A set of articles featuring toys. These mainly if not exclusively feature toys from the 1950s and 1960s so not much in the way of X-Boxes for those who can only play by pushing buttons or twiddling joysticks...
Each article is reached by clicking/tapping the pictures below. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Blimey! The 27th of January and not a single blog post until today in 2015! Sorry folks! Busy doing other things, but some of those things will form the basis for more entries over the next few days with a bit of luck.
Last Sunday saw our first proper outing of the year when we got into the car and set off across the Pennines to York. Notwithstanding the M62 being a mess of roadworks and speed restrictions, we arrived late morning and decided to go into the excellent York Castle Museum.
This is the famous museum with a street. Shop and other building fronts have been collected and set up in a street setting with the sound of horse hooves and displays of contemporary goods in shop windows. There are also a set of period rooms from the 1600s right up to the 1950s. The final room depicting the 50s bears an uncanny resemblance to my grandparents' living room from that time. I'm never really comfortable with publishing lots of photos from museums so will limit myself to the above and a couple of items that form a more temporary display of toys and childhood, both of which have personal memories for me.
The first was this - a 1950s toy called Ball Mosaic which was as simple as they come. A perforated sheet of cardboard and a small collection of shiny coloured balls that sit on the holes and can be arranged to form patterns or pictures. A sheet of paper shows a few samples to give ideas. And then the child is only limited by his or her (or parents') imagination!
The second item is a John Bull No.6 Printing Outfit. These comprised of a couple of wooden (later red plastic as shown) holders into which you fitted small rubber stamps, each of which was of a letter of the alphabet or a number in reverse. A pair of tweezers was provided to pick up the letters but invariably you would try to pick up a row or a word and squeeze the tweezers too hard, catapulting letters all over the place. Once you had spelt out your message with the letters, you stamped the face of the letters on an ink pad and then on a piece of paper to print your message.
This was a great hit with all little boys who liked to get messy and, I'm sure, a disaster for all mummies of the time who would unwrap this present for her offspring and happily anticipate ink blots all over her carpets, tablecloths and furniture... Luckily the letters soon got lost and the toy thrown away!
In 1969 I used the remnants of my John Bull Printing Outfit to print envelopes for first day covers of the stamps commemorating Prince Charles' investiture as Prince of Wales.
We came out of the museum to a dull and cold day and this view of Clifford's Tower, the keep, and only surviving building of William the Conqueror's castle apart from some curtain wall which also forms the town walls. The mound, or motte, never fails to impress me and the castle has seen some horrendous events in its past. Here in 1190 some of York's Jewish community including wives and families barricaded themselves from rioters in the tower. With either forced conversion to Christianity or, more likely, death at the hands of the mob staring them in the face the men killed their families and set fire to the tower, committing suicide. Those who escaped the flames were indeed killed by the rioters, many of whom owed money to the money-lending Jewish society. Following the massacre, the rioters broke into the Minster and burned the records of their debts.
Here also in 1537 on the orders of King Henry VIII, the leader of the Pilgrimage of Faith, Robert Aske, was executed slowly and cruelly by being hung, festooned in chains from the walls. Without a noose, with no drawing and quartering of his body, he remained alive in his chains until he died of exposure and thirst, this taking days of agony. The good old days eh...?
We had a leisurely lunch in Gert & Henry's, a 16th Century building near the Shambles (shown). Some American girls came down to pay at the counter which was near our table. "How is it still here?" asked one on being told the age of the building. "It was built well..." replied the owner. A biker couple in their late twenties came in for lunch, she being in leathers so tight and well-fitting, that the mere sight warmed me up far more than the excellent food!
The Shambles is a fascinating street to wander down. It contains some very old buildings with overhanging upper storeys that come so close to each other at the top that it would be almost possible to shake hands across the street.
Windows have tiny panes of glass in sturdy frames and street lighting is noticeable by its absence. In fact the only downside is that the street attracts lots of people! But if you go there yourself, you can hardly complain at that...!
We walked the full length of the short street and back again. Then a slightly rash decision to walk through the shopping centre on our way back to the car park.
Walking down Stoneygate we pass Mulberry Hall, another ancient building from 1434.
Sunday 24 November 2013. We left the hotel after breakfast and hopped onto a London bus heading for St Paul's. We had decided to have a look at one of London's many museums, but one I had never visited before.
The Museum of London is behind St Paul's Cathedral (assuming wrongly that the side facing the Thames is the front!) and is approached over a walkway from the first floor level of a building on St Martin's Le Grand St on the corner of London Wall.
There's not a great deal of London's original city wall left, but here's a good view of it from within the museum itself.
The museum has a huge collection of items from prehistoric to modern times. The auroch's skull from a huge bison-like animal is awesome and there's a large collection of stone clubs, hammers and knives, before the days of metal. Which itself is well represented by a staggering collection of long pointy prodding things and a display of skulls with holes to prove how well they worked...
The photo is from a slightly later collection of clothes in a display recreating the old Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens which existed in the early 19th century on the southern side of the Thames near Vauxhall Bridge.
This is a pair of virginals - yes, a strange term given that there's only one, but that's how they were described. This was a 17th century stringed instrument played on a keyboard. A bit like a harpsichord in that the strings are plucked, not hit by hammers, but they are plucked near the centre of the string not at one end like a harpsichord. This makes for a smoother less harsh sound. They were immensely popular and Samuel Pepys noted how many of them were to be seen in boats during the Great Fire of 1666. They were not heavy and were expensive, so a good thing to save from a doomed house! This one was made in 1656 by James White. It, like many other exhibits, is displayed in subdued lighting, but the camera has dealt with the low lighting resulting in being able to see it clearly here.
This looks like the granddaddy of all grandfather clocks and I've positioned a passing waif to give some idea of scale. [THUMP!] Ahem... I mean I asked the scrumptious Miss Franny to pose next to it...
There's a street of shop fronts with window and sometimes internal displays of the goods they sold. The toy store had a set of picture cubes. Described as a Victorian toy, these simple forerunners of jigsaws for very young children lasted until the 1960s. I remember having one myself and, unless my memory is playing tricks, the pictures look very familiar too... Each side of every cube had a part of a different picture, so you could make six different pictures altogether.
This was gorgeous. A bronze art deco lift from Selfridges store on Oxford Street. It dates from 1928 and apparently the uniformed girls who operated them were as great a novelty as the lifts themselves! I fell into a conversation with one of the museum's staff about it.
So much so that I had to catch up with Miss Franny who was ready for a sit down in the museum cafe. This was a fun place to be also due to a large video wall that showed different scenes of London with greatly speeded up video. Cars and buses zoomed about and crowds of people weaved in and out of each other at bewildering but hypnotic speeds. I came out of there without a thirst but with a crick in my neck! Brilliant!
Today I took myself off to Fleetwood High School to see an exhibition of model trains.
I never put so much effort into model trains myself. I was happy if I could set up a track and got one end to meet the other so a train could go round it instead of all this fiddle yard nonsense where you send a train from one end to the other and then send a different one back...
But if I'm totally honest, I never bothered much with scenery either... The front of the sofa was a mountain range and I had couple of plastic Airfix platforms and a few buildings, none of which in a real town would have stood anywhere near each other...
This one was modelled on a container yard. The crane gantry went up and down and the crane came down and picked up containers from lorries and placed then on trains or vice versa. The modern diesel engines made quite realistic sounds too - an innovation that was quite missing from the train sets of my childhood.
But I couldn't help feeling it was a boring setting for a model railway... sorry guys! Get some trains going, never mind all this fiddling about lifting boxes up and down... Still... whatever floats your boat I suppose!
And talking of things that I never had as a kid - this stall (Kytes Lights) had LED lighting sets for emergency vehicles and platform lighting etc. Brilliant! Really realistic too - model ambulances and fire engines had blue flashing lights behind their grills!
There was a large Scalextric track in the main entrance. The trouble with Scalextric was always two-fold: you needed a space the size of your entire home's footprint and the cars move at a scale rate of something roughly twice the land speed record and therefore fly off at corners far too readily...
I used to have a OO scale set called Minic Motorways which was excellent and you could have trains and cars going and both scaled the same! There was even a level crossing so you could crash them into each other!
Chesfield Tramways represents a 1950s town with Blackpool trams running through it. A brilliant set with copper wires strung over the roadways and mostly scratch built trams running up and down. There were Glasgow and Sheffield trams in their fiddle yard I noticed so they weren't just Blackpool trams. The trams actually do pick their current up from the overhead wires too.
A massive layout and N gauge trains allowing for a really intricate and detailed scenery layout. Or a lot of grass... The river crossing was good but not enough trains going for me. Surely that's the point of model trains? I can't be doing with all this bell clanking and lever pulling and signal setting - just get some trains going! Heh heh - ain't I a stinker?
This one was good - I loved this scenery! The setting was Arizona and there was a wrap-around layout with operators standing inside. There were more buildings on the other side so I wondered if we were seeing the back of it, but there was a train going round all the time, so top marks. The loco was making all the right noises too, including a deep hooter blasting out to wake the folks in the nearby reservation...
But for the best ever train sets you need to watch an old Addams Family episode. Two trains would be on a direct route to collision and the watching guest would say "They're going to crash!"
"You think so?" Gomez would say, pressing the plunger to blow up one of the trains!
Just harking back to last weekend's Tram Sunday event in Fleetwood for a moment, there was one other item of interest on display that I haven't mentioned.
The Austin J40 was based on Austin's A40 model, scaled down for children and fitted with pedal driven power. These were not pedals as in a bicycle but square hoops that you pushed alternately, first one foot then the other to power the car.
At Fleetwood there was a roundabout operated by Howard Brothers (see the entry about their gallopers).
The J40 model produced for roundabouts had no pedals fitted but was fitted with two steering wheels for two children sitting in each car.
The Austin J40 was built in a factory in Bargoed in South Wales and provided jobs for miners who had either been injured or who had become too ill through lung problems to carry on working underground.
The J40 followed a previous pedal car called the Pathfinder.
Here are a number of Pathfinder pedal cars presented as an attraction in Great Yarmouth. I took the photo in 1981 whilst on holiday there.
These were expensive toys. The Austin J40 cost £33 including purchase tax which in the day would have been 3 or 4 weeks wages for most people.
I emailed my son-in-law, Eddie, a copy of this one. I'm not sure he was all that impressed though...!
It's a sobering thing to walk round a museum and find loads of things that you remember and that some of them are from what you consider your adult life, not just childhood!
So it was when we had a look around the Science Museum in London last weekend.
Certainly there were loads of things from well before I was born. But then...
There was the iron that my Mum used to use. I remember exactly the feel of the dial and the little rocker switch on the front, even if I can't remember what the rocker switch was supposed to do.
Of course, when I played with it (and I'm not sure at this point, memory failing me a little, whether I was supposed to be playing with it at all...) it wasn't an iron but a hover-transport-cum-spaceship for Dan Dare in which the Mekon was imprisoned and taken away to the penal colony on planet Zongo.
As the spaceship pulled off against considerable gravitational pull (the iron was heavy...) I was able to communicate with the Chief Warder on Zongo (my brother Frank) by means of my Dan Dare communications tower.
This didn't exactly pass the stringent tests of expectation. The searchlight had a torch bulb, rather than a powerful beam that could be seen as you looked sideways at it. The walkie-talkie had only short wires and you had to remain so close to the Chief Warder that you could hear him talking anyway, without relying on the distorted buzzing coming from your handset. And the Morse Buzzer... well who wanted to use a Morse Buzzer anyway?
I've shown the box lid of this toy previously on the blog but here it was, complete and just waiting for me to smash the glass, load the spinning discs, turn it against the spring to a maximum of 8 clicks and dispatch the hordes of Treens who were trying to rescue the Mekon from the innards of the iron. I mean Prisoner Transport...
Now that was all very well and it all brought childhood memories flooding back. But then...
This was the adding machine that Mum and Dad bought to do all their calculations to add up hundreds of football coupons every Friday night. Dad was a main collector for both Littlewoods and Vernons Football Pools. He collected the packets of coupons from other collectors and then had to open each, add up the value of the coupons, check it against the money that each collector had handed in, deduct their commission, calculate his own share and then bag up the money for banking before taking the large bag of coupons into the Manchester office in Ancoats. The deadline was 2:00am and it would always be towards 1:00am by the time we got there.
The adding machine enabled Dad to recruit more collectors as it saved him time in adding up long lists of payment amounts manually.
And then if being reminded of teenage years wasn't enough, things got worse!
This was our first video recorder. It came out in 1972 but it would be around 1974 when we got ours I think. The big cassette tapes had the two spools set one on top of the other, a messy arrangement that quite often fouled up. You could record TV for an hour on each cassette, which were hideously expensive. The quality though, was excellent for the time. Far better than the VHS machines that came out a couple of years later and became the standard format.
I wonder whatever happened to my tape of Benny Hill...
