This post will be for the odds and sods not included in the other posts and will be for any other Airfix toys from the early years as they turn-up.
MINI AIRCRAFT
I'm starting with a set which may not even be Airfix, but there are more clues to them being so than not, so for the time being, here are the 'provisional' mini-planes.
So far I have found four aircraft types, the
Mosquito,
Spitfire and
Lancaster from Britain and the American
Lightning with its twin-boom fuselage. There are also two distinct issues, an unmarked, early phenolic plastic (probably cellulose acetate) and a later tranche in polystyrene marked
'MADE IN ENGLAND' on the wing undersides.
The
Mosquito - the damaged phenolic plastic one is the same colour as the granules left in the later animal rattles and building-blocks seen above, and the carded dog, while the later pale blue one is the same colour as those later animal flats.
We looked at this chap in comparison with some of his contemporaries over on the main blog here;
M is for Miniature Mosquitoes
Lightning, again the colours are similar matches for the other early
Airfix toys, here the phenolic blue (damaged, top left) matches some of the early carded animal flats.
Avro Lancaster, this is in a much smaller scale, not that the other two were the same scale, but this is such a large real-life aircraft the difference is a tad more obvious!
The fact that they are all 'same size' suggests they may have been made as novelties for budget Christmas Crackers, which would put
Tom Smith in the frame, and the UK's leading maker of crackers in all price ranges when I was a lad! Not that I'm adding them to the tag-list, that's an assumption too far!
Finally the Spitfire; here a washed-out candy-pink one clinches the Airfix moniker for me, this colour is used by the later animal flats and other toys, while other (Thomas - Tudor Rose/Kleeware, Lipkin - Pipin/Triang and Bell/Merit being the obvious) make's pinks are of different shades.
The model is in the largest 'size', scale being the wrong word for such an inaccurate representation; the wings are close, but what's the cockpit doing so far back? It looks more like a racer!
Open to evidence of actual provenance on these, but for now - Airfix?
ICE CREAM TRICYCLE
One of the first non-toy soldier products of early Airfix to become known to toy soldier collectors, back at the start of the organised hobby (mid-1980's to early 1990's), as several stashes of unsold shop-stock came into the hands of soe of the early dealers, and for a while you could always find them at the Plastic Warrior show, in Richmond (Queen Charlotte Halls), but after a couple of European buyers bought a bunch and spirited them away over the Channel, they became hard to come-by again, although the main collectors of that era probably still have one or two in their 'piles'!
A simple model, sold assembled, and made from a relatively stable, early
polystyrene, which does suffer from slight warping, predominantly of
the large flat areas of the ice cream fridge compartment, nicely hidden,
now, by the ornate counter-top!
The box is pretty plain, but with the white card, and two colours, probably
still a shelf stand-out in post-war austere Britain, especially if a
couple were already displayed in the widow, with their brighter-still plastic
colours - there were a few variants of the colouring.
