North Lights - a History

This was posted on Blab today by Whitestones_uk.

History of North Light

First produced in 1978 by Guy Pocock and Anne Godfrey at the 'factory' at Yarn Mill, Biddulph, Stoke On Trent England.

NL started with dog models when designer Guy Pocock pioneered the application of the Kennel club breed standard to dog models available to the gift trade. Seven pedigrees were designed in collaboration with the sculptress Anne Godfrey and from their success in the gift trade North Light was born. In the pursuit of excellence North Light sketched, photographed and measured dogs of the first pedigree. 

The studio name was selected to refer to the ideal direction from which the light should pour into an artist’s studio, the North Light.

At the beginning they built up a line of 160 pedigree dogs. It was in the mid 1980s they began the working on horses. They also began to introduce farm animals, wild birds and other exotic animals from around the world.

North Light models are crafted in a mixture of ceramic and resin, with the addition of porcelain powder. Cold Cast Bronze models were a mixed with powered bronze then painted to look like bronze, they are heavier than normal NLs. 
North Lights were painted with Liquitex Acrylics. They were painted in a mix of airbrushing and hand painting by a highly skilled workforce. 

Dates on models are not the year it was made but the COPYRIGHT year

North Light went through many years of financial hardships and their history is 'chequered' ...

In 2005, the North Light factory located in Stoke-On-Trent, England was sold (including all existing North Light molds) to the company: WADE CERAMICS LTD. They repackaged and resold the North Light horses under the new trademark: North Light @ Wade. Production of most of the animal figures continued in the UK until July 2008, when the decision was taken to cease UK production of the North Light animals. A new range of animal figures was introduced - the North Light @ Wade Premier Collection - consisting of 17 horses and 22 dogs. The new range was made in China, but sold at a considerably lower price (sadly the quality of finishwork from China was not to the same high standard). Unfortunately Wade ceased production of all North Light figures in January 2009. All moulds are now discontinued. 

There are over 50 horse moulds.

Horses: Smaller Trad.
Arabian
Hanoverian
Morgan
Small Shire

Regular Trad. Size:
American Saddlebred
Andalusian (on and off base) [there were 2 types of base]
Lipizzaner - there were 3 different moulds: Piaffe [on base], Levade and Capriole [on base]
Broodmare (& Suckling Foal)
Carthorse with a rope halter and blanket moulded on
Clydesdale
Cob
Donkey Jennet
Large Friesian (head turned & up)
Friesian 1st version - head down
Friesian 2nd version - head up
Grazing mare
Hunter with braided mane & tail
Part Thoroughbred (same as the Hunter, but a loose mane and tail)
Irish Draft – braided main & tail
Jumper (with base & wall)
Warmblood - (same as the ID, but a loose mane & tail)
Mule with teeth showing
Percheron
Quarter Horse
Reclining Mare
Rolling Stallion
Royal Storm - rearing horse ( there are at least 2 sizes)
Shire Mare
Shire on the move (like carthorse but with the halter and blanket removed)
Shire Stallion (large)
Suffolk Punch
Thoroughbred (on base)
TWH
Zebra/Quagga

Farrier – horse with raised leg and farrier adding shoe

Pony Moulds:
British Spotted Pony
Welsh Cob
Welsh Mountain Pony
Welsh Pony Stallion
New Forest Pony
Norwegian Fjord
Exmoor Pony
Shetland - Miranda 
Shetland Pony.
Fell Pony.
Action Fell Pony. 
Dartmoor - Kirtly Ladybird
Dartmoor Stallion.
Pony Stallion
Highland

Foals:
Yearling Scratching 
Shire Foal
Small scratching foal
Lying foal
Shetland Pony Foal
Standing Foal
Grazing Foal
Arabian Foal
Donkey Foal
Suckling Foal

Micro Minis
Exmoor
Highland
New Forest
Welsh Mountain Pony
Shetland
Donkey
Twin Horses (lying)
Foal
Fell
Dartmoor

Ridden (moulded on tack and rider)
Child rider with pony
Pony Club with pony
Ridden Hunter (Huntsman) 

Dressage (small classic with rider)
Piaffe
Levade
Half Pass
Canter Pirouette 

As well as horse head 'busts' and 'Flying Horses' wall plaques

Kathleen Moody - a Little History

On the Moody Madness list there has been an ongoing discussion about Kathleen Moody's model, Simply Splendid and whether it was released by Hartland.

Kathleen herself clears up the confusion but also adds some interesting Breyer history, too:

Sat Aug 4, 2012 11:45 am (PDT) . Posted by:

"Kathleen Moody"

*Okay. To set the record straight- I did Simply Splendid before my
involvement with Hartland existed. It was one of the first horses I ever
did in clay and the very first resin I ever produced. I had it cast
through DaBar Enterprises, who then released and sold it. It was never
associated with Hartland in any way. SS was the horse that one of my
model buddies took to Calif to a Breyer West show and got the attention
of Peter Stone which resulted in my being hired by Breyer over twenty +
years ago. Hartland produced Lady Jewel and Jade in plastic (who were
created to be companion pieces for SS). The** Mini, the Paso (and Pocket
Ponies which were created by Carol Gasper and Linda Lima) were released
through Paola Groeber as resins ** before I started work with Breyer.
**Paola painted alot of stuff including SS.** They were all created in
the same time period- thus the confusion. Splendid Adventure was a very
limited run released later as a variation of SS.

K*

Elephant

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

Every model has a story. I'm not just talking about my personal history with the model, or its provenance. It's that I'm finding I could, quite realistically, come up with an interesting and detail-rich history post about each and every model. Here's a good example:

It's an early variation of the Breyer Elephant, in battleship gray. There are two different versions of this variation: one is molded in solid, opaque gray plastic, and the other (like this one) is painted in opaque gray paint. They can be hard to tell apart at first glance; the easiest way is to flip them over and check for paint puddling on his feet. Dating these fellows is rather hard: it's assumed that they were manufactured in the 1950s, but photographic evidence for the battleship gray variation is found the 1963 Dealer's Catalog.

(I'll discuss the problem of dating by catalog photos later this week.)

I found this fellow in a rather large collection of Elephant figurines that included several Breyer Elephants. When I spotted the collection at the flea market, from a distance, I made a silent prayer to whatever deity watches over the flea market that there would be at least one of the really rare Breyer Elephants in the herd (Pink, Blue, Woodgrain?)

Alas, they were all the same shade of gray, save this one. This guy was the only Elephant worth keeping. The rest of them went straight to the saleslist, where they made me a modest profit that was probably wasted on some other crazy flea market purchase, like my giant bucket of sequins or that five pounds of vintage Czech rhinestones. (They were still in their original packaging!)

Did you notice the sticker? Of course you did! It's a gold foil sticker indicating this fellow was a souvenir of the Will Rogers Turnpike in Oklahoma. Breyers with souvenir stickers or decals aren't uncommon; I see them turn up on eBay or the local dirt malls from time to time. They're not factory issue, so they don't necessarily add anything to the value of a model unless the place or date has a certain significance to it.

This one does.

A few weeks after I purchased the elephant collection, I found an old stash of travel brochures from the late 1950s. I don't go out of my way to collect them, per se, but if I find any that interest me on an artistic or topical level, I'll snap them up. They're cheap and fun, and provide an intriguing window into the previous owner's notions of suitable family vacationing.

And every once and a while, you find a genuine little treasure. In this box, I found a brochure announcing the opening of the Will Rogers Turnpike, in 1957! (I'd scan this little curiosity and share, but I can't find it at the moment - the boxes of horses are getting in the way.)

Highway and turnpike openings in the late 1950s and early 1960s were kind of a big deal, so the fact that the state of Oklahoma thought it was worth celebrating is not all that unusual. I just think it's neat that I found two separate Turnpike souvenirs in the same season, at the same flea market in Michigan, and from two different vendors!

I have no evidence one way or another if the Elephant was a souvenir sold specific to its opening, or was just a gift shoppe item that was available for some time afterwards. The paint job is a pretty early one, so I'd like to think that it was – or at least from the time when the road was still new and exciting, and not just a strip of pavement that took you from Point A to Point B.

Should the Elephant ever have to make that journey to Point B, the brochure is coming with him.

Early Hobby Book by Marney

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)


I've had to reference Marney's book a couple of times in the past few weeks. It felt strange using it as a reference book: it's become more valuable as an artifact of Breyer History than as a Breyer History.


There's still value in it as a history: Marney knew what she was talking about. She had unprecedented access to the factory and to everyone in the know. It contains unique and otherwise unpublished photographs. The sections on early Breyer history provide data and insights you can't get anywhere else. There's just one problem, and it's a big one.

She couldn't write.

I'm not talking about style or flow, I'm talking about simple coherence. She couldn't organize her thoughts on the page. She'd stop and just start rambling, or ranting. Unrelated captions and marginalia are embedded within paragraphs. Some concepts are left completely unexplained, and others are expounded upon, again and again.

Dates and data changes from page to page. She contradicts herself, frequently. On one page she spends an entire paragraph describing the horse and rider packaging, stating that she couldn't reprint them out of respect for Breyer's copyright: on the next page is a Breyer promotional picture showing the boxes she just described!

It's an almost textbook case against the concept of self-publishing. Some people need editors, and some books shouldn't be published. This shouldn't have been published, at least in the condition that it's in.

I know she had significant health problems, which probably affected her writing, and prevented the necessary editing from occurring. Whenever I find myself skimming through it, frustrated, I tell myself: It's probably just a first draft. There wasn't time to fix it.

But even if there had time, who would have volunteered to edit? I know I was too intimidated to even ask. We were all too intimidated to ask: she was our guru, our buddha, the queen of all Breyer History. Who were we to question her in the completion of her sacred task? She knew it better than any of us could have; it would have seemed presumptuous of any of us to have asked if she needed help.

If any good came out of it, it made me realize that I had to get somewhat serious about collecting and preserving Breyer History. This blog, and the history in it, might not exist because of it.

I often wonder what happened to Marney's stuff. Not the horses, but the paper: the research notes, the ad slicks, stock photos, correspondence: everything that did (and didn't) make it into the book. Part of the reason is because I'd like to see it preserved, as part of our greater hobby history. But part of me hopes that by looking at this otherwise unknown source material, some Breyer mysteries will finally be revealed, or at least be better explained. We have a better framework now to interpret whatever data it might contain, things she might not have noticed, or thought unimportant at the time ...

I know it was not all thrown out, or destroyed. I actually have some inkling of where and to whom some of it went; it was through one of those folks that I managed to secure one of Marney's photo albums. I'd love to have more of Marney's stuff – or access to it – but there are rather delicate issues involved, most of which are probably not prudent for me to discuss, except in this most general of terms.

A History of Breyer

(from Bryer History Diva, 2009)

So when I tell them that the hobby has been around in some form, in the U.S., since the late 1950s, I get the usual eye-rolls and incredulous looks. So I'll go to my archives and pull out a couple of pieces of documentation to straighten out the wiseacre, including this neat article from the September, 1961 issue of Western Horseman:

Yup, that's an Old Mold Mare they are holding. There's a App FAM and several H-R minis visible, and that's a pot metal Western Horse on the shelf. A favorite quote from the brief article beneath:

“The miniature saddle maker's artistic talents also include pencil sketching and refinishing horse statutes in such colors as real animals.”

Unlike Breyer History, we actually have quite a lot of Hobby History ephemera out there. Prior to the Internet, the hobby was a paper-intensive affair: letters, newsletters, photo shows, the occasional newspaper or magazine articles brought us together and bound us together. I can remember stalking the mailbox on a daily basis, anxiously waiting for the next precious communique from the Model Horse Universe. A big, fat envelope with my name on it = much happiness!

As a student of history, I'm also interested in saving the hobby's collective history, not just of Breyer Horses. Aside from the research opportunities it would provide (i.e. being able to track when certain terms were invented, when color and mold changes occurred, etc.) it'd also provide us some standing and credibility to the Outside World. Showing the Outside World that we've been around for about fifty years will go quite a ways towards taking us more seriously, and proving that we're not a fad, and we're not going away.

Besides, other avocations with papery origins, most notably Science-Fiction and Comic Book Fandom, have made vocal and visible efforts to preserve their history and ephemera, so why not us? Science-fiction fandom just celebrated its 80^th anniversary, in fact! (And some are celebrating by trying to find out what happened to First Fandom's first club president. Cool!)

http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58405

There's just one problem: most hobbyists shared my sentimental attachment to this paper, and are loathe to give it up.

I've been trying for some time now to save the physical remnants of our collective history and create at least the rudiments of a hobby archive. I've made a few excellent recoveries and discoveries, but most hobbyists don't want to surrender the tangible evidence of their fondest childhood memories. Then there's the contentious question of who becomes the repository: everyone who has a bigger than average pile of stuff wants to be home of THE archive (including me!)

I first became involved on Blab when my name came up in a potential hobby history project; our initial efforts didn't get very far, for a variety of reasons. The topic came up again, in connection with the epic “future of the hobby” thread, and it looks like we might get a little bit further along this time. For one thing, a Facebook page has already been created to help collect and coordinate our collective efforts, and begin the effort to collect oral histories. A link to that page has been provided in my Links of Interest, to the right.

Next post – back to plain ol' Breyer History. Promise!