Who Or What Was Alvis Stalwart

 

  Who or what was Alvis Stalwart?  For the price of 50 cents, I was willing to find out. That was the price of a Matchbox car in 1966 when the Alvis Stalwart was first introduced to American kids.

   The name was fittingly strange for a vehicle that sported six wheels and looked like a prop from Lost In Space.  I never cared to research the name – it probably wasn’t in the library card catalog anyway.

   Fast forward 53 years and I came across a Facebook group dedicated to diecast metal cars.  I pulled out my childhood Matchbox car collection for a quick photo.  After all, here was a group - possibly the only group, that actually cared what was in the box. 

   Out popped weird named vehicles like the Mercedes Unimog, the Iso Griffo and of course the Alvis Stalwart.  It took me 53 years but finally I learned the origin of the Alvis Stalwart.

   Wikipedia describes the Stalwart as a highly mobile amphibious military truck built by Alvis that served the British Army from 1966 until 1992.  British servicemen apparently called it a Stolly. 

   My miniature Matchbox version was labeled BP Exploration to probably misdirect Russian spies who looked to steal the design.

   There is no single toy from my childhood that consumed more of my time and gave me greater pleasure than my collection of Matchbox cars that were stamped “Made in England by Lesney.”

   Lesney Products was an industrial die casting company founded by Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith in 1947. The pair began experimenting with die cast toys and created the first toy under the Matchbox name in 1953.  A Lesney co-owner named Jack Odell designed a miniature car for his daughter because her school only allowed children to bring toys that could fit inside a matchbox. The rest is history as they say.  

    Because each model had to fit in a matchbox, the idea was born to sell the models in replica matchboxes. For many years that followed, the name Matchbox was synonymous with die cast cars.

   Competition from Mattel’s Hot Wheels cars seriously cut into Lesney’s business in the late 1960’sand they were eventually bought out by their old rival Mattel in 1996.

   One thing that made Matchbox cars special was the price.  For fifty cents, a kid could buy a toy with his/her own money that lasted more than an afternoon. 

   I hauled my cars in their special Matchbox case for sleepovers and vacations frequently scanning the free catalogs for new models.  These days a mint condition catalog is worth more than the cars but I never saw them as an investment.

   Instead, they were just comfortable old “friends” that had personalities and helped me fill hours of my childhood and then hours of my son’s childhood.

   My photo on Facebook drew 130 likes from the die-cast group last week and prompted several others to pull their collections out of the closet.  I wonder if there was an Alvis Stalwart was among them.