My Brother: The Engineer

From early on, it was obvious my brother would become some kind of engineer. He had little interest in History or English at school, it took two or three goes to pass English Language at Ordinary Level, but when it came to Maths or Physics or anything mechanical or electronic, he was a natural. This was also apparent in the toys he had. 

In the few years between us, toys became more sophisticated and technological. My early toys were mainly metal, the most complex being a Hornby clockwork train set, a Meccano construction kit, and a working model steam engine used only under supervision. My brother’s toys were more electronic, with increasing use of plastics. He had a Scalextric electric motor racing track, Lego instead of Meccano, and model aeroplanes that were light enough to actually fly. 

Two toys in particular showed his talents. The first was a Philips Mechanical Engineering kit he received around the age of 9 or 10, followed by a matching Electronic Engineering kit shortly afterwards. 

Suggested Projects: Mechanical Pump and Electronic Organ

The mechanical kit had a variety of plastic wheels and aluminium parts that could be assembled in limitless ways, and an instruction book of projects from the simple to the sophisticated, such as clocks, pumps and vehicles of various kinds. They were powered by elastic bands, water power, air pressure, or gravity, or by the electric motor included in the kit. The electronic kit was similar, with resistors, capacitors, coils, transistors, diodes, switches and loudspeakers, which could be wired together to create circuits on a baseboard. Suggested projects included radio receivers, amplifiers, alarms, a moisture indicator, and a time switch. With both kits together you could create vehicles controlled remotely by lights or sound. 

Brother with his Electronic Engineering Kit

But my brother had most fun when he began to dream up his own projects. He made a device to administer electric shocks, and another to close his bedroom curtains automatically when it got dark, and to open them again with a switch. There was a similar device for the door. 

We moved to a house where the previous owner had a burglar alarm which we wanted taken out, but the alarm company removed only the control unit, leaving all the wiring throughout the house and the magnetic door switches (which is how alarms worked then). Before long, my brother had a panel in his bedroom indicating which doors were opening or closing. No one could sneak up on him. He worked out a way to tap the magnetic emissions from the house telephone wire, and could listen in to everything that was said. Another device automatically switched on the tape recorder if there were any sounds in his unattended bedroom. 

Not all went as intended. Up later than he should have been, an air-raid type siren he was making went off in the early hours next to our parents’ bedroom. 

He tried out all kinds of ideas. Our parents had a butane-fuelled cigarette lighter refilled from a pressurised canister. He used the canister to make a powerful flame thrower that could squirt burning gas and incinerate the enormous spiders that lived behind the garage. And, if they were squirted with non-burning gas,, they dropped frozen solid to the ground and smashed into brittle pieces. 

At a time when relatively few got into university, he was offered a place at Bradford to do Mechanical Engineering. Not only that, but tipped off by an uncle who was active in the engineering professional bodies, and knew who was going to be on an interview panel, their interests, and hence the questions they were likely to ask, he got a bursary from the government’s Property Services Agency, and was paid a salary. He had, of course, to work during the university vacations, and was expected to remain with the agency after graduation. He was based in  Croydon, designing air conditioning systems for a series of new prisons under construction, when he became ill, and we lost him a month before his thirty-seventh birthday. His children are older than that now. He would have been 69 today. 

The R100

New Month Old Post: first posted 10th July 2016.

In his autobiography, Slide Rule, the author Nevil Shute (1899-1960), a man of his time with attitudes to match, remembered working as an engineer on the R100 airship during its construction at Howden in Yorkshire in the nineteen-twenties. Much of the workforce consisted of local lads and girls trained to carry out riveting and other tasks high up in the ribs and spines of the airship skeleton. Of them he writes:

The lads were what one would expect, straight from the plough, but the girls were an eye-opener. They were brutish and uncouth, filthy in appearance and in habits ... these girls straight off the farms were the lowest types that I have ever seen in England, and incredibly foul-mouthed ... we had to employ a welfare worker to look after them because promiscuous intercourse was going on merrily in every dark corner ... as the job approached completion ... we were able to get rid of the most jungly types. 

Jungly types? That is my maternal grandma you are talking about, Nevil, and her friends and cousins. They never had the chance to be privately educated and scrape through Oxford with a bad degree. While your evenings and weekends were spent dancing, playing badminton, flying aeroplanes and writing novels, they were toiling away tending crops and animals from their damp and dingy dwellings. Better check your privilege. 

And, how come the lads were “salt-of-the-earth, vital rustic types”, while their sisters were “jungly beyond vulgarity”? How was it different from when you were in the army? 

The language of the men was no novelty to me, of course, and I could out-swear most of them, but their attitude to women was shocking... 

Workers at Howden, high up in the ribs and spines of the R100 skeleton.

Both my parents had memories of the R100. My mother’s mother worked there for a short time, and had a small, airship-shaped piece of duralumin silver metal, around an inch and a half long (4cm) and flat on one side. It was from a batch of airship brooches unfinished when they ran out of metal. She gave me it as a toy and it became an imaginary submarine. 

My dad remembered going to see the R100 in its construction shed at Howden. His dad borrowed the Model T van from work to drive there across the newly opened Boothferry Bridge. He said that the river was swollen by floodwater. Looking up in the shed, the airship was so big my dad could not see it. At 700 feet long (220m) and 130 feet in diameter (40m), it was around the size of two rows of twenty-five terraced houses with front gardens and a road between. He thought he was looking up at the roof.

The R100 in its construction shed at Howden
with one of the control gondolas hanging from the airship
which my dad thought was the roof.

The R100 squeezed out of its shed and left for Cardington in Bedfordshire in December, 1929. It was one of two airships built in competition to explore the possibility of commercial flights to Canada, India, and Australia, then still too far for aeroplanes to carry heavy loads. The other was the R101 built at Cardington. 

No more large airships were built in Britain. The R100, the better of the two, made a successful flight to Canada and back in 1930, crossing the Atlantic in three days. Rather than admit defeat, the R101 team attempted a premature flight to India, but the airship hit the ground and caught fire in France in October, 1930, with the loss of 48 lives. The airship project was abandoned and the R100 broken up for scrap. Large airships were built later in other countries, such as the Hindenburg in Germany, but these also ended in disaster. They were filled with hydrogen. 

The R100 over Montreal, August, 1930.

The Horse Race Game

We had a Blue Peter afternoon. 

For those not from the U.K., Blue Peter is a BBC Television children’s magazine programme that has been running at least once a week since the nineteen-fifties. Amongst a wide variety of content, it is known for encouraging children to make things out of cardboard, pipe cleaners, household waste items, and “sticky-backed plastic”. One of its best-remembered creations was a version of the Thunderbirds Tracy Island in the nineteen-nineties. 

That was amusing in itself. Television re-runs of Thunderbirds generated a stream of toys and merchandise, and Matchbox Toys brought out a Tracy Island play set just before Christmas. It sold out within days. Blue Peter responded with a home-made version made from paper mache. Thunderbird 1 was launched from a Yoghurt pot, the hangar for Thunderbird 2 was a tissue box, and Thunderbird 3 launched out of a toilet roll. The BBC was inundated with so many requests for the free instructions, they had to stop sending them out, and instead released a VHS video of presenter Anthea Turner making it (see the BBC archive). 

Our Blue Peter afternoon was spent making a horse racing game for the memory group Mrs. D. runs. The theme that week was Royal Ascot. 

We came up with a track made from long pieces of card marked with lines, with cardboard fences. For the horses, I printed out two-sided chess knights in different colours. They were stapled around movable cardboard stands.  

The rules were kept simple. Each player has a horse to move according to the throw of a dice (I can hear my maths teacher telling me if there is only one it is a die). If you land on a space before a fence, that counts as a refusal and you have to move back three spaces. The first to the finish line is the winner. With around ten participants taking turns, the game lasts more than half an hour.

Horses are go. F.A.B. Anything can happen in the next half hour. 

It was fantastic fun, with laughter and excitement. One lady must have had a “donkey”, because it kept refusing the first fence when most of the others had nearly finished. Some wanted to bet on the outcome, but that was not allowed, although they could try to predict the winner. One could not remember which was her horse, and one kept taking the die out of the cup and turning it in his hand, not knowing what to do. They laugh at each other because they think that they are the only one that is with it, and that all the others (including the volunteers) are completely gaga. 

“Parka”
“Yuss Billaidi”
“Put down one hundred pounds each way on the green-yellow one, at 7:2”
“They won’t allow it, Billaidi” 
“Oh! And Ascot used to be such fun” 
“Yuss Billaidi”

Of course, I wanted to strive for perfection by colouring the track green and drawing white railings along the sides, having water jump, colouring the horses in jockey colours, and making one a zebra, but Mrs. D. said we had spent long enough. Perhaps we should send off for our Blue Peter badges anyway. 

We spent days making things like this as children. One of the best Christmas or Birthday presents you could get was a roll of Sellotape, a bottle of glue, a ball of string, and a few cardboard boxes. My brother made himself an aeronaut’s flying suit out of cardboard, complete with streamlined leggings, gauntlets, helmet and wings. He bounded around the house in it, jumping on and off the furniture making flying noises. 

Would many of today’s youngsters, who seem to spend most of their time playing games and messaging each other on their phones, have the interest, persistence, or even the practical ability to make such things?

Credits: The voices of Lady Penelope and P. were provided by JayCee and Parker, with American and Australian versions by Steve Reed and Andrew High Riser, and German sub-titles by Meike Riley. The horses were fed on silage grown by Dave Northsider, their stables built by Debby Hornburg, and the zebra ridden side saddle by Debra who seeks. The horses are writing a guest post for Tigger’s Mum. Tracy Island and the race game were made by Mrs. D. who let Tasker think he was helping. Thelma played Anthea Turner, and Yorkshire Pudding was Brains. 

Airfix Modelling

New Month Old Post (first posted 14th August, 2014).

In 2009, I came across a magazine called ‘Down Your Way’ which published pieces submitted by readers. I was dismisses of most of the content, which was unjust because the best way to improve one’s writing is to write lots, and getting something into print gives the ultimate encouragement. Teenage Son had the right attitude:
    
“Well, if you’re so good, let’s see you get something in there.”

The result was ‘Airfix Modelling’, published the following year. It may not be entirely accurate, especially with regard to the present day, and there are other things I would change too, but I have resisted the urge to tinker. It seems to be trying too hard to entertain. I also dislike the captions used in the magazine (“model boyhood”, “glued to a hobby”) which were added by the editor.

It was, in effect, the start of this blog, although it did not appear in this form for some years. 

January 1, 1965.  Friday. Made F4 UID Corsair from Airfix, and also a station booking hall.

January 2, 1965. Saturday. Made Airfix station platform.

Most of us remember Airfix, the make-it-yourself model aeroplane kits. There were also ships, vehicles and even, it seems from my diary, railway buildings. The Airfix company flew off the ground, so to speak, in 1955, in a World War Two Supermarine Spitfire. It sold well and became the first of an enormous product range. For a couple of decades, Airfix was a very profitable business. Its faithfully reproduced, 1/72 scale models, came as injection-moulded plastic ‘trees’ of parts that slid and rattled enticingly inside their sturdy cardboard boxes. You broke off the parts one by one and glued them together with clear, stringy, cellulose adhesive, which the instructions called ‘cement’. You squeezed it out of a metal tube, releasing an exhilarating chemical vapour. 

Some parts, such as wings and the fuselage, were fairly large. Others, like the engines, fuel tanks and ailerons (to be an Airfix modeller you really had to get to grips with aero-terminology), were smaller, but still easy to handle. The tiniest parts, such as the pilot’s joystick, the propeller shaft and the machine gun barrels, which in the finished model were all supposed to move forwards, backwards, up, down and round in a realistic manner, usually ended up glued firmly to your fingers in a horrid sticky mess. You knew you were going to be spending the next couple of hours peeling rubbery ‘cement’ from your fingertips, nails, nose, hair, ears and any other exposed and unexposed bits of the body it had managed to stick to. 

You could always spot inexperienced Airfix modellers by what appeared to be globs of mucous matted into the sleeves of their jumpers. The best way to glue very small parts was to apply minute amounts of ‘cement’ with a pin or matchstick, but you needed to have progressed beyond the novice stage to know that.

Kits were graded according to difficulty, but that was not as helpful as it seemed. The easiest kits, with the largest parts, were also the smallest models. What boy, no matter how young and inexperienced, would truly want to build the smallest and easiest models, when the largest and most difficult had the most impressive pictures on their boxes?

For me, the ultimate was the Short Sunderland III Coastal Command’s Fighting Flying Boat, which came in a massive box with an all-action painting of four powerful engines, roaring away on a high-mounted aerofoil above a magnificent white hull, banking to the right on the lid. Once I had one, my younger brother had to have one too. It took my Dad ages to make it for him, about three months of sticky fingered Sunday afternoons, and the ruined sleeves of several jumpers.

You could literally spend weeks making Airfix aeroplanes, and that was only the first stage. Next came painting. The paints were in tiny containers. One brand was Humbrol, a Hull company that had originally made paint for bicycles. Their paint came in delightful tiny tinlets, with little metal lids you prised off with a coin, just like real full-sized paint tins. Airfix’s own brand was in little glass bottles, like nail varnish bottles with a brush fixed to the underside of the screw top. I liked gold and silver best. They looked dense and sparkly against the glass of their bottles, and glittered as they flowed from the point of your brush. 

Sadly, there was not much call for gold and silver. The largest aircraft surfaces, such as the wings and fuselage, tended to be green or blue. I found it impossible to apply the colour evenly over these large areas. I was so disappointed when, after painting a Dornier Do217E, one of the first models I made, a splendid World War Two German bomber with realistic rotating gun turrets and elevating barrels, it dried as patchily green as a forest canopy from the air. 

My disappointment was replaced by disbelief when my mother, with real enthusiasm, exclaimed, “Oh Tasker, it looks just like a real one!” Whether it really looked like a real one in camouflage, or whether she was just trying to cheer me up, I still do not know. 

You then had to apply the ‘decals’. You and I would call them ‘transfers’, but the instructions always called them ‘decals’. Looking this up now, I find it is short for decalcomania, derived from the French ‘decalquer’, a ceramic decorative craze from the 1870s, but let us stay with ‘transfers’. They came on a card from which, when moistened, you could slide the transfers on to the model. 

You positioned the German crosses, the RAF ‘roundels’ (red, white and blue rings to you and me) and other markings, exactly as they would be on the original, a finishing touch that made for a highly realistic model, although not realistic enough for some. Perfectionists took things a stage further using a repertoire of illusions, such as filing the bottoms of the wheels flat to give the impression of bulging pneumatic tyres.

There was just one overriding, inescapable problem with Airfix models. They did not actually fly. They were not that kind of model. You could only pretend to fly them. Holding them in your outstretched hand you could, climb, dive, yaw, pitch, roll, bank and loop around the living room, making terrifying explosive sounds and screaming engine noises as you machine-gunned the family cat. Mind you, Sooty the cat had his own ideas about that and was pretty adept at leaping acrobatically up from the floor and smashing the model out of your hand with his teeth and claws, gouging out a couple of strips of flesh in the process. What would Churchill have given for air defences like that in the war? Enemy bombers ferociously snatched out of the air and disembowelled by batteries of enormous furry felines. The Battle of Britain would never have happened, and Churchill’s ‘never in the field of human conflict’ speech would have had to be completely different.

Alternatively, you could admire your models standing on the bookcase in your bedroom, until they got squashed beyond recognition by a busy mother with a pile of sheets and blankets. Or, you could hang them from the ceiling with invisible threads of black cotton, except that the Short Sunderland III Flying Boat was so heavy it would have necessitated a length of steel cable, a Bob the Builder safety helmet, and a rolled steel joist up in the roof. You could end up with a couple of dozen models suspended in perpetual dogfights all around your bedroom, until one day, when light had rotted the cotton, and you had imperceptibly grown a few more tenths of an inch taller, you inadvertently nudged one with your head, sending it crashing to the floor in a plume of accumulated dust that hung thick in the air like smoke, as you accidentally tripped on your model and trod it into the carpet.

To be truthful, there was not a great deal you could do with the finished models. The interest was in the making of them. It taught you patience and perseverance, and gave you confidence in the use of terms like fuselage, ailerons and landing gear, admirable qualities and skills even today. 

It seems hardly anyone makes Airfix models these days. The activity fell into decline from the late ‘70s and the company went bankrupt. Ownership of the rights went through several financial crises and takeovers, with at one point Airfix being owned by Humbrol, the paint company. You can still buy the kits, but at prices that in 1965 would probably just about have bought you the real thing. Those who do still make them are as likely to be adults as children. A fifteen-year-old boy who made model aeroplanes today would need to keep pretty quiet about it to avoid being beaten up at school. 

Maybe the increase in the cost of plastics contributed to the decline, or maybe it was more down to social change and the emergence of computer games. One thing that did not occur to many of us in 1965 was that for some fifteen-year old-boys, breathing cellulose vapour would become an entire pastime in itself, rather than just a small part of the pleasure of model making.

I remember the American Corsair fighter mentioned in the diary as the last model I made. The first had been a Fairey Swordfish, an early World War Two torpedo biplane with fiddly wing struts. But other parts of my diary show that by fifteen my interests were poised to move on, from making models at home to more outgoing things in the real world, although I know now I still had some way to go. 

“You still have,” said Teenage Son, unimpressed.

 

 

[Originally published as ‘An Essential Piece of Kit in a Model Boyhood’ by Tasker Dunham in Down Your Way: Yorkshire’s Nostalgic Magazine, Issue 145, January 2010, pages 46-48. ISSN 1365  8506. Country Publications Ltd., Skipton, North Yorkshire.]

 

A Practical Wife

New month old post - last month’s old post was part of a longer piece. This is how it continued (first posted 18th August 2014).

In ‘Dad’s Thursday Helper’, I wrote about the dubiously wonderful things Dad could do with fire, lead, tar, meths, petrol and so many other substances while Mum was out. Yet, Mum never thought him particularly skilled in practical things. There was another reason for this too, which was that Mum was by far the more practically gifted of the two. She did all the gardening and repairs around the house.

She inherited a naturally practical, creative imagination that had run in her family for generations. Her great grandfather had maintained steam engines on barges in the 1870s. One of her brothers was a plumber, another was a self-taught mechanic. I watched the plumber dig down at Grandma’s house to connect a water-toilet to the new drains that had reached the village. And later, the mechanic effortlessly dismantled the broken mini-van lock and made it work with the ignition key. Even Mum once rescued me from a car maintenance disaster with pointed kitchen scissors after I had stupidly twisted the top off a grease nipple. She could use tools in entirely different ways from their intended purpose.

“Aren’t I lucky to have married such a practical wife,” Dad used to say.

I remember them decorating together, a paintbrush each. Mum got on quickly and efficiently with long smooth brush strokes, whilst Dad stabbed away awkwardly, making slow progress. I later realised she had given him an old brush, the stock clogged up with dried paint, stiff and ineffective, but he did his best without realising anything was wrong.

This kind of thing is pretty insidious. Dad, who made himself a cat’s whisker crystal radio as a boy, taught both me and my brother to assemble Airfix models and make things with Meccano, preserved fences with creosote, repaired punctured bicycle tyres, helped maintain his firm’s cars and vans in the 1940s and 1950s, and had the confidence to melt lead and tar on the kitchen cooker and get away with it, gradually came to believe himself functionally incompetent in all matters practical. We all came to think it.

After Dad retired he made some real howlers. He decided to help around the house by cleaning the finger marks off the furniture with a mixture of vinegar and water like his mother used to do. Within minutes he had knocked the vinegar water on to the carpet. “For goodness sake, get a bloody job,” Mum yelled.

Mum spent her final months explaining how to do the household things she had always done for us all. Dad carefully wrote it all down in a notebook, but it did not always help. Mum became so exasperated at his ineptitude as she tried to instruct him how to build cane pyramids for runner bean, she exclaimed “I’ve got more sense in my little finger than you have in your whole body.” Dad knew she you would never harvest them, and she didn’t.

Later, most memorably, he melted the plastic lid of the kettle by putting it on the gas ring without water. The next day, having bought a new lid, he did exactly the same again. “They always used to have metal lids,” he complained.

It was a vicious circle, lack of practice leading to lowered confidence. Were those tar splashes on the yellow shed and the flaming pool of meths creeping across the table, mentioned in the last post, early indications?  

I like to think I inherited Mum’s practical abilities. I can garden, hang wallpaper, service a car, replace light switches, maintain computer software, put new taps on washbasins, mend toilet cisterns and make guinea pigs hutches, to mention but a few. Dad visited us one day to find me hammering a hole in the bedroom wall to fit a new electrical spur socket. The floorboards were up displaying my neat new wiring all ready to connect up. I proudly showed him what I was doing.

“Aren’t you lucky to have married such a practical wife,” he told me.

Dad’s Thursday Helper

New month old post (first posted 18th August 2014)

Thursday afternoon was half-day closing. The whole town seemed to shut down. Retail businesses got the afternoon off in part-compensation for being open on Saturdays. So, Dad came home and Mum went off to Grandma’s leaving him to get on with his Thursday afternoon jobs. I ‘helped’.

 

We cleaned and brushed his boots and shoes, black and brown, with Cherry Blossom polish from a round tin with cherries on the lid, and Wren’s waterproof dubbin with a little bird. 

We replaced brake blocks and pumped tyres, and mended punctures by immersing the inner tubes in bowls of water to see the bubbles, marking with chalk, and sticking on puncture patches with stringy rubber solution. I learnt about tyre levers and tubular (box) spanners. We polished the wheels and handlebars with rags (old underpants were good) and mustard coloured chrome cleaner, transforming dirty grey to silver shine. We smeared on vaseline for protection from the weather – a magnet for yet more grime. 

We soaked the chains in trays of petrol to remove the oily grit, and then disposed of the petrol by setting it alight. Dad once just tipped it on the garden but had to stop after Grandpa came for tea one day and complained: “This lettuce tastes of petrol.” 

We cleaned Dad’s pipes, scraping out the burnt black ash with a gadget barbed like a miniature medieval mace, and soaking up the evil-smelling gunge with fluffy pipe-cleaners.

Then it was time for nicer smells and sounds: the matchsticks that rattled in their flat green and red box with a picture of a swan on the top, the firework hiss and smell of sulphur when he struck one, and the clouds of sweet St. Bruno smoke. He would pack the pipe bowl with tobacco from a black and white metal tin (with new tins, you had to pull a rubber vacuum seal from the bottom before you could open the lid), put the stem between his teeth, suck a flame down into the bowl, and blow smoke from the side of his mouth with a satisfied expression and popping ‘p’ sound.

“Can I have a puff?” I begged. “Let me have a puff”. I was only four.

“Oh all right,” said Dad reluctantly. He held the stem of the pipe near my mouth. I was instantly sick. 

And then there were the fun jobs – playtime. We had a model steam engine, the “steam boiler”, which drove a flywheel through dual pistons, exactly like the one pictured. It had a brass water tank heated by a methylated spirit burner that slid underneath. Dad loved to take it out of its oily cardboard box and fire it up on the back room table. Once steam was up, it could be set in motion. The flywheel revolved at a fair old pace, puffing and rattling, spitting out a lethal mixture of hot oil and boiling water. It had a screeching whistle and a safety valve that blew like a railway engine when the pressure got high.

It was important the pistons were always oiled and that the water tank did not run dry. The spirit burner needed topping up frequently. The smell of methylated spirit mixed with hot emulsified oil is unforgettable. Once, we spilled methylated spirit on the table and it caught light. I watched fascinated as a lucent blue pool of flame spread slowly across the surface, Dad flapping it frantically with his hands, looking panicky.

A move to another house brought a whole new set of Thursday afternoon jobs, sanding and painting skirting-boards and staining wooden floors around the edges of carpet squares before fitted carpets became the norm. 

We painted the garden shed banana yellow. It leaked, so we mended the roof. I sat up there with Dad, ‘helping’ him tack down new sheets of roofing felt and painting it with hot black tar. Dad heated the tar to boiling point in an old paint pot on the kitchen gas cooker. Then, holding it with just a wooden cane through the handle, carried it bubbling and the smouldering tar acoss the kitchen floor, across the garden, and up on a rickety stepladder and on to the shed roof. It must have been a thoroughly hazardous operation. There were splashes of black tar on the yellow paint for years.

But there was still room for play-jobs. 

We found some old lead piping in the shed. Dad melted it on the kitchen cooker in an empty tin can, and then, holding it with pliers, poured the molten metal into toothpaste tins which had originally contained hard, flat, tablets of ‘dentifrice’ wrapped in red cellophane. You rubbed it with a wet toothbrush to form a lather. The empty tins were just right for moulding make-believe medals – possibly something Dad had himself made in this own childhood. After pouring the lead, the medals were dropped into a bowl of water and sizzled as they cooled. The embossed ‘Gibbs’ lettering transferred perfectly to the moulded medals. No one knew about lead poisoning then.

Perhaps it was just as well Mum went to Grandma’s on Thursdays. 

‘Dad’s Thursday Helper’ would have continued for me until I started school, but Dad was then able to do it all over again with my brother.

Teenage Mums

Fairy Liquid ads 1960s (3 in sequence)

My mum’s cousin who was born in 1928 said that for her thirteenth birthday she received a toy pram with a life-sized dolly. She paraded it proudly up and down the village high street.

Thirteen! I kid you not. In later life she couldn’t believe it herself. Nowadays, it’s more likely she would have a real one.

It reminds me of a joke about the much-parodied detergent ad:

         now hands that do dishes can feel as soft as your face 
         with mild green Fairy Liquid

         Mummy, why are your hands so soft?
         Because I’m only fifteen.

Hornby ‘O’ Gauge Revisited

A couple of years ago I posted a visual reconstruction of my nineteen-fifties Hornby ‘O’ gauge clockwork train set.

I recently came across the following leaflets that came with the set, saved by my dad between the pages of an old family bible (click to enlarge, or save image for full-size):

Did you know that the handle on the winding key was designed to test the correct spacing between the rails?

It seems from the following that only boys who join are entitled to the privilege of free expert advice. Does that mean that girls had to pay? I’m tempted to send off one shilling and 3 pence (6p today) for the official badge and special booklet on my daughter’s behalf:

Little Ships

H.M.S. Hood edged slowly for’ard towards the lock at the far side of the attic floor.

“Engines full astern” bellowed the captain. “Ding ding, ding ding!” signalled the bridge to the engine room. “Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom,” sounded the propeller, spit splashing from my dad’s lips like sea spray.

“Watch out!” he warned. “Don’t get caught in the propeller.” He pushed me to the floor. “Man overboard!” He trapped me in his arms and legs and started to spin me round and round. “That man’s got caught in the propeller. Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom.”

“Stop engines. Ding ding, ding ding!” The ship blew five blasts, one long and four shorts: “Bvvvvvvvvvv, bvvv, bvvv, bvvv, bvvv,” to warn she was about to swing round. “Drop anchor. Diddle diddle diddle diddle diddle diddle, splshhhhhh!” I’m not sure whether the coughing that followed was supposed to be part of the sound effects or not. 

We were playing ‘Little Ships’. Most of them were waterline models of battleships. We had H.M.S. Nelson and H.M.S. Rodney (identical sister-ships), H.M.S. Hood, a couple of submarines and three or four destroyers. Finding them again now, online, I am fairly sure they were from the pre-war Dinky Toys diecast metal set number 50: Ships of the British Navy. They were modelled to a scale of 1:1800 (150 feet to the inch), which meant they varied in size from five inches (12.75cm) down to two inches (5cm). They were of course my dad’s childhood toys and he still liked to play with them. He pushed them around the attic floor making appropriate engine and captain noises. He knew all about ships because his grandfather had been a master mariner. At first I just used to watch.

Like the ones pictured, most of the battleships had already lost their guns by the time I came along, but that did not matter because, living in a seafaring town, we pretended they were merchant ships. We had a toy dock made out of box wood, with glued-on strips to represent the quays. The lock gates were made out of strips of tin plate, and the rest of the surface was crayoned blue to represent water. It had a strange fusty smell. Ships sailed upriver from abroad, swung round on their anchors, manoeuvred through the lock and moored against the quays inside. The tiny destroyers were make-believe tugs to help the larger ships move around in tight spaces. My dad glued a wooden jetty to the attic floor so ships could tie up downriver to wait for the tide – just like at Blacktoft.

We had just one merchant ship, the Italian liner Rex, also a pre-war Dinky model, which, together with half a destroyer, are all that now survive. Of the rest, H.M.S. Hood, emulating its real-life counterpart, was accidentally smashed to smithereens by someone’s foot. The others rattled around inside a Crawford Tartan Shortbread tin until they disintegrated and were thrown out: a pity because they are now much-in-demand collectors’ items. Even the biscuit tin is a collectors’ item. We found it with the ships in my dad’s sideboard.

Also gone are the wooden models we made ourselves. The tray-shaped softwood strips that used to hold propelling pencil leads made an ideal starting point. You pointed the bow and rounded the stern with sandpaper, glued on a matching fo’c’s’le and bridge, and cut a thin piece of dowel for the funnel. You painted the deck white, the sides black and the funnel whatever colour you wanted. It made a passable scale model merchant ship.

After seeing my dad make them I tried myself. The outcome was a poorly finished, vaguely ship-shaped blotchy white lump. I should have started with something better than a knotty strip of firewood. I proudly took my ship to show Jack who sat next to me at school. I didn’t notice the funnel had come off and fallen on the floor in front of Miss Walker’s desk.

“What’s this?” she asked the class, prodding it with the toe of her shoe, disgust in her voice. “Is it a sweet or something?” I had to go out to the front and pick it up. I would have been about seven.

Later, in the nineteen-sixties, we bought some new little ships for my brother, but at 1:1200 scale they were slightly too big. These were Triang models: M704 the S.S. United States, M705 the R.M.S. Aquitania, and M732 the Shell tanker S.S. Varicella. They had plastic masts, most now lost. These were also in the biscuit tin.

I looked up the real S.S. Varicella. She was built on Tyneside in 1959 and sailed under the Union Jack with a mainly British crew until sold in 1976 and scrapped in Taiwan in 1983. Its battered model survives it by many years. Yet it has to be said that any real ship in that condition would be towed off to the breakers yard, its place taken by a foreign-built ship, with a foreign crew, sailing under a foreign flag. Perhaps no one but oldies would want to play ‘Little Ships’ now.

“Bvvvvvvvvvv! Ding ding, ding ding! Half ahead.”

My mum gave us one of her withering looks. “How ridiculous! How could anyone have half a head?”

Hornby ‘O’ Gauge

Tasker Dunham reconstructs his clockwork train set.

I’ve not given it much of a thought in nearly fifty years, but today, just looking at the images hits me in resounding vivid detail: the solid heaviness of the black tank engine in your hand, the oily smell of the high quality clockwork motor, the steady force of the spring against the key as you wound the ratchet, the clunky movement of the brake and gear rods in the cab, the thick paint of the milk wagon in contrast to the tinniness of other rolling stock, the frictionless glide along the rails, the musty scent of track metal on your hands*, the sudden give of point levers and signals switched into position, the whirr and rattle of a train in motion, the made-to-last sturdy red boxes.

 

Yet, at the time, I thought my clockwork Hornby ‘O’ gauge set was second best to ‘OO’ electric. Although smaller, the locomotives, rolling stock and track of the ‘OO’ sets looked real, especially those made by Triang which, being made of plastic, did not need an incongruous third power rail**. ‘OO’ locomotives had accurate wheel arrangements, such as 4-6-2 Pacifics and 4-4-2 Atlantics, with coaches that ran on proper wheeled bogies. The track looked as if it was laid on real wooden sleepers and the points had a lifelike form and movement. On top of all that it had sophisticated remote controllability. In contrast, I thought my hands-on 0-4-0 engines, four-wheeled coaches and track looked like the toys they really were.

I realise now they served different purposes. The ‘OO’ gauge electrics were exact lifelike models. ‘O’ gauge was more tactile, but with sufficient realism to remain credible. My train set still provided hours of entertainment, from my earliest days with my dad in the attic to later years playing with my brother. My dad always set out a ‘Grandad Dunham’s siding’ where we would deliver wagons of imaginary coal, oil, tar and creosote - presumably what real heads of household would buy in those days. By the time my brother was interested we were able to augment the layout with other toys and accessories so that the trains rattled through idyllic pastoral scenes of grazing farm animals and busy urban roads of matchbox cars.

Hornby Trains were the creation of Frank Hornby (1863-1936), who had earlier invented the Meccano construction kit. He developed Meccano for his children around 1898, marketing it as ‘The Mechanics Made Easy’ in 1901, and ‘Meccano’ from 1907. Hornby ‘O’ gauge trains (1:48 scale) were introduced in 1920, and made from metal pressings bolted together with Meccano. ‘OO’ gauge ‘Hornby Dublo’, approximately half the scale of ‘O’ gauge, was introduced in 1938, and made from diecast metal. Both gauge sizes were sold in both clockwork and electric versions before the Second World War, but afterwards Dublo was entirely electric. The company was, however, slow to adapt to changing conditions. Metal models were expensive to make but Hornby didn’t adopt plastic until 1959, which was much too late. Around the same time it invested in retooling ‘O’ gauge production when it should have discontinued it. It was bought out by its rival Triang in 1964. The Hornby and Meccano web sites give more detailed histories.

I have tried to re-construct my entire train set from internet images. I hope these are all in the public domain and copyright free, but if I have inadvertently infringed anyone’s rights then please get in touch and I’ll remove them.

I am going to call things by the names we used ourselves rather than their correct names, for example ‘railway gates’ instead of ‘level crossing’.

To begin, we had two locomotives as pictured above, or engines as we called them, one with tender in L.M.S. maroon livery and the other a black British Railways tank engine with the lion and wheel logo. The L.M.S. engine was part of the initial set and had three matching coaches, one a brake coach or guard’s van with protruding observation ports known as look-out duckets. We later acquired a second set of three coaches in red and cream livery.

 

We had masses of track in sections we called straights, curves and points, able to create what seemed a limitless number of different layouts. We had two types of curve, one based on a circle of two feet radius, the other tighter. Points were also in both radiuses, some turning left and some right, switched by fairly realistic trackside levers. Some straights and curves were half-length ‘shorts’. One of the straights was a switch rail, with a left-right sliding tab between the tracks to catch levers underneath the locomotives. Depending on its position, locomotives would either brake, reverse or pass unimpeded. The track could be locked together by means of black connecting plates, which we wrongly called fish plates, which slid in between the section joints.

Over and above the basic sections of track we had a set of railway gates which could be opened and closed, a turntable to reverse locomotives or place them in sidings, and a couple of buffer stops. We didn’t, however, have much trackside furniture other than a signal box and two signal posts, double and distance. The signal box was possibly the most unsatisfactory item in the train set. Its clanky lightness made it so obvious what everything was actually made of, which was pressed tinplate. I also wished the signals were of the kind that raised rather than lowered into the line clear position, as on our local railway. It may also be surprising we did not have a station platform, but we didn’t really need one. Wooden building bricks, cardboard boxes, Airfix kits, Meccano and Lego could be used to construct all the stations, goods yards, tunnels and roads we needed. Making was as fascinating as using.

One particularly attentive detail was that if you look carefully at the front of the engines, there are brackets for oil lamps to display a train headlamp code, and similar brackets on the coaches for lamps at the rear of the train. Miniature lamps, red or white, slid on to the brackets to indicate passenger trains, freight trains, and so on.*** Another nice touch was that the handles of the winding keys were shaped to act as rail width gauges, especially necessary after accidental adult footfalls. 

I’m not sure whether I have collected all the right images for our freight wagons. We had at least one coal wagon, a cattle wagon, a flat bed truck, a petrol tanker, a milk wagon with milk churns and a guard’s or goods brake van. The cattle and milk vans had sliding doors to accommodate our toy farm animals and the milk churns. The guard’s van had hinged doors.

One advantage of ‘O’ gauge clockwork over ‘OO’ electric was that was that it could be set out just about anywhere, such as in the garden. I laid it out on the lawn during the school summer holidays when I was around fifteen, possibly the last time I used it, with a friend from next-door-but-one who was three years my junior. It looked right in the garden, as if meant there, but just as we’d finished assembling the track, two of my own aged school friends arrived on their bikes. It was a difficult and embarrassing clash of developmental phases, one of the Basil Bernstein moments I've mentioned previously, between two friends who shared my emerging teenage interests, and one with whom I still liked to play trains. I’m sorry to say the school friends won, although they did help put everything away into their red boxes. My younger friend went home, and I went off on my bike with my two school friends. I remember the day well because, in just retribution for my disloyalty, I sprained my ankle jumping over a fence. It puffed up like a balloon.

I don’t know what became of the train set. My brother must have had it for a time, and then I guess, as they do, my mother gave it away.

Nowadays children seem to have Brio, with its grooved jigsaw-jointed track and chunky minimalist trains connected by magnets. Just as Meccano was outsold by plastic Danish Lego, Hornby and Triang trains were overtaken by wooden Swedish Brio, triumphs of convenience over realism. They are not for the older children among us. I would happily play with my ‘O’ gauge train set again, if I still had it, but my children’s Brio, with the rest of their junk, is gathering dust in a box in the loft. Perhaps it says it all that to recreate my clockwork set at present day second-hand auction prices would now cost in excess of a thousand pounds, whereas a similar quantity of Brio could be gathered for less than fifty. 


See also later post: Hornby ‘O’ Gauge Revisited


* Actually metal doesn't smell. Its distinctive odour is the caused by a chemical reaction between the metal and moisture from the skin which produces musty smelling aldehydes and ketones. 

** I could be wrong, but I think because the Hornby sets were metal, they made an electrical connection between the two main rails of the track, and therefore a third rail was needed to provide power. The Triang sets did not have this problem because they were made of plastic.

*** There are several different express freight codes in the diagram to account for trains made up rolling stock with different brake configurations.

Mum’s Little Bear

I’ve written about all kinds of objects, documents and other treasures my dad kept squirrelled away, but hardly anything of my mum’s. This is mainly because she rarely kept things. She was hardly ever sentimental. When belongings had served their purpose they were either given away or thrown out. It was the fate of many of my toys. So anything she did keep must have been very special.

When they closed the church where she had been a Sunday School teacher during the early years of her marriage, where she began to build a social life for herself having escaped the suffocating village of her childhood, I was surprised to find she had brought home one of the children’s tiny wooden chairs from the church schoolroom. It must have been associated with many happy memories.

Looking at the bustling supermarket and car park that now occupies that site you would never know a church had once been there, or imagine the happy community it supported through not only worship and other religious activities, but also coach excursions, children’s groups, tableaux depicting Biblical scenes in Whitsuntide processions, a youth club and a very active drama group. Small towns used to be like that, although to me, catching the tail end, it seemed just as claustrophobic as my mother’s village must have been to her. She put the little chair in the loft where it stayed for several years. I don’t know what became of it. It would be satisfying to think it still in use, the favourite chair of a small child somewhere.

She also had three small toy figures, each around four inches tall, which she kept in a tin high on a shelf in the built-in kitchen cupboards that seem to have been constructed with the house in the 1920s because the neighbours’ kitchens were all exactly the same. One of the figures was a wind-up clockwork monkey with a red coat and beret, a yellow scarf and black trousers, which banged a tin drum hanging from its waist with drumsticks held in its hands. Another was a blue-uniformed toy soldier that came with a tiny knife which you used to cut the soldier in half, except that after the knife had passed all the way through his abdomen, the soldier remained intact. I’ve no idea how it worked, possibly some combination of moving hooks and magnets. There seems to be nothing like it on the internet but the drumming monkey was very similar to ones made by Schuco in Nuremberg during the 1920s and 1930s.

 

Again, I have no idea what happened to the drumming monkey and the immortal soldier but the third figure I still have, a delightful miniature golden mohair teddy bear which was definitely made by Schuco before the war. Its head turns and its arms and legs move at the shoulders and hips, but it also has a secret. When you remove its head it opens out to reveal a mirror, powder compact and lipstick holder. Traces of powder remain in the oval metal recess behind the powder puff. The lipstick holder slides out of the neck tube. Evidently, being in such good condition, with its original felt puff, it’s worth several hundred pounds.

Assuming that at least two but possibly all three of the toys were made in Germany, then how did my mother acquire them? Presumably they were given to her when she was a girl, but I cannot think of any member of her family who travelled abroad. Living close to a sea going port there were other local men who did, but I know of no one who would give her presents like these. Or were they bought in England? If so when, and by whom. I wish I’d asked when I still could.

The little bear was inside the last of my mum’s objects I still have, a nineteen fifties Egyptian leather handbag where she kept her notebook and diary and birthday lists. I’m not sure she liked it, and don’t think she ever used it as a handbag, but she kept it because it was present from my aunt and uncle’s period in Aden.

I remember at the same time they gave me an Arab man’s silk headband known as an agal (a bit like this), and a large square of white cotton material known as a keffiyeh, which are still worn together by Saudi kings and throughout the Arab world as protection from the sun, dust and sand. I don’t know what happened to them either. I wouldn’t have been seen dead in it. Not even in a Biblical scene in a Whitsuntide tableaux.