COLUMN: LUKE HONEY
Our columnist on clockwork tinplate toys
My grandmother’s clockwork toy collection began by accident. Her original plan was to entertain the children of friends who came to the house: she bought the toys brand new from the local village shop and brought them out of the cupboard as a reward for good behaviour. By the time we came along, she had built up a considerable collection of mechanical toys (in original boxes and near-mint condition), almost without realising it.
Many of the toys come from Germany and Japan: dancing monkeys, juggling elephants, sporting gira !es, acrobats, jousting knights in armour, trains and cars of every description and, most exciting of all for the nine-year- old mind: a "reman who raced up a telescopic tinplate ladder upon the turn of a key.
In the years leading up to the First World War, Germany dominated the toy industry. The famous companies of Marklin, Care#e, Bing and Lehmann manufactured wonderful toys made from tinplate (thin plates of steel, plated with tin), which from the late 1880s could be decorated with colourful o!set lithography, printed directly onto the metal. The toys were light, so cheap to export.
Over in France, just before the advent of mass-production, cra $smen made "ne automata for the luxury market. These were beautifully constructed mechanical objets, more expensive novelty than toy. Automata date back further in time than you might think. Queen Elizabeth I’s court astrologer, Dr John Dee, invented a vast mechanical beetle, which, it is said, %ew around the stage during a performance of Aristophanes’ Pax at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1547.
In the 1870s, following the opening up of markets to the West, the Japanese began to manufacture tinplate toys, o$en direct ‘ knock- o!s’ from German toys then %ooding the market. In the years following the Second World War, the British and American allies occupied Germany and Japan. With peace treaties signed, their "rst goal was to reconstruct the devastated industries of their former enemies, and with the de-militarisation of both countries, the logical step was to switch production away from arms and munitions to tinplate clockwork toys for export.
Many of these early 50s Japanese toys copied the older pre-war German designs. For the collector of post-war tin toys, the evocative names of Alps Shoji Company, Haji Toys, Tokyo Plaything Shokai (T.P. S), Mitsushima (MM), and Yoneya (Yone) resonate down the years. The colourful lithographic printed boxes evoke the innocent world of 40s and 50s bubblegum Americana: check shirts, crew cuts, pony-tails, Bobby Soxers and the Coney Island fairground. In Germany the old "rms of Schuco and Köhler manufactured wind-up racing cars, motorcycles and songbirds with beautifully printed tinplate.
Fi $ies Japanese and German clockwork (or ‘wind-up’) toys are eminently collectable and relatively a !ordable: under £150 at auction, robots and cars excepted. Look for them in markets, local antiques arcades, junk shops and, as ever, that ubiquitous internet auction site. The box is the thing. Be#er to own a rare toy in a decent condition with an intact box than several commonplace toys in poor condition with ta#y boxes or, worse s till, without boxes at all.