COBI
COBI Matilda Mk.II A12 Set 2495
COBI's Matilda Mk. II A12 is built from 510 blocks, 22 cm long, with an opening hatch, a gun that elevates and a turret that rotates. Markings are pad-printed, and the set includes a figure of David Fletcher of The Tank Museum.
There is a museum historian in this box
The figure is not a soldier. It is David Fletcher, who worked at The Tank Museum at Bovington for over forty years as its historian and librarian, and who became unexpectedly famous late in life.
The museum started putting him on camera — standing in front of a vehicle in a tweed jacket, talking about it without notes, with a dry delivery and an apparently bottomless supply of detail about obscure British tanks nobody else cared about. The videos found an audience of hundreds of thousands, and a generation of enthusiasts learned armour history from a softly spoken man in a museum hall.
He retired in 2012 with an MBE and died in 2023. COBI put him in a set with a Matilda because that is the kind of tank he would have chosen: British, awkward, and much more interesting than it looks.
It is the only COBI figure of a living person made for being good at explaining things.
The tank
The Matilda II was the most heavily armoured tank in the world in 1940 — 78 mm at the front, which nothing in the German inventory could penetrate except the 88 mm flak gun. At Arras in May 1940 Matildas stopped Rommel's division temporarily, and in the Western Desert they were briefly unkillable, which earned them the nickname Queen of the Desert.
The problem was the gun: a 2-pounder that fired no high-explosive shell at all, so a Matilda could destroy a tank and do nothing to an anti-tank gun or a bunker. The turret was too small to take anything larger, and the type was finished as a gun tank by 1942.
In the COBI range
Sets 2993 and 2995 are the Mark I and Mark V from the same museum, and 2988 the Rolls-Royce armoured car.
Specifications
Pieces: 510 · Figures: 1, David Fletcher of The Tank Museum
Model dimensions: 22 × 11.5 × 12 cm (8.7 × 4.5 × 4.7 in)
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