In order to avoid raking over old ground, I have culled the dialogue below from the 10c British Sugar Corporation discussion on the old forum.
I wrote:
“One of the few gaps of any note in Nick's otherwise excellent on-line Matchbox catalogue is the 10c British Sugar Corporation promotional.
Now I don't know how many of you noticed it, but there was one of these in MICA's Spring 2012 auction. Furthermore, the Lot description referenced a 1996 MICA article in Volume 11, No. 6, p.233/4 and, with Kevin McGimsey's written permission, it is reproduced below. I have also added the catalogue illustration.
In addition, thanks to Kevin, I can also report that the casting matches the standard issue variation code 16.
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If the MICA article is to be believed, the 10c BSC promotional seems to have been produced in extremely limited quantities - no more than 72 and perhaps half that. With three known survivors, that gives survival rates of about 4% and 8%. If we allow for the models owned by secretive collectors by doubling (admittedly a totally arbitrary factor) the number of known models, the survival rates climb to 8% and 16%.
So perhaps the suggested 10% survival figure is a good rule-of-thumb after all.”
I then quoted Christian (from a post in a totally different topic entitled “Code Definitions”) as follows:
“…the British Sugar Corporation truck would be Code 1 if the information provided is indeed correct, i.e. if it was wholly made by Lesney including the application of the decals. However, I have doubts if that was really the case, and perhaps we may never know for sure. If Lesney just provided blank models and the decals were applied elsewhere, then the model is Code 2.”
I responded:
“I had always assumed that the 10c British Sugar Corporation promotional represented a non-Lesney (i.e. unofficial) conversion of the standard Tate & Lyle model, but the MICA article has set me thinking.
Way back in those pre-internet days, it would have been difficult (but obviously not impossible) for BSC to make contact with a suitable decal manufacturer. Having done so, they would then have had to find someone to first soak the decals off the Tate & Lyle models and then to apply the five(!) BSC ones – fiddly, precision work which would be both difficult and time consuming for someone inexperienced in decal application. (The rejection rate through misapplied and torn decals doesn’t bear thinking about! There would also be the issues of the axles rusting from the model being immersed in water in order to remove the original decals.)
It makes a lot more sense for BSC to have signed a contract whereby Lesney used its regular decal supplier to provide the BSC decals and then used a member of its own skilled staff to apply them to a quantity of bare 10c Fodens taken straight from final assembly. The end product would have been produced faster, more neatly and with a negligible rejection rate. It would certainly have been more convenient for BSC and, even after Lesney’s margin, probably also cheaper.
We know that Lesney did something similar with the 2c Muir Hill (albeit a slightly larger run and using decals already in-house for a different model), so taking the concept one step further by introducing tailor-made decals for a shorter run is definitely plausible.
Taken together, the 2c Muir Hill and the 10c BSC promotionals seem to me to point to an attempt by Lesney to break into (or should that be to create?) the corporate model market. If that is correct, what went wrong? Why are there so few of these ‘private company’ models? Could it be that economics just didn’t add up? Certainly it’s a big step from using a single, pre-existing decal on a reasonable number of models, to ordering three completely new decals and then affixing five of them to a very small quantity of models. I can quite imagine that with the number of models Lesney was making in the mid-1960s, the profits to be had from producing extremely small runs of corporate models were insignificant and were deemed not to justify the effort involved. As an extension of these ideas, could this by why Lesney adopted a very cooperative but ultimately ‘hands off’ approach to the production of the Beales-Bealeson vans?
Could someone with more understanding of such things have a stab at working out the chronological order of the 2c Muir Hill, the 10c BSC and the 46b Beales-Bealeson promotionals please?”
Chrisitan replied
“The Muir Hill was made in 1967, which is indicated by it coming with an E type box.
On the BSC I can only go by the MICA article, and I cannot see if the box shown there has one blue and one black side or two blue sides. It is either from 1964 or 1965, but certainly earlier than 1966.
The Beales Bealesons van has been described as issued in 1964 (e.g. in Geoffrey Leake's Concise Catalogue).”
I am not sure if Lesney actively attempted to break into the promotional market at that time. More likely those few models came to be due to requests from outside.
Beside those mentioned, there are a few more examples. The best known (and probably earliest) is the Models of Yesteryear Y-4A Sentinel in "Gebrüder Schmidt" livery. Nowadays it seems to be accepted as a fact that Lesney provided blanks of that one, and the decoration was applied by a third party. The new Yesteryear book by Alexandr Pícha and Libor Miks calls it a Code 2 model.
Another one is the King Size K-13A Foden Cement Truck in "Lieferbeton" livery.
I still have no definitive knowledge about how this one came about, but it seems likely that, again, Lesney provided blanks and the decals were applied elsewhere. Note that Lieferbeton was an Austrian subsidiary of Readymix.
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I then wrote:
“I don’t collect either YY or KS and so was unaware of the two promotionals you mention.
As regards the 46b Fermont, I pretty sure that this wasn't officially sanctioned by Lesney and the reason for this is as follows. One of these models was recently sold on Ebay and the seller provided a number of clear photographs, one of which showed a blank, but very uneven, baseplate (see below).
It is unclear what has been done, but it looks to me as though the raised lettering has simply been ground off and the baseplate then rather badly repainted in matt black. (N.B. The quality, or lack thereof, of the baseplate painting indicates to me that the bodies were painted by Lesney.) Now, if this were a model for which Lesney had provided unassembled, pre-painted models under contract, then it is inconceivable that the finished product should no longer bear the Lesney name (c.f. Beales-Bealesons).
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It now looks to me as though the policy was to accept orders for models with non-standard decals, but not for non-standard colours. This does then raise the difficulty of the 34a Eheim bodyshells. Presumably those were ordered in sufficiently large quantities in a standard Lesney colour (I think that's probably the determining factor) that the additional organisational effort required to put them down the correct paint line and then pack and ship them was minimal and obviously more than offset by the sales margin.”
