1966 World Cup Willie Mascot

Another great find, this time from the Stables at Camden Market, probably sometime in the early Nineties. To think I actually ummed and arrghed over paying the £8 price tag!

World Cup Willie was the mascot for the 1966 World Cup in England and what a handsome fellow he is too. There've been some good mascots over the years, but this soft toy version is my favourite. Sadly I cant find a makers mark, so I cant tell you much more about him.

Willie was the first World Cup mascot, and while he was emblazoned on all manner of items one of the strangest Ive found is this rollerball figure below by Marx Rolykins. The base has a lead ballbearing that makes Willie glide along.















To see all the mascots, since Englands finest hour head over to Wikipedia.

Matchbox drums

I spent an age over at wackystuff the other day, and what a treat it was! With nearly 1000 images to peruse, it really is a delight!

Some of the highlights include some very idyllic 1950 family postcards as well as some superbly printed labels.

Prompted by some of the matchbox labels on wackystuff I have posted a couple of cylindrical matchbox drums, of my own. These lovely little drums hold 100 matches with brightly coloured heads, all visible through the tightly fitting lids.

Not so easy Ladybird Reading Scheme

Heres an odd one!

Intrigued by the cover, I initially presumed these two Ladybird books were Dutch, but it turns out they were part of The Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA). Devised in 1961 the idea was to teach children to read phonetically. This meant devising new letters and symbols for some sounds. In total there were 44 symbols in the new alphabet.

The two books here are from the Ladybird 606 series, People at work (or should that be "Pepl at wurk") are The Fisherman & The Policeman. Ladybird translated a number of books into ITA under the title "eezy-reeding". Apparently they are now quite rare.

At the height of its popularity in 1970 the ITA scheme was estimated to be in 4000 schools. Theres a few more examples tagged over at flickr. See if you can work out whats going on?

Below the opening page from The poleesman.