TOYS OF 1928

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 January 1929, Page 4

TOYS OF 1928

MODERN TASTES IN NURSERY

Christmas conies to London by way of Houndsditch (remarks the “Observer”). It is true that special toy departments make their appearance in the big stores very early in November, and nearly birds begin to think of packing (having already caught) their presents. But ih the big stores you have only an anticipation of Christmas ; in Houndsditch there is an early taste of the real thing. Shop after shop, warehouse after warehouse —and nothing to be seen but dolls and false noses and gew-gaws for the chimneypiece. Houndsditch. is unquestionably the present stronghold of ChristmasKeepers of toyshops in Berkshire are jostling with the toyshop people of Barking, and those of Hampstead with - those of Kentish Town. In Houndsditch, where they buy their dolls in dozens, there is a chance •of seeing the way the world is going. For history moves with alarming rapidity in a toy warehouse. Here of all places you begin to feel with more than usual keenness that we live' in a prosaic world, and that history throws people into the scrap heap without a tear. There were, for instance, those Dutch dolls.

Thej were famous people in their day. They were like Lincoln’s common men whom God must have liked because he made so many of them. They were so cheap. They had black hair, heads like eggs with flattened tops, red cheeks (generously rouged), and no individuality. The toy warehouse was populated with hundreds of - modern minxes, but of the friendly Dutch people there were only six—six of them ranged in sizes on a card. It might have moved Maeterlinck to poetry to see them. All the other dolls were ' set in life-like attitudes on luxurious boxes, but these were tied with string to a card. “There is no demand for Dutch dolls now,” said the fatalistic guide. The world of toys is becoming a thought dour, and is (for the male half), giving itself over to motor-cars. Nor is it satisfied with motor-ears as motor-cars, but it must have what people of the grown-up trade call “gadgets” as well. For instance, this year there are headlights. The 1928 Christmas models carry a battery underneath the floorboard, and can find their way about a dark nip’sery at high speed. Another gadget is a new steering apparatus. The owner runs after his car, holding a. contrivance on the end of a flex, and, by pressing a trigger, he steers the car. It is not much more exhausting than the primitive method of hauling your car along with a piece of string. But, perhaps, this is the toy world’s comment on the grown-up idea of progress. But boys are still democrats- There is a preference for milk-carts over Rolls Royces, for buses and coal-carts, oil tanks and motor-tractors, in short, for anything that has another function than merely to proceed under its own clockwork. “ And, of course, there are garages. The day is long past when a car could be kept in the cupboard. Some of the garages are elaborate and professional, with petrol-pumps, but for the most part, they are painted to look as much as possible like the red-brick addenda to the most desirable villa residences. Trains are as popular as ever. They seem to satisfy a need in the boy’s imagination in a way no motor-car — even an oil-tank, or a commercial tractor —ever can. They say in the warehouses that boys are reading just as many books about railway engines as they ever did. The railway companies can take comfort.

THE TOYS YOU MAKE. Even so, the feeling of dourness persists. We are in the midst of an age of constructional toys. Toys which you merely wind up and then sit back to watch them go, are still here (mainly because they are cheaper, the experts say), but their popularity is small compared with that of the toys you make for yourself, according to the best engineering principles. These afe legion. They are of steel, and wood, and tin; some by clipping them together, and in others, it is a matter of dovetailing wood. . Some are engineering purely, others have a hint of architectural intention. Some seem to concentrate on making the mode] look like its real prototype; others pay less attention to looks and more to principles, and are adapted best to making models of crankshafts and pistons and eccentric gears (if that is the proper name for them). The older sets were more devoted to the heavier industries, and produced models of cranes and the sort of machines you, find in dockyards ; but the newer sets have an eye on the fancier industries, and are all prepared to produce models of the finnicky and clever machines you find in chocolate factories —machines that stretch out eerie arms, like octopuses, and grab. There is a quiet corner of the warehouse devoted to steam-engines. They have fallen on evil days- Boys have electric motors now. Yet, oddly enough, I am told that there are a few signs of revival this year. It is the same with magic-lanterns. There is something about magiclanterns which makes them seem almost to deserve their high-sounding name. I wonder if it was a fact that they were dangerous and usually lor bidden that made them, in the prekinema days, seem perhaps the most 'fascinating of all toys? They have this year returned minus all risk. A strong bulb, a battery, and, hey presto! One thinks of the days of methylated spirit, the difficulty and the excitement, and then all the pictures wrong side up : is it worth while now it is so simple ! Toys for girls have never been remarkable for imagination, nor are they in 1928. Only a boy’s toy-maker would have thought of that full-loaded train, straight from the Zoo, in which the giraffe and the elephant can only be accommodated by having holes cut in their respective carriage roofs, while the kangaroo and the ostrich peep out of the window amazed. The girls have their dolls, which merely grow more unbreakable, and their furniture which seems scarcely to have changed these dozen years. Vanity sets are booming and work-boxes going out. It is the bookish age, and more children’s books are sold than ever. But some of the books have odd habits and are cut in the shape of people who roll their eyes and (if pressed)! squeak. It is interesting to find that the ragbook, in which so many of us met literature for the first time, has all but died out. And that is undoubtedly symptomatic ; but of what?