Well Ladies and Gentlemen… Boys and Girls… all the sailors at sea… and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all… are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
Back in the dim and distant past when all toy soldiers were exactly 54mm tall and nice and glossy too Laura (the first Mrs. Neilson) and I were sitting around the log fire in our ‘squatter shack’ in the hills of Hong Kong trying to decide what to call our latest business venture…
Many ideas were batted back and forth… The Original Oriental Toy Soldier Company… Toy Soldiers R Us… Wee Army Men… were but a few of the hundreds of draft ideas. Then, finally… “Just a wee minute,” I pondered, “we need a name that is very British sounding and sounds as if its been around for about a hundred years or something.”
“What about Wm. Britain’s?” Laura suggested helpfully dissolving into a fit of giggles.
“We need a name that can overcome the fact that we are based in Hong Kong,” I continued. Now, in those days after leaving the Royal Hong Kong Police and Government service, my main business was our own little graphic design studio… imaginatively called ‘The Andy C. Neilson Studio’. In my studio I had a library of reference books and magazines covering all kinds of subjects including, of course, two of my favourite interests… ‘history and the movies’.
One day casually leafing through a book about the First World War, I came upon a great looking recruiting poster showing a ‘Black Watch’ Jock, rifle in hand, staring balefully out. The headline read ‘YOUR KING & COUNTRY NEED YOU’.
“That’s it!” I said out loud, “It’s perfect!” KING ampersand COUNTRY… it even reminded me of long-established firms… ‘KENT & CURWIN’ (Clothing Retailer)… ‘FORTNUM & MASON’ (famous London store)… ABERCROMBIE & FITCH (Clothing)… SMITH & WESSON (Guns)… I could go on but you get the general picture.
It was also the same as one of my favourite movies about World War One… KING AND COUNTRY starring Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtney.
And that my friends is how the name ‘KING & COUNTRY’, please note not ‘KING AND COUNTRY’… (that ampersand means a lot to us), came about.
And the rest, as they say, is history…
Best wishes and happy collecting!
Andy
P.S. Ampersand: The character or sign (&) representing the word and.