Meccano at Christmas

This Meccano Magazine cover from December 1954 is a perfect evocation of the mid-1950s. Soberly dressed small boys stare at a window display of pristine toys and models. These are the wonders of the age, beyond the reach of all but the most generously indulged child. For the rest they remain unattainable. Childish exuberance was greatly frowned upon – the solemn duty of every child was to grow up with the greatest possible speed and the least possible fuss. These were serious times – excitement and frivolity were in short supply where they weren’t actively discouraged. Recreational activities were either sporting or educational – entertainment in any but the most modest amounts was undesirable, an irresponsible diversion from the business of forming a new generation of productive economic units. Note how the boys are wearing scaled down versions of their fathers’ outfits in coarse woven fabrics – gabardine, tweed and worsted. (One of the few pleasures to be had observing the latest infant generation of the House of Windsor is their adherence to this anachronistic dress code.) Physical comfort was held in low esteem so textiles with the power to irritate the skin were broadly held to be character-forming. Caps were worn to make young people more easily identifiable, especially in instances of antisocial behaviour. Among the most serious offences a child could commit was to neglect to wear a cap. As the years advance the tendency to romanticise the experiences of childhood marches in step. Nostalgia begets amnesia and the discomforts are forgotten. Sadistic schoolmasters, school bullies, knitted swimming costumes, itchy baggy underwear, damp and unheated homes and a diet of overcooked flavourless stodge all fade away in the diffuse glow of the lost Golden Age that never happened.

Round the Docks

The work was demanding and dangerous, the workforce was casualised and routinely exploited and the workplace was disorderly and perilous but the image of the docks held a special place in the imperialist imagination. All of Britain’s maritime supremacy and economic power as a nation that traded to survive was focused on the dockside. Despite the development of mechanised lifting gear the greater part of the labour involved came from physical effort – enormous quantities of finished goods and raw materials were loaded on and off ships by hand. A picture of ceaseless activity is placed before us. Rail mounted cranes, teams of horses, motor vehicles and railway wagons compete for space on the quayside, above them swing cradles of locomotives or turbines and hoists bearing cotton bales, sacks of sugar or animal carcasses. A compelling theatrical scene of wonder for the spectator and a raucous, turbulent and unstable environment for the manual labourers where the threat of serious physical injury could come from any direction at any moment. 

Our old friend the shipping container killed off this spectacle and replaced it with a highly formalised aerial display of bar-coded containers – all very fascinating in a different way but totally inaccessible to the general public. It’s a world of computer commanded reach-stackers, gantry cranes and side-lifters manoeuvring outsize boxes from ship to shore and back again with maximum cost effectiveness in an anonymous intermodal zone where the most frequently heard sound is the warning beep of reversing vehicles. 

Airships Dirigibles Blimps Zeppelins

Airship technology is another of those doomed innovations with a glowing future that stubbornly fails to materialise. Immensely popular between the wars when no vision of the future was complete without airships in command of the skies. The airship had proved itself as a leisurely form of international travel although a distressing tendency to premature landfalls or self-immolation rapidly undermined public confidence. In times of conflict it was only effective as an agent of death and destruction in the unlikely event that your opponents lacked a more agile and speedy defence capacity. So the great dream of fleets of floating hotels silently crossing the oceans died a death. The rapid advance of jet engine technology was the final blow as the aviation industry increasingly became addicted to speed. 

But for a few decades the airship wobbled along on the fringe of viability and enthusiasts continued to develop ever more extravagant plans, quick to capture the public imagination but wildly impractical. Heroic visualisations of gargantuan machines graced the covers of many a magazine with an engineering obsessed readership of impressionable adolescents. For postcard publishers even an embarrassingly incompetent drawing of an airship could be grafted on to refresh a stale and outdated image. As late as 1944 the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation was waxing lyrical about the prospects of the “coming superliner of the skies” and posing the question, “Is this the Luxury Liner of the Future?”. 

Skyriders

The suspended monorail is an enduring vision of a future that never quite comes to pass. It was a favourite theme of the great Arthur Radebaugh who pictured such a system in the 1940s. And yet in the German city of Wuppertal such a creature has been in operation for over a century. It makes an amazing site as it glides over the city streets offering vertiginous views of life below. No wonder the gent in the postcard has swiveled round for a better look.

Readers of Meccano Magazine in 1930 were promised 120mph travel but that never happened either. This exciting prospect was the brainchild of Scottish engineer, Mr. George Bennie and went by the name, Railplane. The London and North Eastern Railway invested in a short test track and a propeller-driven prototype. It all came to naught and left the unfortunate Mr. Bennie penniless. The full story can be found here and the attentive reader will note that the Railplane was not a monorail because it was supported underneath. After all these decades of transport innovation this remains one aspect of the future that stubbornly refuses to be born.

Engineering for Boys

I was never convinced by Meccano. As a modelling material it seemed crude and inflexible especially when applied to the task of modelling vehicles. The results obtained by clamping together assorted perforated metal rods looked very feeble when compared with the developing trend towards detailed realism in the production of die-cast toys. And there was always the suspicion that Meccano was basically an educational material and therefore to be resisted on principle. It has to be conceded that it’s the ideal medium in which to model a Manure Distribution Cart, if such an idea appeals. And the same goes for a Transporter Bridge if you’re on the lookout for an unusual table decoration with the added value of safe conveyance of salt and pepper.


The conventional view of Raoul Dufy was that he was a lightweight when compared with fellow Fauve, the saintly Matisse. His oeuvre was seen as a steady decline from the robust brilliance of his Fauve paintings to become Court Painter to the world of Haute Couture with a queasy combination of ingratiating colour and a slick, calligraphic drawing style. I began to revalue his work when I viewed his wonderfully inventive textile designs and his mastery of the woodcut in his illustrated edition of Apollinaire’s Bestiaire. There’s also the Black Freighter – the image of a hard-edged black hulk that intrudes on the horizon of Dufy’s most intensely hedonistic visions of the Côte d’Azur and strikes a single sombre note as an untimely reminder of human mortality. In this example, Dufy’s brush deftly reduces the mighty engineering of le Transbordeur de Marseille to a cluster of lines applied with rapid touches. This wasn’t the only occasion on which Dufy took up some less refined subject matter. For the 1937 Exposition Universelle he painted a gigantic (33 by 200ft) mural, La Fée Électricité that was displayed in the Pavillon de l’Électricité. The result was a stunning symphonic celebration of the role of electricity in the modern world that can still be seen at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.