A couple of handsome oldies

And I don't mean these two, undeniably handsome though they may be in their rustic sort of way.

No, I was digging around in odd corners of my collection while putting together my recent "chopping" piece and re-discovered a couple of fine old models I hadn't even looked at in ages. They may be familiar to some of you at least but there's no harm in giving them another viewing.

The first is a 1954 Alvis TC21/100, familiarly known as the "Grey Lady". The real car looks like this:

and this is the 1:43 white metal version produced by Top Marques. Pretty nicely done, and the wire wheels look particularly fine.

By the way there is a new outfit calling itself Top Marques, making resin models, but they are not related to this 1980s white metal producer.

Second up is an Armstrong-Siddeley Star Sapphire. Here is the real thing:

and here is the 1:43 produced in white metal by Pathfinder Models.

The Star Sapphire was a mildly re-worked version of the earlier Sapphire, which was modelled by an Australian outfit called Big River Models.

The Pathfinder and the Big River are both now quite expensive and hard to find.

The Alvis and the Armstrong-Siddeley were handsome products of the "old school" of car-making, well-built and with decent performance and a sophisticated feel, suitable for middle class types who couldn't quite run to a Rolls or Bentley, but with bodies expensively produced by outside coachbuilders and small production numbers, they ended up being unable to compete with more modern designs like Jaguars which were available at half the price, and they eventually ceased production.