Toys that echoed the adult world

VICTORIA Regina -- Defender of the Faith and Empress of India --

reigned over the era that, for all practical purposes, invented modern

Christmas. Prince Albert played his part in the process, reputedly

introducing the ubiquitous Christmas tree to his adopted land. Albert

may have been wooden, but for Victoria he was the perfect match.

It's long been held that Victorian children were seen and not heard --

and historians argue that until the nineteenth century, childhood really

didn't exist at all. Children were, effectively, little adults. But as

Victorian Chrismas got spruced up, presents -- as often as not

thoroughly educational and selected to ''improve the shining hour'' --

started to appear at the bottom of the family tree.

Though various politicians failed to amuse Victoria in later life, as

a child she was delighted by toys and played with dolls until the age of

14. She has scarcely laid her presents aside when, in her nightie, she

received a Prime Minister, come to summon her to assume the throne.

As far as we know, Victoria had been spared from the worst (or best)

of her century's deeply improving presents. We'll simply never know what

small people made of the Scottish-produced Didactic Music Game of 1803.

This pedantic product really lived up to its name. Instructions read

like the codicil to a particularly complicated will. John Heyes, Curator

of Edinburgh's Museum of Childhood, has wryly included a rare specimen

in a ''Fun and Games'' exhibition running until mid-February.

Any Scottish child on a festive outing to Edinburgh City Arts Centre

and able to crack this one (the patents alone run to several pages) will

have a glittering future -- on Mastermind.

As nineteenth-century expertise -- and the juvenile Christmas present

market -- developed, Yuletide became something of a rally of the dolls.

Realism -- then as now -- was the name of the game. In 1878, Thomas

Edison patented the Phonograph Doll. She recited nursery rhymes. French

dolls were highly prized. They still are. One elaborately dressed

''Parisienne'' doll recently went for #4700 at a Christie's auction in

Glasgow.

Even today's Action Man had an ancestor of sorts. The early 1900s saw

a vogue for German-made sailor dolls, their cap bands emblazoned with

the names of famous British warships. Their little owners may well have

ended up at Jutland or on the Somme. Disturbing adult reality was never

far from the innocent make-believe of the Christmas nursery.

Boys of yesteryear went overboard on Christmas morning when tinplate

warships were unwrapped. Teutonic pre-eminence in the manufacture of

clockwork toys saw Gebruder Bing and Gebruder Marklin develop a

flourishing overseas trade -- exporting distinctly ''British'' warships

and locomotives for sale here. In the early 1900s, Bing's submarines

surfaced in Britain's toyshops -- and in 1909 Marklin proudly offered

their model of this country's new Dreadnought battleship, powered by

electricity.

Even before the First World War, war toys were viewed with suspicion

in certain quarters. In March 1914, at the Children's Welfare

Exhibition, held in London's Olympia Exhibition Hall, the National Peace

Council displayed a selection of ''peace toys,'' arranged before a

painted backdrop of the Peace Palace at The Hague. This optimistic

endeavour inspired Saki's scornful short story The Toys of Peace. .

Toy soldiers excited adults and children alike in Edwardian Britain.

The toy was occasionally father to the man. The young Winston Churchill

had an ''army'' 1500 strong, and prudently denied his brother -- another

toy soldier enthusiast -- the benefit of artillery.

The adult H. G. Wells mobilised toy armies on his sitting-room floor.

In his book Floor Games, published on the eve of the First World War,

the author of The War of the Worlds observed: ''You only have to play

out little wars three or four times to realise just what a blundering

thing Big War must be.''

The appropriately-named William Britain and Sons were brand leaders --

producing hollow-cast lead toy soldiers in the 1880s and still mustering

plastic mini-warriors in the 1950s. Britain's products smartly reflected

every change in warfare. During the Boer War, the firm turned out

Cameron Highlanders in newly-introduced khaki. In 1916 their kilties

came complete with shrapnel helmets, and around that time they also

marketed an Exploding Trench. This gruesome toy is now -- and hardly

surprisingly -- extremely rare. But children's playthings always seem to

have closely mirrored the world which produced them. Youngsters in the

Third Reich paraded table-top Sturmabteilungen before model Fuhrers.

Visitors to the ''Fun and Games'' exhibition can enter into the

delights of Blackout, featuring ARP workers, or Hang Out Your Washing on

the Siegfried Line -- at Christmas 1939 Woolworths sold the latter for

sixpence. There was presumably no similar spin-off from Dunkirk or

Stalingrad.

Christmas night might have come a little late to Scotland, but once it

had arrived Victorian retailers marketed toys with gusto. Glasgow's

Grand Colosseum warehouse promised ''Wild Jungle Beasts, Fairy Gipsy and

Witch, Fortune Tellers and Santa Claus'' -- in that order.

In Scotland's pre-war industrial warrents, children were lucky to get

a doll made -- with patent skill and love -- out of the heel of an old

and battered boot. At Springburn Labour Exchange on Christmas Eve 1926,

an unemployed father, turned down for money, nearly brained a buroo

clerk with an ink bottle.

By Christmas 1940, while adults relaxed with a seasonal glass of

''Convoy'' South African sherry, stores offered ''Navy Velour Siren

Suits'' as presents. Messrs Copland and Lye caught the Zeitgeist with

''Dolls in Service Dress -- 6/9 to 19/11.''

Retired GP Bill Souter recently acquired some Second World War toys

from a contents sale at Rowallan Castle. A beautifully made 3.7 inch

anti-aircraft gun was probably once part of a set complete with

battery-operated searchlights, a reminder of the omnipresent threat

posed by the Luftwaffe.

The head of that institution, Hermann Goering, was a model train

enthusiast -- with a huge ''O'' guage layout at Carinhall, his baronial

seat. Goering was known to give interviews to the foreign press while

standing at the control panel; at the flick of a switch, wire-operated

bombers swooped on the trains. It's interesting to speculate a little on

just how Goering may have come by his train set. Says Bill Souter:

''Most of the big pre-war German firms like Bing and Marklin were

Jewish-owned and they vanished after 1933.''

Collecting the Christmas presents of yesteryear can severely damage

your health. Bill Souter recalls one renowned collector whose expensive

obsession led to fatal malnutrition. His wife had fled years before.

Bill Souter none too seriously confesses: ''When I got married, I

looked for a house suitable for a model railway.'' His wife Margaret

soon caught the bug as well -- she's housemother to 70 venerable dolls.

Pride of place goes to an 1880s German clockwork walking and talking

doll which glides along on wheels set in the soles of her feet. A

Shirley Temple doll -- at present suffering from alopecia -- awaits a

new wig, on order from a specialist supplier based at Intercourse,

Pennsylvania.

Bill Souter treasures examples of Scotland's only known entry into the

model railway market. Bar Knight Ltd. -- co-funded by the proprietors of

Glasgow's Clyde Model Dockyard -- turned out ''O'' gauge locomotives in

the undercroft of St Enoch station. Bar Knight, now a precision

engineering firm, are still based in the city -- where they lovingly

keep two mint condition tank engines (in original boxes, with 1920s

guarantees) as a reminder of the company's Christmas past.

Bill Souter's loft railway contains no fewer than three precious Bar

Knights -- lined up on the tracks with the Basset Lowkes, the Bings, the

Hornbys, and the Exleys. Locos with names like ''The Puddock'' await

repair in his own ''Molendinar Locomotive Works.'' Wagons from Plean

colliery trundle past long-vanished stations like Dundee Central and

Glasgow Buchanan Street. Among the heterogeneous travelling public are

some of Basset Lowke's remarkably lifelike Distinguished Passengers --

including Amy Johnson in full flying kit.

Childhood dreams are turning into serious adult money. Dave Hall, head

of the collector's section at Christie's in Glasgow, has watched it

happen. ''For eleven years in the trade, I've been telling people that

the market for Dinky toys has peaked -- but it just keeps on going up

and up.'' Pre-war ''O'' gauge trains are ''out of sight.'' Dave Hall's

personal ''dream sale'' would have to include a three-feet-long 1930s

tinplate clockwork liner -- sold, in immaculate condition, for #10,000.

And any toy auctioneer would give his hammer hand to handle Marklin's

exploding train set -- designed for junior connoisseurs of railway

disasters. That could fetch up to #50,000.

Growing tribes of arctophiles have pushed prices of pre-1914 Stieff

teddy bears -- surely the original unisex Christmas toy? -- up to

similar levels. Bears are a bull market.

John Heyes, aware that Edinburgh's Museum of Childhood can't match

these prices, is currently appealing for a benefactor to donate a 1930s

Meccano Motor Car Contructor Set. ''And a few Dinky planes in original

boxes wouldn't come amiss either!''

Hard-pressed parents can sleep easier this Christmas. John Heyes

detects a trend away from high-tech toys -- towards traditional games

like Diabolo, a well-named Edwardian craze. The trick was to spin the

''diabolo'' on a string between two sticks, throw it into the air by

pulling the string taut, and catch it again on the string. If that

doesn't keep Junior quiet at Christmas, nothing will.

And futurologists may like to toy with a most unseasonal thought.

Peace toys did appear for some years after 1918. Britain's produced a

non-belligerent sanitary inspector, along with miniature farm animals

and agricultural machinery. But by the mid-1930s, field guns, armoured

cars, and fully equipped squaddies were back in the shops. From current

toyshop evidence, war toys have been demobilised -- and Britain's are

down on the farm again for the 1980s.