Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Daleks Foil Trading Card 🛸 Card 1 of 6

Remember the Daleks? 🛸 Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Foil Trading Card, Card 1 of 6

Size: 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"

🛸 The Men Inside the Daleks — a 1994 Doctor Who Foil Card Shot Beneath Hammersmith Bridge

Everybody knows the Daleks. Almost nobody knows the people inside them. This 1994 Cornerstone Communications foil card, marked FOIL 1 and licensed by BBC Enterprises, is about exactly those people: the operators who drove the casings around the studio and the voice artists who gave them their screech. On the front, a Dalek waits on the bank of the Thames under Hammersmith Bridge — the stretch of river where, in 1964, one of the men named on the back rode a Dalek up out of the water for one of the best cliffhangers Doctor Who ever made. New old stock.

🃏 The Card

The front photograph is tinted blue-green: a Dalek on the riverbank with posts and trees behind it, and overhead the deck and turreted towers of Hammersmith Bridge. It sits inside a swirling purple-and-blue marbled border, with DALEKS! running down the right side in tall cream letters, the CCI logo at top left and the Doctor Who diamond logo at top right.

The back is cream, with a panel headed OPERATORS OF THE DALEKS printed over a faded background image, a boxed FOIL 1 running up the side, and the fine print: "© 1994, Cornerstone Communications, Inc. Doctor Who Diamond Logo © BBC, 1973. Licensed by BBC Enterprises. Doctor Who is a trademark of the British Broadcasting Corporation and is used under license. Daleks © Terry Nation, 1994."

📦 The Set

Cornerstone Communications published Doctor Who trading cards from 1994 to 1996, four series in all; the first three ran to 110 base cards each and the fourth to 90. Series 1 came in boxes of 36 packs, ten cards to a pack. Seeded into those packs — about one in every twelve, by a collector checklist of the set — were six foil villain cards, three on the Daleks and three on the Cybermen. A seventh foil, Davros, came only in the factory set. This one is marked FOIL 1 and is the Dalek foil given over to the operators.

📜 What the Back Tells You

The text makes one point and makes it well: some of the busiest performers in Doctor Who were almost never seen. It names the men who worked inside the casings — John Scott Martin, who by the card's count had played a Dalek fourteen times beginning with "The Chase" and worked with all seven Doctors; Murphy Grumbar (also billed as Peter Murphy), Robert Jewell and Cy Town, with eight Dalek appearances apiece; and Gerald Taylor with seven. It names the two voices heard most often, Peter Hawkins and Roy Skelton. Then it finishes on a joke for the fans: one of the most famous voices in the show's history threatened to exterminate only once, and it belonged to K9.

👤 The Operators

Robert Jewell (1920–1998) was an Australian, a veteran of Melbourne stage shows and a stage manager at His Majesty's Theatre there before he came to Britain. He was inside a Dalek in the very first Dalek serial in 1963 and kept at it through "The Dalek Invasion of Earth," "The Chase," "The Daleks' Master Plan," "The Power of the Daleks," "The Evil of the Daleks" and "The War Games" in 1969, as well as both Peter Cushing Dalek films. He played a Zarbi in "The Web Planet" and the Macra in "The Macra Terror," and in "The Daleks' Master Plan" he took a second role, as Bing Crosby. Jewell also owned a camera: the still photographs he took of "The Feast of Steven" as it went out on air are the only surviving images of that episode.

John Scott Martin became the longest-serving Dalek operator of them all, working inside the casings from "The Chase" in 1965 to "Remembrance of the Daleks" in 1988 — long enough to work with every Doctor from William Hartnell to Sylvester McCoy. In "The Chase" he also operated the Mechanoids.

🎙️ The Voices

Peter Hawkins was born in Brixton in 1924, the son of a police inspector. In the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy and was aboard HMS Limbourne when the German 4th Torpedo Boat Flotilla sank her on 23 October 1943. From 1952 he was both Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men, and he later voiced every character in "Captain Pugwash." With David Graham he shared the original Dalek voices on television from 1963 to 1967, voiced the Daleks for the 1965 film "Dr. Who and the Daleks," and voiced the Cybermen too. When he died in 2006, Nicholas Briggs, the modern voice of the Daleks, called him "truly the Emperor of the Daleks."

Roy Skelton (1931–2011), from Nottingham, gave the original Cybermen of "The Tenth Planet" in 1966 their unsettling sing-song voice by putting the stress on the wrong syllables, and began voicing Daleks the next year in "The Evil of the Daleks." To generations of British children he was someone else entirely: Zippy and George on "Rainbow," switching between the two on the fly and writing around 150 episodes. He was offered Davros in "Genesis of the Daleks" and turned it down because of his commitment to "Rainbow."

John Leeson, the voice of K9, is the card's punchline. In "Remembrance of the Daleks" in 1988 he voiced the Dalek battle computer.

🌉 The Dalek in the Thames, 1964

"The Dalek Invasion of Earth" was Doctor Who's first major location shoot, taking the Daleks to Trafalgar Square, Westminster Bridge and the Royal Albert Hall. Its first episode had to end with a Dalek rising out of the Thames, and that shot was made on the north bank by Hammersmith Bridge. The crew set up around eight in the morning while the tide was low, laying boards across the foreshore. By noon the river had come in, and with Robert Jewell inside working the head, a wire pulled the Dalek along through the water. The six-part serial went out from 21 November to 26 December 1964; 11.4 million people watched the first episode, and the Dalek coming up out of the river is still counted among the show's best cliffhangers. Around London that August, tourists and passers-by stopped to take snapshots of the invaders.

🏛️ The Bridge Itself

The bridge in the photograph is Sir Joseph Bazalgette's, opened by the Prince of Wales on 11 June 1887 on the piers of William Tierney Clark's bridge of 1827 — the first suspension bridge ever built across the Thames. It has survived three bombs. At one in the morning on 29 March 1939, a Chiswick hairdresser named Maurice Childs, walking home across the bridge, noticed smoke and sparks coming from a suitcase on the walkway; that IRA attempt failed, and so did a second in 1996. A third bomb, in 2000, did explode, and the repairs closed the bridge for three weeks. In April 2019 cracks in its pedestals shut it to motor traffic, and in August 2020 it closed to everyone, keeping crowds off it for the Boat Race.

Local folklore says the bridge wears green and gold as a nod to nearby Harrods. It makes a good story, but Bazalgette's own plans from the early 1880s already called for green and gold paint, and Harrods did not acquire its Barnes site until 1894.

📺 A Card From the Years Off the Air

When Cornerstone printed this card, there was no Doctor Who on television. The last classic serial, "Survival," ended on 6 December 1989. The BBC never formally cancelled the program; it simply stopped commissioning new episodes. Nearly seven years went by before the 1996 TV movie with Paul McGann, and the show did not return as a regular series until 2005. Fans call that gap the Wilderness Years, and it was kept alive by novels, audio adventures, videos, magazines, conventions and trading cards like this one — which went back to the people who first built the Daleks' menace while the Daleks themselves were off the air.

⚖️ Why the Fine Print Says Terry Nation

The last line of the fine print credits the Daleks not to the BBC but to Terry Nation, the Cardiff writer who created them. Nation held the copyright to the Daleks, and in the mid-1960s he tried to launch a Dalek series of their own in the United States. He died in Los Angeles on 9 March 1997, aged 66, three years after this card was printed.

📦 Condition

New old stock, never circulated. The photographs show the card from this stock, front and back.

🎁 Good For

A Doctor Who or Dalek collection; a Cornerstone Series 1 builder chasing the six foil villains; anyone who grew up with "Rainbow," "Captain Pugwash" or Bill and Ben and never knew those voices were Daleks too; a Hammersmith or London keepsake; a small frame beside a Dalek figure.

🛸 About these

The supply is finite - nobody's printing 1994 Dalek foil cards again, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.