Brook Jeremy - Forty Years of Airfix Toys

FORTY YEARS OF AIRFIX TOYS

FORTY YEARS OF AIRFIX TOYS

JEREMY BROOK

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2019 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2019

Jeremy Brook 2019

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of thistext may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 536 7

Contents

Foreword

On joining Airfix in the early 1960s as a Design Draughtsman who had never built an Airfix kit, the design of the models and the ethos of John Edwards, the Chief Designer, intrigued me. The watchword was attention to detail and double-check your source. Having survived the demise of Haldane Place, the home of Airfix, and opened the Palitoy Design Office, the ethos remained but we became restricted by costings.

Peter Allen in 2018. PETER ALLEN

I have known Jeremy for many years and in Forty Years of Airfix Toys he follows the ethos of John Edwards.

PETER ALLEN

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Airfix Products Ltd was the Toy Division of Airfix Industries. Following World War II, its main output was to be of toys and games, with some household products also being made. As the first operator of a plastic injection-moulding machine in the UK, it would become the countrys biggest producer of plastic combs and manufactured a growing range of plastic toys. In 1952 it began work on its first plastic construction kit, a small model of the Golden Hind. The newly formed Kits Division would go onto becoming the largest and best known manufacturer of plastic kits in the country, and still to this day is introducing new models each year.

The toys and games side of Airfix carried on making toys, games and building sets and, at the beginning of the 1960s, it entered the motor racing market as a competitor to Scalextric while its early building sets were improved and relaunched as Betta Bilda to better compete with the improved plastic Lego. Painting sets were made available when Airfix repackaged the American Craft Master range, and later it also developed its own ranges of arts and crafts.

Early 1960s Toy Catalogue.

In 1971, Meccano and Dinky Toys were purchased from the Lines Brothers group which had recently gone into liquidation, and the ailing Tri-ang Pedigree Company also joined Airfix a few years after. In 1976, a new range of high-quality train sets and accessories were released that were worthy rivals for the existing Hornby railways. Around the same time, the company acquired the small manufacturer Scalecraft, which made a range of plastic, motorized kits. By the late 1970s, in short, Airfix was producing a large range of toys and model products that are often overlooked because of the success of its famous plastic construction kits, which are still in production today sixty-five years after the first kit was released and nearly forty years after the original Airfix company ceased trading. Details of those can be found in my book 60 Years of Airfix Models.

This is the story of those other toys and models produced over the forty or so years of the life of the original Airfix Company.

Acknowledgements

It has been a great pleasure to write my second book on the Airfix story. While I have a lot of Airfix toys in my collection, this book would not have been so comprehensive without the help of many people. Ralph Ehrmann, who was managing director of Airfix, and Peter Allen, who worked at Airfix and later at Palitoy, both have fantastic memories and were able to answer all the questions I had, the answers for which are not available elsewhere. My thanks to Graham Westoll, who worked in the Arts and Crafts division and wrote several articles for Constant Scale, which provided much insight into the workings of the non-kit parts of Airfix, and Graham Short, who over the years sent me numerous photographs of Airfix toys from his huge collection. Arthur Ward, who has written several books on Airfix, including his 2013 The Other Side of Airfix, provided much background information on the workings of the toys side of Airfix, and Jo May-Prussak, who revealed much about the life of Nicolas Kove. Paul Morehead of PlasticWarrior had much information on the early days of Airfix, and John Begg, an avid collector, allowed me to photograph much of his impressive collection.

Thanks go also to all the many members of the Airfix Collectors Club, who encouraged me over the years to complete this important part of the Airfix story, and finally to my grown-up children, who understood their fathers need to buy dolls and the like on eBay!

LMS Royal Scot Locomotive.

Motor ACE the Hi Speed range.

CHAPTER ONE

A Brief History of Airfix

In 1938, a Hungarian Jew by the name of Miklos Klein arrived in Britain, whereupon he changed his name to Nicolas Kove. He had led an interesting life, having been sent to Siberia in World War I before apparently walking back home! Between the wars he moved with his family to Spain, where he set up a company employing cellulose-based plastics and patented a process for stiffening collars called Interfix. With the threat of civil war in Spain looming, he moved to Italy, but found that Mussolinis strong connections to Hitler made Italy an unsafe base for a Jewish-run company. So he took his family and set off for a safer home.

The story of Airfix starts with his arrival in England. Shortly after arriving, he set up a new company, probably in 1939, in the Edgware Road in London. He called his new company Airfix, which had nothing to do with aircraft models; the famous kits would not appear for another fourteen or so years. He chose the name Airfix because he strongly believed that a successful company should appear at the front of an alphabetical trade directory and he also had liked trademarks ending in ix, like he had used for his collar-stiffening process in Spain. Since one of his earliest products was to be air-filled toys, he felt Airfix was appropriate since his product could be said to be fixed with air.