The Curmudgeon

So with Easter very late this year, we still have time to take a breather before the trippers come back in earnest - time to sit down with a good book.

And, in this I would like to thank a man whom I have never met, and whom I am never likely to meet, for fanning the warm coals of nostalgia in a world which, by the day, seems to be getting colder, harsher and much more dangerous.

Anthony McReavy is, according to the blurb on the back cover of the book which is entrancing me, an academic and a museum curator, which are exactly the qualifications which under normal circumstances ensure that I would never read one of his books.

Historians take themselves very seriously indeed and their so-called carefully researched biographies are often little more than a few dates buried deep in pompous self-opinions and often-distorted speculations.

But Mr McReavy picked for a subject of this book not a politician nor a general, not a writer nor a painter, but another man whom I also never met - but who nevertheless played an absolutely crucial part in my childhood.

His name was Frank Hornby and he made toys.

Proper toys that conquered the world and inspired millions of young boys (and perhaps a few girls) to take up proper careers and make proper things than people really needed, not merely wanted.

The son of a meat porter, he was one of seven children, hated school, and began his working life as a clerk on Liverpool docks, then one of the key hubs of the British Empire.

He was fascinated by the constant bustle on the docks, of goods trains coming and going, the huge cranes unloading and loading the ships coming from or bound for all corners of the world.

He was also a keen disciple of one of the Victorian age's most popular authors, Samuel Smiles, the great believer in self-improvement, who happened to be a Yorkshireman and secretary of the Leeds-Thirsk Railway.

When Frank Hornby's two sons were born, he had very little money to spare for toys. So he went into his garden shed and produced the greatest boy's toy of all time: Meccano. Later came Hornby Trains and Dinky Toys.

He became a millionaire and an MP but his greatest triumph was to fill boyhood throughout the world with toys which taxed the mind and the fingers but killed or maimed no one.

He led thousands of lads to become engineers and scientists. At least one Nobel prizewinner thanked Frank Hornby for setting him on the path to his prize.

But as I sit by the Aga these evenings, the chill winds whistling in the chimney, this book, the Toy Story, takes me back to Christmases of yester-year when we had beaten Hitler and the world seemed a safe place.

And I always left until last the big rectangular box in the brightly coloured paper which I knew was the latest addition to my Meccano collection. My gift from a humble Liverpool clerk.

Thanks, Anthony McReavy, for having the brilliant idea of writing a book about a truly important person.

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.