BAYKO - Surprising Boxes

This one of the most inexplicable aspects of BAYKO, and will probably continue to be so.

Most standard pre-war BAYKO sets and the supporting cast of conversion sets were sold in red boxes...

...but not all!

Set #6 was in a Brown box - different, but not surprising.

However, for some reason that I can't really explain, some pre-war BAYKO sets were produced in Blue boxes [left].

We might explain away the use of Blue for some 'New Series' BAYKO sets as being related to war-affected material shortages...

...but there are also examples of earlier sets in Blue.

Strangely, after the war the situation is almost reversed. Most of the time, most of the sets and conversion sets were produced in Blue boxes...

...but there are many examples of sets and conversion sets in Red boxes.

This variability certainly continued until at least October, 1950, so it remains likely that material shortage is again the front-runner in terms of a credible explanation.

Less easy to explain away are the occasional 1950s era BAYKO boxes which turn up in a dull shade of green [right].

I really think that this was too late for the material shortage explanation to be relevant...

...so was it, perhaps, a marketing experiment...

...or even production targeted at the Irish market?

Whatever the Green box explanation, I've also heard tell of a few larger 1950s BAYKO sets in 'old gold' coloured boxes but know absolutely nothing of their origins - a special promotion perhaps?

Thanks to Angus Jones of New Zealand for initiating this section.

The photos [right] show a set 0X box which is stapled rather than glued, and made from thicker cardboard than normal.

There is clear evidence to confirm that this was how this box was actually sold - the price sticker [sixteen shillings and nine pence] from David Jones Department Store in Sydney.

My original guess, given the geographical clue, was that this was perhaps part of a damaged consignment which was fixed with flat-pack boxes, perhaps dispatched from the UK...

...I'm now older and wiser - well, perhaps I now know better anyway - as you will see if you read on.

Robin Throp tells me that he has come across stapled boxes in the UK, so perhaps the explanation is simply the use of a different supplier.

Peter Crook went even further and brought quite a collection of stapled boxes to the June 2007 BAYKO Collectors Club meeting at Lane End.

All of the 5 boxes shown here [left] - which include Sets #0, #1X, #2 and #2X [2 off] - are from the late 1940s or early 1950s. This, I believe, strongly supports the theory that this was all part of Plimpton's response to the post-war material shortages. Stapled boxes were obviously a lot more wide spread than I first thought.

One final point, if you click on the image / slide show [above, left] you will see a larger version on which you can clearly see that several of the staples are 'vertical' rather than the 'horizontal' orientation you would expect - just think about how you would do it with an ordinary office stapler and you'll understand what I mean. Thanks to eagle-eyed Robin Throp for noticing this.

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