the 234 model issued and gets a gold-plated base too into the bargain, a pleasure denied to the Bentley and Chevrolet. The Chevrolet, however, is the scarcer edition with a red interior.

I can only assume that each having an opening boot or engine compartment is the common feature that brought them together in some marketing person's mind. They are sold in a dark teal coloured flat window box which is very hard to find now and I have not yet found anyone who makes a passable reproduction.

They were not on sale for long and I believe most went to Marks & Spencer rather than the local toy store.

Launched in November 1961, and, again, not available in the local toy store, were five models comprising the Trophy Models range, produced for Marks & Spencer. The five were 150 Vanwall F1, 152 BRM F1, 300 Austin Healey, 301 Triumph TR2 and 302 MGA.

All five are really quite hard to find now and command high prices. They are the Corgi models simply gold or silver-plated with a new Trophy Model baseplate and each has the cast spoke-effect wheels that had been designed for the Aston Martin DB4 and appeared on later Vanwalls and BRMs but never the three sports cars.

For most of us collectors in November 1961, however, the excitement at the local store would be the arrival of a quite delightful Triumph Herald 1500 Coupé. The new feature on this model was the fully opening bonnet, something for which the real model was well-known and the little black piece of plastic to represent an oil filter (although in scale nearer the size of an air filter!)

This very attractive model has firm suspension that will have survived to this day, I'm sure, on your models, and the bonnet opened and closes very neatly.

The very earliest editions had quite strange-looking smooth little wheels but they were free spinning. This would be only the second model to have free-spinning wheels on first release and the first to have this size in that form. Most models that you'll encounter will have the shaped variety.

There are also two types of base and hinge for the bonnet.

Finally, November saw the arrival of 456 the ERF 44G Dropside Lorry. Some three years or so after the 457 Platform model, this seems something of an afterthought by Corgi and you almost wonder whether someone had forgotten to issue it in 1958. The same truck did actually appear in March 1960 with a trailer in a Gift Set and will pop up again in blue and white in another Gift Set next year. This is, however, its sole appearance in a 456 box. One of the last models to be issued with fixed smooth wheels on first issue in the box, this is quite scarce, most having the shaped variety. However, as it is impossible now to be sure whether the model your buying did actually come in the box as opposed to someone swapping it with an earlier Gift Set component, I am at a loss to know how anyone can really justify the high prices some attach to this smooth wheel version.

With the Bentley Continental and other cars with suspension and nice features now on the shelves, this must have looked rather sad with its empty interior and solid stance not to mention the very dated cab design.

The Great Book of Corgi (and some dealers who rely upon it) talks about a 56 model Plough being issued this month in 1961 too. It is described as the same as the earlier edition but with plated shears. That would be nice but I have never seen one and suspect that it may have been something Marcel may have thought about but, as far as I can tell, the shears stayed yellow and plastic on the 56 model and did not get any replacement with plated ones until December 1964 when the rather simpler type of Plough is issued as 61 in blue. If anyone knows otherwise, do get in touch.

Memories (now better illustrated!)

Someone asked me this afternoon why and when I started what has become this Corgi Toys business. I say what has become because what I'm doing now is not what I had originally planned. I took her back to the mid-1960s and my first Corgis. That meant I had to try and recall just what my first model had been. As my father worked for an agricultural machinery depot, the first items may have been the Massey Ferguson tractor and trailer Gift Set 7. I know now that it must have been the early one as there was no Farmer George on the seat. I also had Gift Set 2 but, as that had a deep green Series II Land Rover it would most likely have been Christmas 1962 so that wasn't the first.

I did have a 216 Austin A40 but I only bought that at a later stage because I wanted to paint it red as my father's was an A40 Countryman version, red all over. (There were no 216Ms available at that time or I'm sure I would have spent the extra 3d and just painted the roof!)

I am pretty certain that my first car will have been the Jaguar E Type. It was the plum red version which, coincidentally, I have been looking for for some time now. Back then everyone had the plum red version and I didn't even know the pretty metallic dark grey existed. That, as it happens, was also one of the very first models I acquired when I did start this business. Now all that is see for sale are the metallic dark grey versions. Odd, but probably just one of those things. Mine had the matching plastic removable roof and both survived intact and more or less unmarked for more than 50 years.

Second would have been a gold and white Triumph Herald with its little removable black air filter on the engine accessed by folding forward the whole of the upper front body section.

I know that the Bentley Continental was available but it was expensive at 7/7d. (That strange looking price construction means 7 shillings and 7 pence. In 1961 there were 20 shillings in a pound and 12 pence in a shilling. 7 and 7 pence as we would have said then is about 38p in today's decimal currency.) I did get a two tone green model but suspect that came as a present in 1962. What I did get next was the Mercedes 220SE. I had a black one and think I still have it too. The paintwork did suffer a bit but that wonderful steering meant that it was played with a great deal.

Apart from the Austin A40, which I don't really count as I didn't play with that, the only model I had with fixed wheels was the Austin Seven. I remember how much better it was to play with the Morris Mini Minor which I bought later. I also didn't have any models without suspension and was completely unaware of the early models and certainly knew little of their Mechanical cousins.

By 1963 I was in the first form at school and getting enough pocket money from odd jobs and saving dinner money to buy almost every new car that came out. I say car because I had little interest then in the commercial vehicles. My father bought me a Bedford Machinery Carrier, to which I applied an Agricastrol transfer, and I also had a Carrimore Car Transporter but that was pretty much the extent of my trucks or vans. Just one exception - an Austin Mini Van, which I found great fun to play with as you could put a finger or two through the rear doors and kind of drive it and push the back out round corners!

Just as these memories flood back now, so they had done in 2013 sometime when, having retired from lecturing and helping to introduce technology in education, Corgi Toys were one of the first things that came to mind when I thought about starting a new business. My plan was then to buy wrecks and restore them. I bought all sorts of equipment which I thought would be useful but it wasn't long before I realised that collectors were not very interested in restored models. They much preferred an original, even if it was not in great condition. I had hoped to get £20 or more for decent restorations but you could buy played-with but still decent originals of the more common editions for that amount.

So the restoration plan was binned and I carried on the other part of the plan which was to build a nice web site that could be a useful and genuinely comprehensive catalogue too. That took shape in 2014 and I bought lots of models with money inherited when my mother died. Once I'd taken some photographs and studied the models I began to sell them so that I could have funds for the next ones required. It just carried on from there.

I never expected it to be much of a business. I hoped people would enjoy reading my news from time to time and I tended to write about whatever came in as and when it occurred to me. It still tends to be that way although the Corgi Toys @ 60 series I started in 2016 has provided some structure. The rest is rather random as anyone who is still reading this will have appreciated!

I have since had a look at Ebay and there are models I've had for sale there for over 5 years! Clearly I am either asking too much or the photos are bad or the descriptions are poor. Maybe all three. Now there's a job for the next few weeks - to try and revive interest in these. I get a number of models listed free but, as my total number of items is well in excess of that, these listings have effectively been costing me a few pence every month and 60 times x pence means I've probably spent more listing them than some are worth! Expect to see some 'special offers' soon!

For those who may also have played with Corgi Toys in the 1960s, my layout was a piece of hardboard that my father had cut to fit nicely over the metal frame of a single bed in the spare room at the first house I lived in. I had made roads using thin strips of masking tape with additional edges from various pieces of Floral Garden and Bayko. Bayko provided a few nice buildings and garages that cars could actually be driven into. The Floral Garden stuff was quite delightful too. I would love to get some again but prices are even higher now than Corgis!

The one Corgi building that I had was a BP Filling Station. Well, it was the shop part and some sort of panelled bit at the side. No pumps but I may have had a BP sign. As I recall I could choose between BP and Shell logos (although the box image I've found just refers to Shell. Were there two?) I still have this tucked away somewhere. I should get it out and use it for some of the photos in future if it is respectable still. I have been looking to buy some kits but they are mostly very expensive. In fact, I'd be happy with a made-up kit rather than the unopened bag of pieces.

Looking to add pictures, I couldn't find any of the Filling Station building, which I had. I shall have to dig out my own - and seemingly take good care of it!

So that was a pleasant trip down memory lane.

2019 arrivals

Very early GS2 with a box and inner tray which displays the pony separately. Later editions had no holes for the pony, which was wrapped in card in the trailer. As seems appropriate, I have used a similarly rare and early trailer without a handle at the top of the ramp. It's not going to be cheap.

58 The Beast carrier with calves and the green mesh on top (although that's not shown here)

151 Scarce edition of the Lotus XI Le Mans in red with original screen

200 Ford Consul in mushroom brown. I though it was a cream one when I saw it advertised! I now have two of these to sell.

202M I also have two of these mid green Morris Cowleys with working motors

203M Vauxhall Velox with working motor

208 Nice Jaguar 2.4 with super original early box

208M Jaguar 2.4 with working motor

209 Riley Pathfinder Police Car lovely but missing the bell.

213 Jaguar 2.4 Fire Chief's Car - excellent and complete but missing a transfer

214 Ford Thunderbird (I bought this hoping it might have had shaped wheels).

231 Triumph Herald - very clean examples in each colour

234 Bentley Continental - superb examples in each of the main colours and one with a lovely original box too.

238 Jaguar Mk X in a really stunning deep cerise shade. I have two of these, equally good, one with an original box.

246 Chrysler Imperial with original box. All very good. I bought this for the golf caddy - the one sold with it is a replacement.

252 Rover 2000 in maroon with an odd wheel!

252 Rover 2000 in maroon with an original box.

318 Lotus Elan S2 - very scarce with cast wheels

323 Citroen DS19 Monte Carlo Edition with an original aerial!

384 The last 1:43 Corgi car. From 1977 a VW 1200 Rally Edition - only available for a short period.

508 Commer Holiday Bus with original luggage cover (but no cases)

These are all quite recent additions, listed in catalogue order. Please enquire for availability and price as there has been quite a bit of interest in some of these.