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Metal Guru: The Nuts & Bolts of Meccano
Depending on your sex and age, these instructions (for a Meccano replica of Tower Bridge) will be either gobbledegook or will carry you back on a tidal wave of nostalgia. There you are, sitting on the floor in your grey school shorts and long woollen socks, while (as featured on the instruction manuals) your tweed-suited Dad gazes on benignly as you construct some fiendishly complicated model. Sometimes he is puffing his pipe, that being the apogee of middle-class respectability. The vast models depicted were misleading in that they were impossible to build with anything but the most enormous sets, and the scale of the otherwise convincing pictures was wildly awry: boys and fathers alike were dwarfed by a gigantic model of a crane, prompting the surreal thought that they were perhaps a family of circus midgets with a mechanical bent. And yet Meccano evokes my childhood like nothing else can.
My recollections date from the 1950s (though Meccano had an earlier life, and a sequel, of sorts, up to the present day). Maybe The Goon Show was playing on the wireless; we were perhaps sucking gobstoppers, only recently taken off rationing (5 February 1953). Like many other families, we had our first TV for the Coronation in that year, but in black and white and with only one channel, it could scarcely distract us from this most time-consuming of hobbies. We took the metal components – red plates and green strips, perforated at regulation half-inch intervals – connecting them with tiny bolts and square nuts and threading steel rods through them. To these were fitted rubber-tyred wheels, gears, chains and pulleys. Then we attached hopelessly under-powered clockwork motors – and finally, a mere hundred or so boy-hours later, we had a working model of a windmill, a trolley-bus or a giant walking dragline. Then we took it to bits and started again. Meccano was sold in numbered sets, or ‘Outfits’, No. 10 being the biggest. As a child I only ever owned a No. 4, but now, as an adult, I have acquired a No. 10 and a No. 9 – so there! Just to touch it fills me with pride, for there is something authoritatively solid about Meccano: even though a gash set I picked up at car boot sale some years ago for my then infant son looks as if someone has taken a flamethrower to some of the pieces, it is still intact and functional when a modern plastic toy would have turned into a puddle of goo. Meccano started with Frank Hornby of Hornby Dublo model train fame. At the end of the 19th century Frank, then working as a cashier in a Liverpool meat importers, made mechanical toys for his sons. By 1901 he had developed them into a construction set he called Mechanics Made Easy, which he patented and produced commercially. The business expanded and changed its name to Meccano in 1907. Frank became a millionaire and Conservative MP for Liverpool. The company steadily increased its range of products, manufacturing model aeroplanes, cars and boats, a mechanical universe in miniature that was to become part of the lives of generations of boys. One might even hazard the suggestion that the world divides into Meccano boys and non-Meccano boys. Compare and contrast the kids of today with those of my generation: today’s lives in a technological age without a clue as to how any of it works – “Oh, no – I can’t even change a light bulb!” Mine represents the genesis of the do-it-yourself baby boomers to whom, after fathoming the complexities of Meccano’s Trunnions and Threaded Couplings, knocking together the odd item of flatpack furniture is a doddle. Despite my literary pretensions, I can strip and rebuild car engines, use an electric router and make and fix stuff. I owe it all to Meccano. And could Meccano have been the training ground for such great British industrial designers as Issigonis (the Mini) or Cockerell (the hovercraft)? What would have become of them if, like contemporary children, they could build something only if it clipped together like bits of Lego? My late father-in-law, who taught engineers, reckoned if you could make it in Meccano, you could make the real thing, and used it extensively in his lectures. Nobel Prize-winner Sir Harold Kroto pays special tribute to the influence of Meccano in his autobiography on the Nobel website. Meccano was sadly a victim of British industrial management at its worst. After nearly 70 blockbusting years producing one of the world’s most successful toys, it went downhill as a result of lousy marketing and competition from rivals. After sustaining heavy trading losses in the 1960s, the firm was taken over by Tri-ang, a division of Lines Bros. Such revolutionary (if abhorred) developments as plastic Meccano were introduced in 1965, but Lines went bust in 1971, dragging Meccano into liquidation. The company was relaunched immediately, but the inflation and recession of the 1970s was biting hard. By 1975 a No. 10 set cost £192, making it one of the most expensive toys on the market. Meccano finally went out of business in 1979, despite the efforts of its workforce who staged a factory sit-in. Ironically, Meccano is still available in the UK, but it is now made by a Meccano SN, a French firm based in Calais. (This is adapted from an article I originally wrote in August 1989, at the time of a huge sale of Meccano at Christie’s in London, the contents of the former Meccano Museum in Johannesburg. The sale included many complete sets as well as dealers’ displays and completed models – a Mississippi Showboat, a five-foot tall model of Blackpool Tower complete with working lifts and lights and a gigantic Blocksetting Dockyard Crane. However, as I said at the time, I can’t imagine why anyone would want a Meccano model that someone else had made – where’s the fun, if your Dad can’t puff on his pipe and say “Well done!”?)
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