Miniatures News, July 1984

While at the London Toy Museum recently, besides admiring again the seemingly endless vistas of model cars, locomotives, railways, ships and aeroplanes, etc, and the loop of passenger-carrying 7½ in-gauge track that surrounds the lake, flanked by “straights” in one-inch gauge, etc, I looked especially to see if, among the toy car exhibits, there were any of those excellent replicas of the Model-T Ford which I used to buy, for a nominal sum, at Woolworth’s, “the sixpenny-store”, as a boy. I recall them as simple tinplate, wire-coil-driven toys, that so effectively captured the Model-T. I seem to recall tiny correct-pattern radiator filler, Ford logo on the running boards, etc, and I remember I had saloon, two-seater and coupe versions, all in glossy black.

I thought I should never see one again. But in the London Toy Museum they have a Bing T-Ford tourer, mit driver, which may be what I am on about. However, it looks a trifle larger, and not quite so well-finished or “Model-T”, as mine, which alas are no more. But memory can play tricks, so Woolworth’s may well have been selling off Bing toys. Or did they have their own line, in improved Ts?

To mark the fact that Kellogg’s (GB) Ltd, the corn-flake importers, was founded in 1924, they have been giving away, on return of tops from their packets, diecast metal “Matchbox” replicas, 7½ cm long, of Model-A Ford vans, carrying the Kellogg’s logo. They say this will be a reminder of typical 1920s delivery vans taking Kellogg’s products to local stores. Did Kellogg’s use such Fords, and if not, did their logo appear on those of grocer’s delivery vans, I find myself wondering? — W.B.