Toys that are too good for children and only for the rich
rayer books are the toys of age,' wrote Pope. Maybe so. But it's surprising how many old people — grown-ups — like children's toys as well. This Christmas West End shops have stocked up with expensive toys to attract the Russian new rich, what is called the Faberge Trade. It was always thus. In the New York Metropolitan Museum there is a beautiful dog, carved from ivory, shown running and with a bouncy strip underneath it so it can be made to move — a mechanical toy in short — which dates from the Egyptian 18th Dynasty (15541305 Bc). This was the time of Rameses II, richest or most spendthrift of the pharaohs, and of Queen Nefertiti, wife of Amenhotep IV, who changed himself into Akhenaten and founded a new religion. Nefertiti, a beautiful creature whose painted limestone bust (minus an eye) is the pride of the Berlin Museum, had six daughters by old Akky, and maybe the dog was carved for one of them. But my guess is that she had it made for herself.
Equally, when Marie de' Medici, regent of France, had 300 beautiful and elaborate silver infantrymen made for her little son, Louis XIII, did anyone seriously expect he would be allowed to play with them? No; they were for her own Florentine-style delight. An obsession with miniature-scale objects is a well-known characteristic of a certain type of acquisitive adult, especially female. The outstanding example is the late Queen Mary. She drooled at the mouth when she saw tiny precious objects — minute Chippendale chairs in walnut and mother-of-pearl, silver-and-gold tea sets, tortoiseshell carriages with gilt fittings an inch high, and Venetian glassware for privileged dolls. In the early 1920s Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Marie Louise, to suck up to her old poker-back, asked Sir Edwin Lutyens to design her `the finest doll's house ever conceived', so that Queen Mary could have fun furnishing and playing with it. He was currently building the most elaborate palace for a single personage ever imagined, the Viceroy's house in New Delhi. So the idea of oscillating to the other end of the scale of magnitude tickled his fancy, always his most active organ. He entered into the spirit of the thing, recruiting famous painters, designers, authors and magicians to help him The result is in some ways the most remarkable object created in the 20th century, all the more striking in that Modem Art was at no point allowed to poke its ugly finger into the delicate pie. You can see the result in Windsor Castle. The pile is Georgian four floors. Much of it is 18th century in flavour, with silk hangings on the walls of the finer rooms, though in the bathrooms the surfaces are ivory, shagreen, marble and mother-of-pearl. The plumbing was real: water ran through the turn-on taps and the lavatories flushed into sewage tanks concealed beneath the basement of the house. There were 200 volumes in the library, an inch or so by two, each hand-written by well-known living authors. The miniature bottles in the cellar had real wine in them, and the kitchen was stocked with real food, for a time anyway — I don't think anyone bothers now. The dining-room of magnificent mahogany and silk chairs could seat 18, and the imaginary diners ate off gold plate and drank from Waterford glasses. The paintings were real and had been done by famous RAs like William Orpen and Augustus John, and standing in rosewood racks were leather portfolios of miniature watercolours and drawings, nearly a thousand of them. There was a nursery with even tinier things in it, and a working gramophone which played a miniature record of 'God Save the King', recorded by the band of the Grenadier Guards. The garage at the bottom had a magnificent set of royal Daimlers and Rolls-Royces, made in dazzling detail with real glass and chromium and horns which worked. According to James PopeHennessy, in his life of Queen Mary, the bed linen in the bedrooms had taken 1,500 hours to weave, the seamstress being someone described as 'a Franco-Irish lady'. Usually the names of the artists and designers were recorded, and it was a lifelong regret of Cecil Beaton that he had arrived on the scene a bit too late to have been recruited to the team. But in general the artefacts were the work of the best available: the garden which surrounded it, for instance, was the work of Gertrude Jekyll, who made it of dyed velvet and hand-painted tin.
What was odd, even sinister, about the house is that children did not come into the project at any stage. Queen Mary was not very fond of children, even her own, regarding them, as Evelyn Waugh did his, as 'defective adults'. Anyway, they would spoil it with their sticky fingers. The house was designed around a rich putative family on a six-inches-tall scale. But these dolls were never made. A draw beneath the house was made big enough to accommodate the family and its servants. But it remains bare. There are, it is true, doll-guardsmen in the sentry boxes, and a pipemajor to wake the family up in the morning, according to George V's routine. But the house itself is untenanted by homunculi. Why? Did Queen Mary herself decide she did not want her Ideal Home ruined by human use, albeit at the pretend level? Did old King George think the joke had gone far enough? (He noted there was no apartment suitable for a gun-room, and no place for a stamp collection.) At all events, this has remained a doll's house with no dolls. And no child-owners either. I don't suppose even the present Queen, or her sister Margaret Rose, were ever allowed to play with the thing, except under the strictest supervision. There is something dead, and even pathetic, about the whole elaborate project, so characteristic of England's state of suspended animation between the wars.
It is significant that the Queen's doll's-house project did not involve England's greatest toymaker, though he was at the height of his powers at the time. Frank Homby (1863-1936) was a Liverpudlian with a Scouse accent No boy ever had a better friend. His father was a grocer, I think, and he himself was a clerk in a shipping office until he was almost in his forties. Then he suddenly conceived the idea of Meccano, in which metal strips, with holes at half-inch intervals, were secured together with screws and nuts. This was one of the great, simple ideas of history, for using the same elementary principle of construction you could produce tiny, simple gadgets and enormous and complicated-looking models of machinery six foot high or even taller. And Meccano never wore out.
To have one such idea was enough to make any man remarkable. But Homby had two more. After the first world war he entered the hiatus left by German toymakers, who had hitherto led the world in mechanical trains, by producing Homby train-sets. These were beautiful objects, finely finished in powerful colours, as well as strongly made and highly functional. My Homby train was the most precious object I owned as a child, succeeded only, in 1938, by the third product of Homby's invention, a 'Mechanised Army' of Dinky Toys. The Dinky Toy was a superb concept, perhaps the nearest approach to the miniaturisation ideal which also lent itself to mass-production. Homby only had a council school education, but he proved himself a first-class businessman as well as inventor, marketing his products and designs all over the world. His Liverpool factory employed over 2,000 people, at the time of the Great Depression, in one of the worst-hit parts of the country. He was briefly an MP but I don't think he ever got much public recognition. He was even left out of the DNB, though remembered in the Missing Persons volume. I salute the man who gave me so much pleasure as a boy. Still, I'm glad they made Queen Mary's splendid mansion for the grown-ups.
Previous page
