My Old Toys

Scalextric

2010-11-02T03:18:00.000-07:00

I never has a Scalextric. Only kids who were slightly richer than us or slighty more spoilt got a proper Scalextric for Christmas - they were expensive. What I did have - for a while - was a ersatz version called "Battery Operated Race Car Track" or something similar. £6.99 from Woolworths. What "Battery Operated" meant was that if you put as many HP" batteries as you could carry in both hands into brick-sized plastic box, the cars would rush round the track for about ten minutes before you had to buy some more... not a easy task at 11am on Christmas morning.
The hand-held controllers seemed to have two speeds - "Stop", and "Fly off the track at the first bend". With practice you could make the cars amble rounds the track withough flying off, and that was challenge enough - actual racing was pretty much out of the question... which was just as well because before long the wire brushes on the underside of the cars would fray and break off.
A day or two after Christmas one of my mum's friends was round, with her four-year-old kid in tow. I was on the upstairs landing avoiding them when she appeared on the stairs and saw me playing with the track. She called down to the kid "Thomas! come and see the trains!" God, I though. Women can be so clueless. I ventured to correct her. "They're cars."
"Oh... Thomas! Come and see the cars going round on the railway!"

Matchbox Cars

2009-07-26T02:01:00.000-07:00

When was about three, I remember having a lot of battered old toy cars which for some reason were kept in a vinyl shopping bag. No two of them were to scale, but that didn't worry me too much when I was three. They all got rolled along the same carpet with the same 'brumm brumm' noise.
In time the whole bag got passed on to Neil Brison, who no doubt battered them up considerably more, but when I was old enough to have pocket money I started up a fresh collection - this time of nice shiny new Matchbox cars.
Each model of Matchbox car was numbered, so if you had "No 74 - Ford Capri" that meant you had at least another 73 to collect. Because if you didn't, someone else would.
They all cost 24p, but the best ones had boots, bonnets or doors that opened, so you had to get those ones first.
One of my first Matchbox cars got eaten by a zebra in Edinburgh. I took better care of them after that.

Plastic jumping bean track type thing

2008-03-16T13:06:00.000-07:00

So many toys from the 70s conjure up images of people at large toy companies sitting about in boardrooms trying to dream up ideas for the next thing they can persuade a viable number of kids to pester their parents into buying, if only the TV ads are jazzy enough. One such thing was this clunky contraption, which I've forgotten the name of. It consisted of three plastic plank-type things, about a foot long, each with four semi-circular grooves running the length of it, and a hole at each corner on the top and bottom where a rod of dowelling fit in, so you could connect the three planks together and stand the thing on the floor. Now came the fun part. you had four plastic bean-shaped things - a plastic shell containing a ball-bearing - that would roll end-over-end down this track. You had to set them off at once and race them.
That was it. It got dull pretty quicky as you can imagine, but I bet the TV ads made it look fantastic.

Polaroid Super Swinger Camera

2008-03-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

This was my second camera.

My first came from Hamleys, the self-styled 'finest toy shop in the world' ('biggest', in the days before Toys-R-Us) on a family trip to London in 1973, when I was seven.
It was small and black, and had no control except for a shutter lever on the side and a knob to wind the film on. My sister Wendy got one too.
For the rest of the holiday, I picked and chose my subjects carefully, as I only had one reel of film, then had to wait about two weeks for the developed pictures to come back from the chemist's.
When he finally came home with the little blue and white folders from Boots', Dad gently broke it to me that none of my pictures had been printed, because none of them had come out well enough. On one of the negatives, if you held it up to the light you could make out a distant silhouette of Big Ben. The rest were blank, or faint blurs. That's what 28p bought you in 1973. (Wendy's were fine, of course - she always seemed to have all the luck).
I was rather put off photography for a while by that experience but I'd recovered enough by Christmas of the following year to be besotted by a Polaroid instant camera in that year's Great Universal catalogue. (It must have been on the pages of grown-up toys... which always looked so much cooler that the others.)
It arrived on Christmas morning in a nice grey box bearing the glamorous smell of fresh plastic. It was big and clunky like everything from the 70s and I loved it. It came with a box of flashbulbs, and a pack of film the size of a small book.
When you looked through the viewfinder and squeezed the inch-high shutter knob, you saw a little red sign light up at the bottom of the field of view that would tell you if the light was right. If not, you'd have to use a flashbulb. If it was, you could press the button down a whole inch with a satisfying THUNK, then pull the paper tab out of the side of the camera - which took a bit of force as well - and the picture would come with it, stuck face-down on the paper. Unlike later Polaroid cameras, it didn't develop before your eyes - you had to wait a full minute before you peeled it off. Too soon, and you would be punished for your impatience. Also unlike later Polaroids, the pictures didn't fade with time - they only had to survive the ravages of an eight-year-old's storage system... though my mum foresaw that and for my birthday, got me a very cool photo album with stick-down pages and an antique world map on the cover.
The camera seems to me now like one of those things from the 70s that was just waiting for a digital age to do what it tried to do, only so much better.

The album is long gone, and the camera was consigned to Harecrag Cemetary for Deceased Consumer goods a few years ago when the plastic around the eyepiece perished, but the pictures survive. Here's the very first one, of Wendy looking eager to see the result.

Adventure Kit

2007-04-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

The photos in the Great Universal or Grattan catalogue always made the toys look better quality, more glamourous or just more fun than they usually turned out to be. They were pictured being played with by beautiful happy children who probably never fell out with each other or their parents, who lived in large detached houses in Surrey, went to smart Chav-free schools and got to go to Disneyland on their holidays. Their world was brightly coloured, full of wonder and smelt of fresh ink. There was a sense that if one could only have access to their wonderful toys, a small part of their world could be yours.
In reality, of course, once the excitement and general mess of Christmas Day had faded, when the smell of turkey had gone and the piles of crumpled wrapping paper had been stuffed into bin liners and thence into the bin, the untidy heaps of presents sorted into disconcertingly small piles and placed at the bottom of the stairs for filing, and even the next morning's holiday TV of old Tarzan movies and Flash Gordon serials had been disposed of and Dad had settled into his armchair for, God help us, an entire afternoon of racing, those much-coveted toys were laid bare to scrutiny in the cold light of Boxing Day and that which was once so wanted was now invariably found wanting.
Never was this so true as of the Adventure Kit.
This consisted of a glossy box in a sophisticated, adult shade of grey, containing a pair of binoculars, a compass, a sort of plasticky satchel type thing, a whistle and (the box proudly announced) a *REAL* camera. The catalogue photo showed the usual shiny kid, in this case looking a bit like the boy out of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, standing in an unseasonally summery
field of tall yellow grass and dandelions against a hazy backdrop of not-uncomfortably- wild-looking trees, his camera and plastic satchel hanging round his neck, examining something in the distance through his binoculars, probably a giraffe. Not an adult in sight of course.
Although it still looked very smart in its box, and still even felt little glamourous when it still smelt of new plastic, reality soon backed it into a corner. My first, and I think only, outing with the Adventure Kit was to the Column Field, all of five hundred yards from home, with Alistair Robson. There were a few trees there, but not much to look at or photograph that I hadn't seen every day since I was three. The only wildlife was four stone lions and a couple of furtive teenagers with cigarettes.
Adventure (the lesson was) does not come from Grattan's Catalogue.

New Record Player

2006-10-08T16:22:00.000-07:00

The faithful old gramophone mysteriously disappeared, as did many old toys and books that one parent or another thought I wouldn't miss, not long after my own first record player arrived one Christmas when I was about seven.
It was a Dansette; green stick-on vinyl-type-stuff on the outside off-white plastic beneath the lid and, with two chrome knobs for tone and volume. It failed to work on Christmas morning, which probably miffed my Dad more than it did me, but once it was fixed I made good use of it for years.
I never got into pop music much – Dad said it was all rubbish and to prove the point he played the finale of the ‘1812 Overture’ at high volume on his Stereo and sat me in the middle of the room for full effect. I was strictly a Popular Classics kid after that, which didn’t really do much for my social life.
I spent many an hour slouching on the floor with the record player on, looking at the plastic band around the electricity lead, and wondering what the cryptic wording meant: ‘Green and yellow earth, blue neutral, brown live.’ It made no sense - I had never seen green and yellow earth.

Old Record Player

2006-09-26T16:41:00.000-07:00

The digital age is still very young, but already it seems odd to think that there was a time, not so long ago, when we all had to do everything without it. Physically the world LOOKED much the same when I was ten or fifteen - give or take a few hairstyles and chrome-covered cars - but it worked very differently. No internet, no cash machines, no mobile phones, only three TV channels and only a test card on them for most of the afternoon.
Take music. Since the appearance of the personal stereo in about 1980, we've had four of five generations of similar machines, leading up to the current wave of hard drive MP3 players with memories big enough to store the entire collections of connoisseurs far too old and wise to ever think of buying in to such a tacky fad as the iPod. (An Archos or an iRiver, maybe. Just because they're not iPods. )

Going back a bit before even the Walkman, my introduction to music was an old wind-up gramophone that must have dated from the thirties. It was black, smelt of dust from the felt mat on the turntable and of rust from its decaying mechanism. You could still buy boxes of needles for them at that time, in little tins the size of matchboxes. You were supposed to replace them after every use, but of course that was a marketing ploy, like the toothpaste adverts that show the stuff being squeezed onto the brush generously enough to make you pass out from minty-flavour overload.
We had a few wooden cases full of 78s that Dad probably got from the salerooms. The oldest record in that box, I think, was a seven-inch 78 called 'Dreams on the Ocean', a Victorian melody performed rather tinnily by a combo called The Kiddyphone Band. It's since been de-hissed and transferred to my external hard drive as a WMA file, but it's just not the same without the shabby label on the original record, which showed a couple of chubby elves gazing delightedly at a gramophone that some careless soul had evidently left behind in their forest glade after (one fondly imagines) an outing from Oxford in a long-nosed Bentley with a hamper of expensive wine and salmon sandwiches, followed by some genteel debauchery with a couple of waitresses from a posh tea room, involving the sort of external hard drive that all students are familiar with.
When I got my first record player for Christmas when I was about seven, the gramophone disappeared. I still miss it a little.

Chunky Wax Crayons

2006-09-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

One Christmas when I was four or five I got a box of about eight big chunky wax crayons. My cousins must have been around soon afterwards because Grandma Betty recalls that my younger cousin Kerry was playing with them and started peeling the paper off. Appalled, and with uncharacteristic assertiveness, I said ‘You can’t take the paper off, Kerry!’
‘I can, Dennis!’, replied Kerry, as she cheerfully continued to do so.

Yellow Submarine

2006-09-23T16:13:00.000-07:00

...which I never owned.
I did have a small toy plastic submarine. I don't remember it in its intact state; I only remember it getting broken when Grandma Ethel trod on it on the dining room floor. Accidentally of course. No doubt I got a curt rebuke along from Mum along the lines of 'Well, you shouldn't leave your toys lying around'.
I wanted another submarine all the same, of course, and there was a nice yellow one from the Beatles film in the window of Johnson's.
Mum said she would buy me the Yellow Submarine if I managed to go a certain amount of time without wetting the bed. I never did get it, though I feel sure I must have passed the required timespan by now.
I'm tempted to give her a call immediately and remind her of the deal, since there's one of those very submarines on Ebay with an asking price of £35, and only 25 minutes of the auction left to go, but it's now 12.15am and she'll be asleep so I'd better let it go. Shame.

Spinning top

2006-09-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

Well, we all had a spinning top, didn’t we? It made that humming noise when you got it going fast enough. I found that a bit magical when I was three, which I suppose was the intention.
I haven't seen this particular spinning top since I was about five years old - nor have I thought about it much since - yet I can remember as if it were two minutes ago, the feel of the plastic handle, the strange helical shape of the rod beneath it that diappeared into the machine to set it spinning when you pumped the handle up and down, the distinctive rattly noise it made when you did that, the oddly ripple-shaped cross-section of the body, the holes around the rim that were there to make it hum, the humming noise itself and the dusty, rusty metallic smell it gave off. I don't recall the design on the top at all, but I do remember the multicoloured blur what it was spinning. What an odd thing memory is.

Crow Shoot

2006-09-14T12:57:00.001-07:00

This was my sister Wendy’s, and appeard one Christmas when I was about five. It was a bit like a miniature funfair stall; an clockwork thing enclosed in clear plastic, with a gun that fired ball bearings at tin-plate cut-out crows that went by against the backdrop when you wound it up. I only remember seeing it on Christmas morning, so I assume it didn’t last long, like many of these things. Not the sort of thing you'd be likely to see these days - shooting birds or animals is a bit of a no-no in the toy manufacturing world, I think... shooting each other in video games is fine, of course... I suppose because you know what you're getting into, not like the poor crows.
This brings to mind something else I once had... a shotgun that fired a sucker dart, which came with - no kidding - a clockwork plastic rabbit. I don't remember actually trying to shoot the rabbit with the gun more than once or twice, possibly because you had to get someone else to wind it up and set it off.... or else do it yourself, then pick up the gun and aim at the rabbit's bum - a much smaller targer - before the clockwork ran out.

Rattly Tubes

2006-09-11T16:27:00.000-07:00

Two tubes of transparent plastic, one green, one red; about eighteen inches long, divided into compartments; each compartment had a hole in the middle to let the balls pass into the next one. Each tube contained eight white balls and eight black ones. Wendy & I thought the object was to get the balls from one end to the other quicker that the other person by shaking the tubes like hell and driving my mum nuts. More likely you were supposed to separate the white balls from the black ones but we never thought of that.

Other toy cars

2006-09-11T15:32:00.000-07:00

When I was very young, four or five, I had a whole heap of battered old toy cars that for some reason were kept in an old white vinyl shopping bag which probably looked stylish when my mum carried it around town in the mid sixties.
Among said vehicles were a tin-plate American-style police car about eight inches long, no doubt full of sharp edges, a blue-and-cream Dinky or Corgi ice-cream van with sliding side windows, a tiny Batmobile complete with plastic Batman and Robin, a little electrician's van, and probably about a dozen others. The only ones from that bag that I remember ever being new were a green Tonka beach buggy - like all Tonka toys, so tough you couldn't possibly break it - and a silver-grey American-style car with a neat convertible roof that flipped over into the boot when you turned the door handle.
Most of the battered old cars were undoubtedly quite old already when I had them - it never occured to my to wonder where they came from, but it's quite likely that they once belonged to Malcolm and Jeremy Dunlop, the older boys across the road. From me, they were passed on to Neil Brison, who no doubt battered them even more.... though he went on to work for Jaguar so perhaps I was instrumental in that. Or not.

Matchbox cars

2006-04-24T15:33:00.000-07:00

I was nuts about cars when I was a kid. Perhaps because you could go places in them. One of my favourite books was a big Richard Scarry hardback, full of elaborate illustrations of townscapes and landscapes full of roads and vehicles and buildings and people - or rather, animals masquerading as people, and evidently getting away with it because there were no real people around to take issue with them. My favourite page of this book showed a country landscape with a road winding across it from one page to the next, so you could follow it with your finger, and imagine travelling along it. And that, I suppose, was also the appeal of Matchbox cars - those tiny yet durable little models that were cheap enough to buy every week with your pocket money, and (cunningly) numbered, so you had to collect the whole series. I think they went up to 75... and each one changed once in a while, so you never really had the lot.
Some had doors that opened, some had bonnets with an engine underneath, once in a while the boot opened too, and just one or two had all three. They were the best ones. Most were modelled on real cars, but a few wacky designs were completely original, if often implausible.

I used to buy one from Egdell’s, the shop on the corner, every Saturday as soon as I got my pocket money. I eventually had 48, enough to fill the specially-designed case which I got for Christmas or my birthday one year.

One of the earliest Matchbox cars I had, when I was about five, ended up in the zebra enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo.

My Old Toys

2006-04-24T15:17:00.000-07:00

This sad picture is of Harecrag rubbish tip just outide Alnwick, Northumberland, circa March 1986. Scattered across the surface of that day's refuse are various items from our garage, victims of a massive clearout just before we moved house. I can see my sister's spacehopper, bike and blackboard, my Dad's telescope and golf trolley, and nothing at all of mine, now that I think about it, but there must be some of my old toys down there somewhere - if not scattered across the surface, then further down, deep in the landfill, crushed or fragmented, rotted or rusted... somewhere down there are the earthly remains of the dozens, if not hundreds, of large and small, cheap and precious, treasured and transient toys and trinkets and trappings of a 60s infancy, a 70s childhood and an 80s adolescence... and now, a modern memory - recalled from beneath a heap of grey matter as deep and murky as Harecrag Tip, that you, gentle reader, may marvel at the myriad simple ways my generation found to pass its time in the days before Playstations - or perhaps just to think - 'bloody hell - I had one of those too.... they were crap.'