Sunday in Old Money: Advent Sunday in Old Money: Day 17

Presents from the Past

Back in my childhood, there always seemed to be a ‘must-have’ toy every Christmas. One year it was Corgi Toys’ famous model of Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang: I wanted this more than I wanted to see the film (which, in fact, I didn’t). In 1967 it was a thing called ‘Johnny Astro’ which was essentially a fan and a balloon masquerading as an outer space lunar landing toy. In 1965 it was anything to do with the Daleks, or Thunderbirds. History repeated itself in the early 90s when the ‘Thunderbirds Tracy Island’ became the most coveted toy at Christmas 1992, to such an extent that Blue Peter presenter Anthea Turner showed young viewers how to make one of their own using household junk. Long after I’d ceased to take an interest in contemporary toys, I was still aware of the frenzy that could ensue when the year’s most popular toys fell victim to demand outstripping supply – during the 1980s and 90s, you could depend on seeing a new example every year: Transformers’ Optimus Prime – Cabbage Patch Dolls – Tamagotchis. I’m not sure I’ve seen any examples of this trend in recent years, but you can bet it hasn’t gone away.

Toy manufacturers didn’t mess about when it came to promoting their products: back in the 60s and 70s, any new toy for Christmas would be relentlessly plugged during the advert breaks in children’s television. Somewhere, I have an off-air recording of a commercial break from the weeks leading up to Christmas 1967, and the aforementioned Johnny Astro is up there vying with adverts for Meccano and a thing called the ‘Chad Valley Close and Play’, a simplified record player aimed at children. The BBC were even guilty of this, in examples of ‘product placement’ that wouldn’t be permitted today. Blue Peter often ran features on the season’s most innovative toys – I can remember seeing Corgi’s James Bond Aston Martin given a plug when it first appeared, and they were always adding new rolling stock to their model railway. Another year, the presenters demonstrated a new toy called ‘Computacar’, which drove itself along in response to a die-cut card that manipulated the wheels from below – a ‘self driving car’ decades before they arrived in the real world. Of course, the manufacturers were never given a namecheck, but once you’d seen the toy, you knew exactly what to ask for from Father Christmas: job done.

I still have my original Computacar from all the way back in 1969: in fact I’ve got two, because my brother and myself were bought one each. These presents from the past have survived along with a surprising amount of other toys from Christmases gone by. A lot of them were accessories and equipment for Palitoy’s famous Action Man – a space capsule dating to 1967 or thereabouts, and two vehicles from around the same time; and of course there were any number of board games. Of the latter, one that stands out in my recollection is a thing from around 1971 called ‘Haunted House’, a game that involved various practical tricks and hazards in a similar vein to the perennially popular ‘Mouse Trap’ (which is still going strong after more than sixty years in production). Christmas 1973’s big new board game was ‘Escape From Colditz’, cashing in on the BBC’s immensely popular POW drama. The game, devised in part by former Colditz inmate Pat Reid, was so realistic it could conceivably have lasted as long as the war itself. You started on Boxing Day and would be lucky to have finished a single game by New Year.

Back in 1965, one of the big toys for Christmas was a superior form of bagatelle game, ‘Three Keys to Treasure’, from American manufacturer Louis Marx and Company. It was designed in the manner of a full-sized pinball machine, and compared to the other bagatelle toys I owned was much bigger and more impressive. It even stood on legs. The object of the game was to succeed in placing balls into three special pockets which enabled the unlocking of a plastic mechanism. Once all three ‘keys’ were unlocked, one was able to access a rotating prize wheel mounted at the top of the table, within which were various tiny trinkets of the type usually found on charm bracelets.

‘Three Keys to Treasure’ survives to this day, although the plastic mechanisms have long since ceased to function, and the whole spring-loaded firing mechanism is broken. A few years ago, I decided to try and find a fully functioning example, and was able to source one on eBay (above) for not too much money. Having found it, surely I could consign the old broken one to the bin? Well, not really. It may be broken, but it’s the actual one I was bought for Christmas fifty-nine years ago…

Not all toys survived after being rendered useless. Another Christmas present from that same year was a bowling alley set called ‘Bowl-a-Strike’, produced by British toy manufacturer Chad Valley. You fired a wooden ball at a series of tenpins suspended on metal rods. As each pin was hit, it flipped upward. Literally minutes of fun guaranteed. Despite being a relatively robust item made principally from wood and metal, this got disposed of a long time ago, but should I wish to own another, they turn up fairly frequently on eBay, which is where I found the below image.

I’d like to be able to identify the oldest toy I had bought for me at Christmas, but while I still own some staggeringly ancient examples including a wooden abacus, a plastic baby’s rattle and a tin drum, they could have been bought for me at any time, and might even have been ‘hand-me-downs’ as some of them look old enough to be from before the war. One toy that survived for decades until finally being disposed of during clearance of my parents’ house was a plush rocking horse which I believe went all the way back to Christmas 1963 or 64. Along with it, I was bought a cowboy outfit, elements of which are still around somewhere.

Our dad was unstinting in his generosity come Christmas: in addition to his day job, he worked as a semi-pro musician, an activity which he referred to as ‘earning pennies for toys’ which is a pretty accurate description. It also kept him away from home on some evenings in the week, often as many as four or five nights, so the toys we were showered with every Christmas were in part by way of atonement.

Every year brought a ‘main present’, something substantial and quite expensive. One year it was a pedal car, another year a bicycle, or a guitar, or a deluxe set of Lego. In addition to this, we got all manner of smaller presents, many of them (like the Computacar) duplicated so that my brother and I could have one each (avoiding potential arguments). I can still point to many of these old toys and say, to within a year or so, when they arrived.

Around fifteen years ago, I photographed collections of presents from Christmas past as an advent project for Facebook. Scroll down and you can see the entire gallery: