Mary Tins Supplemental

If you’ve ever bought off ebay you may well have experienced what happened with me. So, a fortnight ago, just a few days after Christmas I ordered a replica ‘Mary’ tin from ebay. I posted yesterday all about this. Well, what I didn’t tell you was that I was messed around something rotten by Evri, the delivery company, so last Sunday I was looking at alternatives in case it never did get delivered before my nerve snapped and I claimed a refund. Well, one of the reasonably priced alternatives I looked at obviously alerted the owner and he offered it to me at a reduction. The price was so good that I felt, hmm, I certainly don’t mind having three boxes rather than 2, so I bought it. This was the one that arrived yesterday and the one in the photos with my post yesterday.

Later on yesterday, then, the first one I ordered arrived. Here’s a photo of the three together.

So, the genuine Mary tin is in the middle. The one on top is the last one to arrive, while the bottom one is the one that I wrote about and photographed yesterday. So let’s take my original away for a moment:-

The embossing on the lids seems pretty much identical, but of course there is one glaring difference. The top one seems much closer in colour to my original while the bottom one seems more of a coppery or bronze colour almost. There is one other even more obvious difference between the two tins which you can’t see from the photo. Compare the bottoms of the three tins :-

Yes, my first replica tin on the bottom does not have any writing on it, while the top is stamped with the Daily Mail. I don’t know why. There doesn’t appear to be any sign that the plain one has had anything done to it to remove the writing so that someone could try to pass it off as an original. Which I’m sure would be a forlorn attempt anyway because it doesn’t require any expertise whatsoever to tell the difference between original and replica. I guess its because they were made in different batches, and being promotional items, nobody was that bothered about each replica being identical to all of the others.

I do find the whole replica business quite interesting. During lock down I assembled a little collection of various models of trams and buses produced by Matchbox and a few of their competitors. In the process I obtained these two models –

The one on the left is an original Matchbox Models of Yesteryear London Tram. The one on the left is not – it is a promotional model offered by Typhoo tea in 1985 to celebrate their 80^th birthday. Apart from the advertising banner, they seems identical. But they aren’t – there is little or no plastic in the Matchbox model, while the roof, wheels and baseplate of the Typhoo bus are all made of plastic. My guess is that the plastic parts made it cheaper to manufacturer and lighter to transport.