A Filipino’s rare world collection

Today, being a Sunday, I will give politics a rest. I discovered a new world I would not have known – the world of miniature soldiers. (Recently I learned that my colleague columnist Bobbit Avila has also begun his collection).

I was so surprised when a dear friend, Jose Alejandrino, who happens to be Bayanko’s adviser, and I were walking at a mall in Alabang when he spotted a store called Special Toy Store which specialized in selling miniature soldiers and military aircraft. He dragged me to the store and asked the sales lady if they had certain models he was looking for.

The store was filled with toy collectors. One of them whispered to Alejandrino the store had a die-cast metal of the Northrop F5A Freedom Fighter in 1:72 scale which is a collector’s item. The model A was supplied to the Philippine Air Force by the US. Alejandrino decided at once to buy it.

My friend explained to me he had been collecting miniature toy soldiers since the age of 12 when he was in school in England. Over the last 59 years, he had accumulated over 1,200 figures, most of which are made of metal, a lead alloy, and are hand-painted, over 300 die-cast metal military vehicles, armor and artillery, and nearly 100 die-cast metal aircraft. These were purchased during the course of his trips to Austria, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the United States, and Hong Kong. They are all stored in Spain.

“Whenever I visit a country, I look for specialized stores that sell them,” he said. “There aren’t that many anymore. When I find one, I look for missing items in my collection.”

The soldiers in his collection are 54mm (2.25 inches) or 1:32 in scale which is the standard scale adopted by Britains. The military vehicles are 1:50 in scale, the aircraft 1:72 in scale.

He said there are many collectors around the world but most pieces are manufactured in limited quantity. They are made by hand. So there is always a constant demand for limited editions since demand outstrips supply.

He cited four of the most famous collectors. American billionaire Malcolm Forbes had the biggest collection, over 90,000 toy soldiers housed at the Forbes Museum of Military Miniatures in Tangiers, Morocco. He began collecting in the late 1960s. In 1997, part of his collection was sold by Sotheby’s New York. The 5,000 pieces that were auctioned fetched $2,388,637. The rest of his collection has been valued at $25,000,000.

When Alejandrino met Malcolm Forbes before the collector passed away in 1990, they spent the afternoon talking about their collection. “It was one of the nicest meetings I had,” Alejandrino said. “We were chatting like two little boys who never lost their childhood.”

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was also known for his toy soldier collection at Blenheim Palace. In his memoirs, he wrote, “I had ultimately nearly 1,500 (miniature soldiers). They were all of one size, all British, and organized as an infantry division with a cavalry brigade… the toy soldiers turned the current of my life. Henceforward, all my education was directed to passing into Sandhurst (the royal military academy).”

Alejandrino confessed, “Like Winston Churchill my collection inspired me towards a military career. I was a RAF cadet at Sevenoaks in England and was thinking of entering Sandhurst or the Philippine Military Academy, but my father was against it. He wanted me to continue in a university in the United States — Harvard, Yale, or Columbia. I dreamed of being a fighter pilot flying F86F Sabrejets. I eventually ended up at Columbia but all my life I maintained a deep interest in military affairs by studying strategy and tactics in my free time. I also read up on all the great battles. The strange thing is I detested war. I helped organize the Anti-Vietnam War Movement which began at Columbia and spread to all US college campuses.”

Hollywood actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., too, had a toy soldier collection of 3,000 figures. He sold it in 1977 to an unknown American collector.

The most famous woman collector was Anne S.K. Brown who began collecting in 1930. She accumulated 6,000 miniature figures. Today her collection is housed at Brown University Library in Providence, Rhode Island.

Alejandrino said, “My collection is certainly one of the biggest in the world. I have many rare pieces from Britains and Dinkys in the 1950s and from Solido in the 1960s. They are still in their original boxes. These were hand-made in England and France. They are worth quite a lot of money.”

Among the rare pieces in his collection are metal figures of Filipino insurgents and American soldiers in the Philippine-American War. He bought these in Spain.

* * * For me, the biggest surprise was he has, aside from his miniature soldier collection, a valuable collection of Spanish-Philippine coins and pillar dollars.

“I sold my Philippine-US collection to a San Francisco coin dealer eight years ago,” he said. “It was highgrade and complete. I kept the Spanish-Philippine because there are six coins missing to complete it. My pillar dollar collection is one of the most extensive in the world. These were the famous silver pieces-of-eight minted in some Spanish colonies in Latin America that lured pirates in the Caribbean to raid Spanish galleons. I have some very rare pieces like the 1772 minted in Mexico. Only two pieces are known to exist in the world. One is with the Central Bank of Mexico, the other is in my collection.”

What will he do with his collection? “Frankly, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it will end up in a museum.”