True ... The fact that the tail doesn't match the rest of the body material is one of the reasons I suspect it may well be a one-off homemade, craft or custom-made item.
I'd agree. It looks somehow rigid, or semi-rigid to me - like papier-mâché or some sort of canvas fabric around a wire or light timber frame. My gut feeling is that it's a model, rather than a plaything - maybe something designed for a display of some kind. (I've worked in theatre construction, on and off, for many years - and the figure to me just has the look of a 'prop'; but, as I say, that's just a gut feeling.)
I completely get the point that's been made that there can be a certain cultural gap – a dissonance created by the passing of time - which may mean that we simply do not 'get' the figure in the same way; but I think that factor can be overstated, and I’d be wary of straying too far the other way. As I've said before - the past may be a foreign country, but it's not that far away, and they don't always do things that differently.
As a pretty keen museum goer I’ve visited many museums of childhood (including the previously mentioned Pollocks – very well worth an afternoon of anyone’s time if in London), and looking in detail – that is, aside from the very broad-strokes of the monkey likeness - I’ve never seen anything even remotely like the object in that image.
Also, antique toys are very collectible, and there’s a very healthy market for such objects; but similarly, I’ve found nothing even a bit like that thing online. (That comes with the proviso that my knowledge is certainly not exhaustive - but the last year I’ve been doing on and off research into renovating a couple of my dad’s old toys. He was born in 1920, but the family were fairly poor and the items themselves are Victorian/Edwardian hand me downs - including a Burmese tiger puppet gifted by an old soldier, which is not far off as disconcerting as that monkey thing).
It looks African to me, some sort of tribal totem...
I've been thinking in this direction too. I can’t help thinking – factoring in the marking - that it looks more like something that I’d expect to find in an anthropological or cultural museum, rather than a museum of childhood – maybe more Wellcome Collection, or Pitt Rivers, than Pollock’s Toy Museum.
There's another quite big issue for me:
Although I can see potential signs of articulation where the arms join the torso, I can see none at the neck. I can also see no evidence of scrunching that might suggest the head has been forcibly twisted to face the camera - or an indication of how it would be kept in place had this been done. If this is correct, then that would mean that the figure is constructed to have its head turned at a permanent 90 degrees angle, which strikes me as very problematic. I can’t claim an exhaustive search – but if anyone else can find an example of a large stuffed toy or doll type figure with it’s face fixed permanently away from the front of the figure, I’d be interested to see it. This is another reason I think that, if real, this is a fabricated model intended for a fixed position, rather than an actual toy.