The Magnet

My mum never gave away any of my Dinky toys, there was no need to as nobody would have wanted them anyway after us three boys had finished with them, I took a long look at the ravaged box of diecast a few years back when I was visiting my dad when he was sick and decided that it must have been my younger brother Paul that was the guilty party, after all, I always took good care of them, didn’t I?

However, there was no trace of my Action Men. They were missing in action, absent without leave, taken by aliens, or the binmen...

In the 1950s my dad was employed at the Meccano factory on Binns Road in Liverpool. His job of paint tester was basically quality control for the many enamel paints that were used on the Meccano construction kit parts, toy trains and Dinky cars. He’d spray paint onto glass and then monitor the drying time, consistancy and colour against existing charts.

It was around this time that during lunch and tea breaks, he would sell shirts and ties to the many female employees. It was an inbuilt trait of my dad, to sell things, to make money from next to nothing, and to work hard.

He used to cycle from Botanic Road in Liverpool 7 to Binns Road via Edge Lane on his old boneshaker, which would usually take 30 minutes or so, and was warned about his timekeeping, I also suspect that his bosses looked down on his barrow boy antics. After a bout of what he called dysentry, he was late one more time and was sacked.

They did that back then.

I think it was the best thing that ever happened to him and the family, in the short term the supply of Meccano and Bayko kits in the household dwindled, but my dad found his true calling and progressed from a paint testing barrow boy to a full fledged shop owner. In the early 1960s the "Magnet, Toys and Fancy Goods" shop opened at 179 Wavertree Road in Liverpool and if you could put a name to it, he probably sold it.

I’ll try to list what the shop sold in a later blog, but, two of the most important toy lines that he started selling, much to the joy of his two sons, were, you guessed it, Meccano’s own Dinky toys and after a trip to a toy show in Bell Vue, Manchester, Palitoy’s Action Man.

And so the first collection began.

Without that first collection, how could there possibly have been a second?

Thanks Mum, thanks Dad.

xx