Elastolin soft plastic Norman\Saxon footsoldiers.

In 1969 after I’d returned home from a music festival fed up with the quasi-hippy lifestyle I’d been leading, I was accosted by a uniformed army sergeant leaning in the doorway of a recruiting centre. He quipped that I looked as if I needed a change in life and invited my inside, led me to a room and brought in a sheaf of examination questions. Two weeks later I was in Catterick camp hundreds of miles north beginning my training as a communications technician. The relevance of this is that I was subsequently posted to Germany where, after having left my toy soldier collection back in England, I found a toy shop filled with rows of beautiful Elastolin plastic figures. I was quite well paid and had little to spend my money on, so I bought and bought, stashing them in my brother’s house (he lived in Germany). Later I was seconded to the US army (570^th US Artillery) for a year or so and introduced to the American plastic toy soldiers advertised in the comics and magazines given to me by young American conscripts (it was during Vietnam war). My interest in non-british figures, lead and plastic, began and never looked back.

I didn’t return to the UK often during those military days but when I did I was always loaded down with toy soldiers. Over the years I have off-loaded most of the Elastolins. But, despite being one of their cheapest ranges, I’ve always liked the 70mm soft plastic (weichplastic) Bayeux tapestry inspired Norman/Saxon figures. Quirky and mostly with one separate and therefore movable arm, they’re some of the few Elastolin figures I retained. Originals examples are easily identified because it’s almost impossible to mess with the soft plastic, and they are simply painted, with only a few colour variations, sometimes only the shields colours. The set also includes one of my favourite plastic toy figures; the crossbowman; the Norman army had many such auxiliaries and hats-off to Elastolin for depicting them. So here are the six unarmoured figures, the soft plastic foot knights that accompanied them might come at another time. Elastolin later issued a set of magnificent 70mm mounted Norman knights, probably some of the best figures they produced but they never re-issued these figures in their hard plastic; we had to wait until Preiser took over for that and I still prefer these original Elastolin ones

Next post will be Heyde AWI bivouac, after that a Hinton Hunt one, then some early Cherilea plastics.