A WHOLE OTHER WORLD

Here’s an insight into a world that really does no longer exist. Two boys sit happily in their belted shorts and long woollen socks cheerily playing with the results of their latest massive Meccano build. It’s rather hard to tell, but I suspect that they might even be wearing ties.

I found this, my old Meccano construction set instruction manual, sitting on a dusty bookshelf alongside an old work photograph a couple of weeks ago, when I was trying to find something else entirely, but, as ever with those of us who are easily bored, I found myself utterly distracted by it for a while, and it is a fascinating thing to look through. I can’t be one hundred percent sure of its actual vintage, because it comes from a time before everything had to be copyright stamped to prevent dishonest knock-offs, but the prices quoted are all in shillings and pence (with a “d”) and one of the “Meccano Guild” addresses is in Rhodesia.

The booklet itself is all that remains of my long lost Meccano set, which was despatched to another place many, many years ago. To be honest I didn’t really use it very much. We had a very similar relationship to the one I tended to have with my Lego set, in that, despite the possibilities of being “a new toy every day”, once I’d built something that I liked, I tended to keep it that way for some considerable time. The other problem is that I found Meccano, with its tiny screwdrivers and spanners impossibly fiddly to complete without ripping open the skin on my fingers because of the metal edges, which tended to take the joy out of it. I have similar problems now if I’m trying to get at one of the more awkward corners of the engine compartment in my car – scraped knuckles and more pain than gain.

My own set was actually very second-hand, which makes working out when this book dates from even more tricky. A lot of my toys, like a lot of my clothes, tended to be second-hand and from rather obscure sources. My father acquired them through his work, which either meant that they were being diverted from donations being made as they were considered “unsuitable” for the environments they had been donated to, or they had already been rejected, or played to death with, and were destined for the bins when I got them. There is the slightly more sinister idea (that has just rather alarmingly struck me…) that these were things given away after people had “lost” their own children and wanted to be rid of the stuff, but it’s probably not wise to venture there.

The instructions in this book speak hugely of all kinds of lost and forgotten worlds to our high-tech, compact-electronic modern eyes. The youngsters excitedly receiving this set brand new in the late 1950s or early 1960s were encouraged to build such “every day” objects as a “swing boat”, a “drop hammer”, some “counter scales”, a “punching machine” or a “lawn mower”, and that’s just on the front page.

Imagine the excitement of building your own “lawn mower”, modern youth of Britain, especially one that only looks “a bit like” a real lawnmower…

All of them were to be built in that chunky, punched metal approximation of the form of the larger “real-world” object they mimicked. That list of possible projects speaks volumes about the changes seen in this country over the last half century, when children would be familiar with a “steam wagon” or a “stamping mill” without further explanation. Some of the builds even attempt to replicate people with the nearest approximations of limbs and heads using the appropriate metal parts to make slightly scary robot-like equivalents of a “gymnast” or a “coster and barrow”. These required a lot of imagination to be considered human, but, I suppose, that’s precisely what they relied upon.

I don’t think I got as far as some of the more complex builds towards the back of the manual. These required bigger league sets than my second-hand version, which might have required further investment and for none of the pieces to have gone astray or been broken or bent beyond the possibility of reasonable repair. I do remember making the “counter scales” on one wet afternoon, and I have a vague recollection of another long afternoon spent putting the “drilling machine” together, but I think that project number 2.28, the “travelling breakdown crane” would have been way beyond my limits, and quite probably still would be.

The whole world of Meccano seems to be strangely exclusively masculine in its philosophy, as if the kind of boys who wished to build things out of Meccano wouldn’t want there to be even the slightest risk of having anything to do with girls, and as if girls wouldn’t even be remotely interested in leaving their prams and toy saucepans and go off and want to build something. An advert on page three (oo-er) screams “Boys! Read the Meccano Magazine” and then goes on to say that “The happiest and most successful boys are those who take a keen interest in the world around them”, presumably by locking themselves away in a dark and lonely room with an instruction manual and a tool kit. On the same page, an advert for joining “The Meccano Guild” describes it as “an organisation for boys, started at the request of boys, and as far as possible conducted by boys.”

The Meccano Guild was most probably not a proto-fascist organisation, but its “three great objects” were

1)    To make every boy’s life brighter and happier

2)    To foster clean-mindedness, truthfulness, ambition and initiative in boys

3)     To encourage boys in their hobbies, and especially in the development of their knowledge of mechanical and engineering principles

Try getting away with that sort of “no girls allowed” nonsense nowadays my lad and see what happens. Still, as a set of principles, they’re not the worst I’ve ever seen.

Perhaps the world was simpler then, but in many ways it was more complicated too. Playtime really did have a slightly educational aspect, and you had to “work” to get your “fun”, but I suppose there was the sense of having achieved something when you finally got it built, and I suspect that, hidden amongst all the pretence of playing, there was a slight notion of the majority of children being prepared for the big and scary grown-up world of quite similar “real” work just a few short years down the line. I imagine if you spent your entire childhood putting little bits of engineering together, then spending a lot of your adult life putting things together on an assembly line wasn’t quite such a stretch, but then the idea of Britain being a manufacturing base also comes from another world lost to us now.

Ultimately, when we look back with our rose-tinted glasses on the toys of yesteryear, we might dismiss the modern toys as being too easy, with all the imagination work done for you before you open the packaging, but the majority of the children of today (both boys and girls) will probably spend their working lives pushing buttons to run software designed by other people, so it’s exactly the same thing really.