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Over the past two years or so, the French Climat promos from 1982 have been mentioned in a few threads around here, and it has been said that their status is controversial.

Since nobody else has come forward with background information about those models, I have now conducted a search among my old Matchbox USA magazines and unearthed the articles in which they were originally mentioned. I remembered those articles but did not remember when exactly they had been printed, so without the help of an index the search took me quite a while - sorry I did not find the time for this at an earlier date!

It turns out the models were first introduced to the Matchbox USA members in November 1987 - some five and a half years after their issue date. The scans reproduced here are from the November and December 1987 issues of Matchbox USA:





I cannot be 100% certain about the accuracy of Philip Bowdidge's account of how those models were produced, but I have no reason to doubt him.

If one accepts the story as printed to be true - i.e. that the models were delivered from the factory in England to the French Matchbox subsidiary loose and that the labels were produced in France and applied by French Matchbox employees who subsequently packed the models in single blisterpacks and had them delivered to the hotel chain - , then those models have to be regarded as Code 1 issues: entirely produced by Matchbox including the application of the promotional labels.

Of course this does not nullify the fact that those labels are easy to reproduce and that it is therefore easy to produce fakes of those models. For this reason I still think that it is not a good idea to spend large amounts of money on them, in spite of their undoubted rarity - first because you can hardly ever be sure that you will get a genuine item, and second because you will instigate the production of even more fakes.

Thank's Christian for the above, it has been unclear how these models should be coded, so what appears above is going to help with this. I have seen the number 39 Silver Shadow in Silver-Grey in a picture which hopefully can be verified with the date period you mention.

Ghosthunter.

Regarding the Silver Shadow in silver-grey with Climat label, this was first shown in the April/May 1988 issue of Model Collector magazine in an article about Matchbox Miniatures Rolls-Royce models by Nigel Cooper.

Nigel wrote about it as follows:

During 1982 in France the group of hotels 'Climat de France' began a promotion whereby one of ten models was given away to customers. A metallic red version of the Rolls-Royce featured this label. The silver version shown here with 'Climat' on the boot was a pre-production model.

So one has to conclude that if anybody has a silver-grey Silver Shadow with a Climat label, that is either a pre-production or a fake.

On the other hand, although the variant regularly used for the promotion was surely the metallic red one, as that was current at the time, I would not rule out the possibility of examples of the earlier colour still being in storage at the French Matchbox subsidiary and being used for the promotion as well. The same would apply to other models too.

Anything is possible, and nothing is absolutely certain!

ChFalkensteiner wrote:On the other hand, although the variant regularly used for the promotion was surely the metallic red one, as that was current at the time, I would not rule out the possibility of examples of the earlier colour still being in storage at the French Matchbox subsidiary and being used for the promotion as well.

This would tie in well with the comment in the second scan about Matchbox France using models of which they had large stocks.

"So one has to conclude that if anybody has a silver-grey Silver Shadow with a Climat label, that is either a pre-production or a fake.

On the other hand, although the variant regularly used for the promotion was surely the metallic red one, as that was current at the time, I would not rule out the possibility of examples of the earlier colour still being in storage at the French Matchbox subsidiary and being used for the promotion as well. The same would apply to other models too."

My exact conclusion towards the Silver version as well and the last statement is so true, as we are finding just this sort of practice with various models in our collections, thank's Christian for the clarification.

Ghosthunter.

Thanks for unveiling the mystery