Bentley by Rovex

This simple little replica of a postwar Bentley comes from an almost forgotten range of plastic vehicles made in the late 1940s by a company called Rovex, a name usually associated with model railways.

The technology associated with moulding plastics had made rapid progress during WW2 and the toy industry was quick to adapt it. A man called Alexander Gregory Vanetzian founded Rovex in 1946 and secured a contract to supply plastic toys to Marks and Spencer. Among these were a small group of clockwork-powered vehicles around three inches in length, including an Austin A30, Austin A40 delivery van, Commer coach and the Bentley. The special feature of these models was ‘automatic self-return steering’ which really meant that the car zig-zagged alarmingly from side to side!

However, Tri-ang, Britain’s largest toy company, soon bought Rovex and transferred production to a new factory at Margate. Tri-ang Rovex’s plastic-based model railways quickly toppled Hornby from its seemingly unassailable position, while Rovex vehicles were absorbed into Tri-ang’s own Minic series of similar toys.

Models such as the plastic Bentley therefore proved to be little more than a brief interlude in Rovex’s progress to higher things. While they are undeniably crude, in the antique toy market it’s often the items that were not highly rated in their day that turn out to be collectable, simply because so few survive, and finding a Rovex vehicle in its original box is not easy. The plastic will probably have deformed and the wheels melted, but that just adds to the challenge.