I have just said farewell to some old Arab friends.
They were a box of 20 bloodthirsty Bedouins from the Action Packs Desert Fighter range and were snapped up within a few hours of being posted for sale on eBay.
They lived for the past 30 years in a huge box of military kits and toys in my old bedroom and are probably extremely glad to be out at last to pursue their nomadic lifestyle. I hope their new owner treats them well, paints them and places them on a desert diorama with their natural foes the French Foreign Legion, complete with hankies hanging from the backs of their hats.
In their unpainted form these sons of the desert were a fetching lilac colour (well, this was the 70s and they were wearing dresses) and occupied a rather uncertain place in my toy army.
Although one of them had a rifle, the rest were armed with daggers and curved swords so they were most regularly matched against my huge selection of knights, who played crusaders to their saracens.
Although well modelled, the arabs’ main fault was that they were such a bunch of losers - six out of 20 were shown in an extravagant dying pose with arms flung aloft and an expression of agony on their face. Whatever cunning ambush they came up with amongst the cushions and chair legs of the living room floor they were swiftly put to the the sword by the knights, who came armed with a deadly array of broad swords, lances, maces and axes. Richard the Lionheart would have captured Jerusalem in a trice he’s been faced with such a useless crowd.
Later these lily-livered lilac losers were reinforced in their ill-fated battles by a dozen or so more ‘offensive’ arabs from the Timpo Swoppett range.
They were in fact cousins as Action Pack was a boxed range of 1:32 scale plastic soldiers developed by Timpo as a rival to the unpainted figures from Airfix.
While not as realistic or detailed as Britains soldiers (the Rolls Royce of toy figure makers) Timpo’s Swoppett range was ahead of its time because the full-colour figures had interchangeable, moving parts. They were Transformers in a limited way.
Most Swoppets came in two halves. They rotated at the waist and the top half could be taken off and put onto another pair of legs.
Weapons, heads and hats were also removable and thereby came a problem. The cowboys for instance came with a small silver six-shooter which fitted snugly into a tiny fist. These were very easy to lose or they broke off leaving the stub of the gun handle lodged in the hand.
Likewise tiny hats and helmets often went missing into the darker recesses of the vinyl covered sofa or were sucked up by the Hoover.
Beneath his headgear the Swoppet figure had no hair, in fact his head stopped at the rim of his hat. A Timpo Swoppet soldier’s big secret was that he had a huge hole in his cranium where his stetson or helmet fitted. There were some exceptions such as the Mexican Bandits who were literally knob-heads minus their sombreros.
With a touch more ambition I could have developed a Dr Who-style game in which the Swoppets were actually alien replicants - Attack of the Half-Heads. Alternatively, come to think of it, I could have staged Half-Heads v Knob-Heads.
The Swoppets’ alien credentials were underlined by the fact that they came with one of just two faces - a chisel-cheeked Jack Palance-type or a gormless-looking guy with, what I now see as a striking resemblance to Dougal from Father Ted. The Jack Palances were usually the exciting ones, actually pointing their guns, doing some killing while the Father Dougals were doing something pointless like marching as if on parade (what good is that in a battle?) or flouncing along with both arms outstretched, asking to be shot.
Of course, I could have swopped their heads around but to a nine-year-old me that would have been unthinkable.
To this day I still have a little box of spare Timpo parts - Sombreros, Indian pigtails and headless torsos - waiting to be reunited with their original owners.
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