Crumm said:
1988 in Blackpool.
I bought three from a guy selling them from a pop-up pasting table on the promenade.
Han Carbonite
Luke Poncho
R2D2 Sensorscope I think was the other one.
That's really interesting.
'94-'98 I was at University in Liverpool. It was the last time I really collected with a passion. I paid for some beer and all my SW by buying and selling SW. Picking up childhood collections for £40 was easy enough back then and I never ever paid over £100, no matter what was there. Ahhhh, the good old days.....Anyway, to the point: I cannot be 100% absolutely certain who told me the story but I'm pretty sure it was a guy who had a cool little toy booth in The Palace on Slater Street, Liverpool (anyone remember that? Brilliant place
). Anyway, the guy down there told me a mate of his (yep, always the start of a good yarn) had been walking along Blackpool seafront a few years earlier and come across an old chap selling stuff out of a suitcase (not a pasting table in this story). Amongst the bits were a handful of SW MOCs. He paid the chap whatever and the seller piped up "I've got some more of those". Apparently, the buyer arranged to meet the old fella the next day and is let into a warehouse (probably storeroom, but exaggeration in such stories is encouraged) where he found cases and cases of SW MOCs. He, apparently, bought the whole lot for about £5,000. It may have been £10k, I can't remember precisely.
What makes this story now more believable in my mind is the pretty precise location and that he specifically mentioned the last 17 when recounting it to me. I'd always told myself it sounded like BS but yours is the very first eye witness account of a street trader on Blackpool seafront
As an aside, I still have the Lego display sign "It's a New Toy Everyday" that the teller of this story had up in his shop. It was the same day he told me the story I persuaded him to sell it to me.