This maker produced many lovely hollowcast figures from the 1920’s up to the early WW2 years before turning to war production, after the war it split and neither company lasted long despite turning to plastic production. The range that I particularly like is their Air Raid Precautions one. It was produced to appeal to the sentiments of a British population bracing for heavy bombing of cities. The figures are all copies or adaptions the pictures produced for a set of cigarrete cards issued in packs sold by the Wills company. These cards came with the Wills or Ogdens packs. They accurately depict the then government’s early war preparations; warning the population to take seriously the fear of gas warfare introduced during the previous WW1. The set of gas masked firemen, always two would man a hose and the third to set the inlet hose to supply the water to the trailer pump, is particularly nice.
On the right are images of the cards (just a few of the set). All the figures in the range are shown except three depicting civilian ladies using a stirrup pump and a man (adaption of a zoo figure) carrying buckets; I have yet to aquire decent originals of these, but will add them when I do.
All of these figures are now hard to find in good condition.
Jim's Vintage Toy Soldiers 
Fantastic article, James. There are actually a few more figures in the series – two women with a stirrup pump and a young man with two water buckets looking to replenish the stirrup pump water supply. There’s also an item missing from the AFS trailer pump set, which is a sandbagged ring mounted over a circular silvered piece of metal meant to represent an emergency water source.
Also, for the record, these cigarette cards were published by Ogden’s, Will’s, Churchman and Hignett Brothers cigarettes as part of a government scheme to normalise the sight of ARP personnel on the streets from August 1938 onwards. Whilst they all feature the same artwork, Churchman’s cigarette cards are unusual as they’re a larger format, showing off more of the artwork on the cards but in turn became a set of 48 rather than 50 cards.
The figures are complimented well by Britians helmeted ARP wardens and their ARP decontamination stretcher teams, St John Ambulance stretcher and nurse teams and their volunteer ambulance and county civilian ambulances.
Over the years I’ve spoken to a number of local authority emergency planning officers who remember using these figures for the grimmer job of planning emergency exercises into the 1950s Cold War world – a viewing of Peter Watkins’ ‘The War Game’ shows that by the 1960s we were still using a lot of the same uniforms and technology.
The final irony is that Taylor and Barrett’s factory was itself a victim of the Luftwaffe in 1940 and it looks like the majority of the moulds were destroyed (apart from the young man with two buckets who reappeared post war as a fish carrying zookeeper and is frequently retro converted back to give renewed life to a rare figure.
Look forward to reading more of these insightful articles and collections – like the Dan dare one especially. I might have a fair number of those figures too.
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~Hi Paul, thanks for your kind remarks. Reference your final comment about T&B moulds. they were not destroyed. I had all of them in the 1980s; the original brass hinged ones with long wooden handles; like those you see in the Britain’s pathe news film of their casting room, they still had the strips of cloth wrapped around them to stop your hands burning. I could never get the knack of tipping out the hot metal to make them hollow cast, but did cast solid examples. I had the full air raid precautions ones, all the military ones and ones that made up the slush cast fire engines. The most fascinating one I tried to cast was the spaceship, but it was quite large and I could never get a full casting out of it, but I did manage to cast the very tiny sets of spacemen that sat in it, sadly I dont have them anymore. the moulds were not owned by me, they belonged to an antique dealer friend of mine. I gave the ones I had back to him when he sold all the moulds to someone. I believe he had all the moulds, but I was only interested in playing around with some of them. I gave him all the figures i’d cast as well, at that time I was producing my own range and that took up all the storage I had. Someone must still have the moulds, there were a lot of them and they were very robust.
I only put figures from my website that I get out of storage on the website and only add a minimum of text. The Dan Dare Unicorn miniatures seem be unavailable at the moment, I don’t know why, perhaps it’s ebay’s policy of giving details of sellers earnings to the tax office. I’ve got most of the Dan Dare figures somewhere, not just the Phants, but theyre the ones I really like.
Regards,
Jim
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