Not many people could venture into one of our national galleries, point and then exclaim: “Oh, I used to have one of those.” But it’s an everyday occurrence at the nation’s toy museums, where childhoods are remembered and relived by curators and visitors alike, in mini adventure playgrounds lined with rows of dolls, dinosaurs and diecast models.
John Holt talks to proprietors of these houses of fun and games, and hears tales of the teddy bear who flew secret missions in the war, the 80,000-strong hoard built on the back of a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and the family of five who have filled a former guesthouse with decades of dedicated collecting. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin …
Alex Samuel
Ilkley Toy Museum, West Yorkshire
Like many other similar institutions, Ilkley Toy Museum was born out of necessity when a private collection spiralled out of control.
“We’d always collected bits and bobs, but when a big toy sale came up at a local auction house, things began to take over,” says Alex Samuel, who runs the museum with her husband.
“Ilkley is quite touristy so we acquired a building in the town and started from scratch, had cabinets made, then learned as we went along about display and conservation issues surrounding wooden dolls and old fabrics.”
Samuel had no idea that the potential audience would soon extend beyond the traditional adult thrill-seekers in search of their lost youth.
“Schools became interested as what we were doing was perfect for the Key Stage 1 curriculum, which was news to me,” she says. “Adults come to enjoy a walk back through time and seven-year-olds look around to understand what’s old and new, what was clockwork and what needed batteries; it’s like ancient history to them.”
The museum is also working with local organisations to become dementia-friendly – the volunteer team has signed up for training courses and attends public events to supervise tables full of particularly tactile toys.
“People with dementia usually retain good long-term memory so many are able to recall their childhoods and the toys they played with,” says Samuel. “When they visit us here, they have the opportunity to pick up items and reminisce about them in a comfortable environment. It’s lovely to see how such simple things can spark some incredible memories.”
Ilkley Toy Museum’s star attractions are playful figures from different times: the oldest exhibit is an Etruscan doll dating back to 400 BC, while Blanche the bear has a 20th-century tale to tell.
“She’s a Steiff bear who was owned by the daughter of a Jewish family who fled Berlin at the start of the war,” Samuel says. “The woman later undertook secret service missions and became a foreign correspondent, taking Blanche everywhere as her lucky mascot. People are reluctant to sell toys they have an emotional connection with, telling us they’d prefer them to go to a good home. That’s what I like to think we provide.”
Alan Goldsmith
House on the Hill Toy Museum, Stansted, Essex
Like many other children who grew up during the war, Alan Goldsmith used to create his own entertainment with handmade catapults and bows and arrows cut from hedgerows because his family could not afford to buy toy equivalents. He has, however, been making up for it ever since.
“I am a bit childish,” he says. “If you analysed my psychology, you could say this museum started because I didn’t have Hornby train sets and tinplate aeroplanes when I was little. When I turned 20 I began to recapture my childhood.”
Goldsmith founded the House on the Hill Toy Museum, which is now home to nearly 80,000 figures of fun that range from life-size dinosaurs and model soldiers to What the Butler Saw arcade machines and Star Wars weaponry.
“I once overheard a visitor say ‘Blimey, whoever is responsible for all this should see a doctor’. That sums it up,” says Goldsmith, who built his extraordinary empire of entertainment – which includes a reconstructed Norman motte-and-bailey castle with added village next door – on his career in rock ‘n’ roll.
“I came up on the wave of 1960s music promoters and worked with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and Eric Clapton,” says Goldsmith who, in his youth, also staged airshows for crowds of 50,000.
“I was a bit flash when I was 25. I had an E-type Jaguar, I bought a house with 12 acres of land and this old motte-and-bailey castle that I wanted to rebuild. The planners kept turning me down until I mounted an exhibition showing what the old village would have looked like and could look like again.
“The whole complex took five years to build and when visitors started peering over the fence, I decided I may as well open up part of the house as a toy museum, using all the stuff that was piling up in the billiard room.”
Goldsmith reckons the House on the Hill is now the largest privately-owned museum in Europe with its widened scope taking in militaria and music memorabilia.
“A visit to a toy museum should be a dream trip, where an old toy suddenly transports someone in their 40s or 50s to more innocent and happier times,” says Goldsmith, whose tone turns to serious as he considers the lot of an independent museum owner.
“We’re barely tolerated; there’s certainly a ‘them and us’ attitude because we charge admission and have a shop. All museums contribute to local economies but this is a specialist collection that receives no public funding or grants – and the rates and VAT aren’t cheap.”
Cris Hamilton
Hamilton Toy Collection, Callander, Perthshire
Running a toy museum is generally a family affair, but an unusually large number of five members of the Hamilton clan pooled their resources to create a colourful collection that traces the domestic history of playtime.
“Although all five of us own everything, it was started by my father who – at the sprightly age of 83 – is still adding to the Dinky toys and model soldiers he began collecting at school,” says Cris Hamilton, who is joined in the enterprise by his parents, sister and brother-in-law.
“The rest of us started during the early 1970s when there was little interest in collecting vintage toys. Most of it was acquired when we lived in Croydon, but it wasn’t on display until we moved to Scotland.”
The collection eventually outgrew the family home and the Hamiltons looked for a museum location with a difference; 22 years ago, nine 250 cubic-foot containers transported their toys to Perthshire, where they have been displayed ever since in a former 19th-century guesthouse.
The toys are spread across five rooms with interconnecting corridors and landings dedicated to a single theme, each looked after by a single family member, says Hamilton, who has become an expert guide.
“Room one is the toy transport area with cars, model trains, boats and motorcycles, and room two contains TV and sci-fi memorabilia such as Star Wars, Batman and Gerry Anderson’s shows including Thunderbirds and Stingray, and superheroes.
“Room three is the Edwardian nursery and is the only one not open to the public. The assortment of the oldest toys we own can be viewed through the large glass door.
“Room four is the doll, dolls’ house and teddy bear room, which also contains puppets and younger children’s TV favourites such as Noddy, Rupert and Felix the Cat. And room five houses around 6,500 model figures – military, civilian, farm and zoo – along with model tanks, aeroplanes and construction kits.”
Hilary Kennelly
West Wales Museum of Childhood, Llangeler, Carmarthenshire
Hilary Kennelly got together with her husband Paul over a shared love of collections; while he likes model cars, she has a fondness for dolls in national costume. They ran a successful toy shop in Coventry for many years but something was missing from their lives: space.
“We were in a cramped two-bedroom flat above the shop, the stockroom was full of our stuff and more boxes were being babysat by friends,” says Kennelly. “We had been muttering for ages about opening a museum because we had so much stuff, then we found this old farmhouse in rural Wales.”
The place had been uninhabited for years and lacked a lot of roofing, but the pair could see the potential. They got builders to sort out the infrastructure and cheekily asked the carpenter if he’d be kind enough to knock some cabinets together.
“Everything was surprisingly straightforward as we’d had plans in our heads for years – we knew where everything was going to go,” says Kennelly, who is particularly proud of the museum’s storytelling of the once-thriving Welsh toy manufacturing industry. “Local stories are what museums are all about. Corgi Toys was once a major employer in Swansea with some 5,000 people working there. It’s gone now and the models are mostly made in China.
“The American firm Louis Marx also had a factory in the city, which turned out playsets such as the Lone Ranger dolls, along with plastic cars and yo-yos,” she adds. “The British manufacturer Crescent made toy guns in Cwmcarn, Wendy Boston made its teddy bears in Abergavenny and Triang produced trains and wooden toys in Merthyr Tydfil.
“Many factories were started with government funding and provided a lot of work for women while the men worked down the coalpits and in the steel plants. The women did the fiddly jobs because it was felt their hands were better suited to them while the men did the heavy stuff on forklift trucks.”
The Kennellys’ DIY approach to museum-building continues to this day, with recent developments, such as an old schoolroom with old eight-seater desks, sympathetically restored and tightly costed.
“We get on well with the staff at the National Wool Museum in the next village – having the kind of money they do must be marvellous. They envy our freedom though, and say that even minor changes there can involve weeks of dealing with bureaucratic rules and regulations.”
Alan Hicken
Montacute TV Radio Toy Museum, Somerset
A lot of toy museums are in out-of-the-way places and the tiny village of Montacute near Yeovil is certainly no different in its setting. The area abounds with historic houses, castles and country parks, and the village has a distinctive square built of the local honey-coloured hamstone.
Alongside the pub and village shop stands a museum established by Alan Hicken after he inherited a collection of old televisions and radios from his father-in-law’s electrical business.
“I collected a load more and started to put them on display but, while they were fascinating items, they looked a little dull, and made the place quite dark,” says Hicken, who added some brightness and contrast to proceedings by exhibiting colourful annuals, games and life-sized figures tied-in to old TV programmes.
Television and radio have always had a profound influence on the toy market, adds Hicken. His collection spans UK broadcasting history from the Clitheroe Kid right up to the present day and the first female Doctor Who.
“We often have three generations of a family visiting the museum at the same time; the children are into their sci-fi, the parents relate to the TV shows they watched as kids and the grandparents remember the old radio sets. Of course they all claim their programmes were the best,” says Hicken.
“When I was growing up, it was all about American TV westerns – I had board games in which you could play your favourite character from Wagon Train or Cheyenne.
“Alternatively, I used to play a board game based on the BBC radio comedy Hancock’s Half Hour,” he adds. “The aim was to get around the board doing the shopping and visiting the barber’s before having to be home by a certain time.”
As if all that wasn’t enough, Hicken – in true English village style – also found the time to run the post office next door for 13 years as he built up the museum.
“It was either that or be lynched by the community who wanted the post office to stay open. Luckily, the people who ran the saddlery eventually took it over.”
John Holt talks to proprietors of these houses of fun and games, and hears tales of the teddy bear who flew secret missions in the war, the 80,000-strong hoard built on the back of a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle and the family of five who have filled a former guesthouse with decades of dedicated collecting. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin …
Alex Samuel
Ilkley Toy Museum, West Yorkshire
Like many other similar institutions, Ilkley Toy Museum was born out of necessity when a private collection spiralled out of control.
“We’d always collected bits and bobs, but when a big toy sale came up at a local auction house, things began to take over,” says Alex Samuel, who runs the museum with her husband.
“Ilkley is quite touristy so we acquired a building in the town and started from scratch, had cabinets made, then learned as we went along about display and conservation issues surrounding wooden dolls and old fabrics.”
Samuel had no idea that the potential audience would soon extend beyond the traditional adult thrill-seekers in search of their lost youth.
“Schools became interested as what we were doing was perfect for the Key Stage 1 curriculum, which was news to me,” she says. “Adults come to enjoy a walk back through time and seven-year-olds look around to understand what’s old and new, what was clockwork and what needed batteries; it’s like ancient history to them.”
The museum is also working with local organisations to become dementia-friendly – the volunteer team has signed up for training courses and attends public events to supervise tables full of particularly tactile toys.
“People with dementia usually retain good long-term memory so many are able to recall their childhoods and the toys they played with,” says Samuel. “When they visit us here, they have the opportunity to pick up items and reminisce about them in a comfortable environment. It’s lovely to see how such simple things can spark some incredible memories.”
Ilkley Toy Museum’s star attractions are playful figures from different times: the oldest exhibit is an Etruscan doll dating back to 400 BC, while Blanche the bear has a 20th-century tale to tell.
“She’s a Steiff bear who was owned by the daughter of a Jewish family who fled Berlin at the start of the war,” Samuel says. “The woman later undertook secret service missions and became a foreign correspondent, taking Blanche everywhere as her lucky mascot. People are reluctant to sell toys they have an emotional connection with, telling us they’d prefer them to go to a good home. That’s what I like to think we provide.”
Alan Goldsmith
House on the Hill Toy Museum, Stansted, Essex
Like many other children who grew up during the war, Alan Goldsmith used to create his own entertainment with handmade catapults and bows and arrows cut from hedgerows because his family could not afford to buy toy equivalents. He has, however, been making up for it ever since.
“I am a bit childish,” he says. “If you analysed my psychology, you could say this museum started because I didn’t have Hornby train sets and tinplate aeroplanes when I was little. When I turned 20 I began to recapture my childhood.”
Goldsmith founded the House on the Hill Toy Museum, which is now home to nearly 80,000 figures of fun that range from life-size dinosaurs and model soldiers to What the Butler Saw arcade machines and Star Wars weaponry.
“I once overheard a visitor say ‘Blimey, whoever is responsible for all this should see a doctor’. That sums it up,” says Goldsmith, who built his extraordinary empire of entertainment – which includes a reconstructed Norman motte-and-bailey castle with added village next door – on his career in rock ‘n’ roll.
“I came up on the wave of 1960s music promoters and worked with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Dionne Warwick and Eric Clapton,” says Goldsmith who, in his youth, also staged airshows for crowds of 50,000.
“I was a bit flash when I was 25. I had an E-type Jaguar, I bought a house with 12 acres of land and this old motte-and-bailey castle that I wanted to rebuild. The planners kept turning me down until I mounted an exhibition showing what the old village would have looked like and could look like again.
“The whole complex took five years to build and when visitors started peering over the fence, I decided I may as well open up part of the house as a toy museum, using all the stuff that was piling up in the billiard room.”
Goldsmith reckons the House on the Hill is now the largest privately-owned museum in Europe with its widened scope taking in militaria and music memorabilia.
“A visit to a toy museum should be a dream trip, where an old toy suddenly transports someone in their 40s or 50s to more innocent and happier times,” says Goldsmith, whose tone turns to serious as he considers the lot of an independent museum owner.
“We’re barely tolerated; there’s certainly a ‘them and us’ attitude because we charge admission and have a shop. All museums contribute to local economies but this is a specialist collection that receives no public funding or grants – and the rates and VAT aren’t cheap.”
Cris Hamilton
Hamilton Toy Collection, Callander, Perthshire
Running a toy museum is generally a family affair, but an unusually large number of five members of the Hamilton clan pooled their resources to create a colourful collection that traces the domestic history of playtime.
“Although all five of us own everything, it was started by my father who – at the sprightly age of 83 – is still adding to the Dinky toys and model soldiers he began collecting at school,” says Cris Hamilton, who is joined in the enterprise by his parents, sister and brother-in-law.
“The rest of us started during the early 1970s when there was little interest in collecting vintage toys. Most of it was acquired when we lived in Croydon, but it wasn’t on display until we moved to Scotland.”
The collection eventually outgrew the family home and the Hamiltons looked for a museum location with a difference; 22 years ago, nine 250 cubic-foot containers transported their toys to Perthshire, where they have been displayed ever since in a former 19th-century guesthouse.
The toys are spread across five rooms with interconnecting corridors and landings dedicated to a single theme, each looked after by a single family member, says Hamilton, who has become an expert guide.
“Room one is the toy transport area with cars, model trains, boats and motorcycles, and room two contains TV and sci-fi memorabilia such as Star Wars, Batman and Gerry Anderson’s shows including Thunderbirds and Stingray, and superheroes.
“Room three is the Edwardian nursery and is the only one not open to the public. The assortment of the oldest toys we own can be viewed through the large glass door.
“Room four is the doll, dolls’ house and teddy bear room, which also contains puppets and younger children’s TV favourites such as Noddy, Rupert and Felix the Cat. And room five houses around 6,500 model figures – military, civilian, farm and zoo – along with model tanks, aeroplanes and construction kits.”
Hilary Kennelly
West Wales Museum of Childhood, Llangeler, Carmarthenshire
Hilary Kennelly got together with her husband Paul over a shared love of collections; while he likes model cars, she has a fondness for dolls in national costume. They ran a successful toy shop in Coventry for many years but something was missing from their lives: space.
“We were in a cramped two-bedroom flat above the shop, the stockroom was full of our stuff and more boxes were being babysat by friends,” says Kennelly. “We had been muttering for ages about opening a museum because we had so much stuff, then we found this old farmhouse in rural Wales.”
The place had been uninhabited for years and lacked a lot of roofing, but the pair could see the potential. They got builders to sort out the infrastructure and cheekily asked the carpenter if he’d be kind enough to knock some cabinets together.
“Everything was surprisingly straightforward as we’d had plans in our heads for years – we knew where everything was going to go,” says Kennelly, who is particularly proud of the museum’s storytelling of the once-thriving Welsh toy manufacturing industry. “Local stories are what museums are all about. Corgi Toys was once a major employer in Swansea with some 5,000 people working there. It’s gone now and the models are mostly made in China.
“The American firm Louis Marx also had a factory in the city, which turned out playsets such as the Lone Ranger dolls, along with plastic cars and yo-yos,” she adds. “The British manufacturer Crescent made toy guns in Cwmcarn, Wendy Boston made its teddy bears in Abergavenny and Triang produced trains and wooden toys in Merthyr Tydfil.
“Many factories were started with government funding and provided a lot of work for women while the men worked down the coalpits and in the steel plants. The women did the fiddly jobs because it was felt their hands were better suited to them while the men did the heavy stuff on forklift trucks.”
The Kennellys’ DIY approach to museum-building continues to this day, with recent developments, such as an old schoolroom with old eight-seater desks, sympathetically restored and tightly costed.
“We get on well with the staff at the National Wool Museum in the next village – having the kind of money they do must be marvellous. They envy our freedom though, and say that even minor changes there can involve weeks of dealing with bureaucratic rules and regulations.”
Alan Hicken
Montacute TV Radio Toy Museum, Somerset
A lot of toy museums are in out-of-the-way places and the tiny village of Montacute near Yeovil is certainly no different in its setting. The area abounds with historic houses, castles and country parks, and the village has a distinctive square built of the local honey-coloured hamstone.
Alongside the pub and village shop stands a museum established by Alan Hicken after he inherited a collection of old televisions and radios from his father-in-law’s electrical business.
“I collected a load more and started to put them on display but, while they were fascinating items, they looked a little dull, and made the place quite dark,” says Hicken, who added some brightness and contrast to proceedings by exhibiting colourful annuals, games and life-sized figures tied-in to old TV programmes.
Television and radio have always had a profound influence on the toy market, adds Hicken. His collection spans UK broadcasting history from the Clitheroe Kid right up to the present day and the first female Doctor Who.
“We often have three generations of a family visiting the museum at the same time; the children are into their sci-fi, the parents relate to the TV shows they watched as kids and the grandparents remember the old radio sets. Of course they all claim their programmes were the best,” says Hicken.
“When I was growing up, it was all about American TV westerns – I had board games in which you could play your favourite character from Wagon Train or Cheyenne.
“Alternatively, I used to play a board game based on the BBC radio comedy Hancock’s Half Hour,” he adds. “The aim was to get around the board doing the shopping and visiting the barber’s before having to be home by a certain time.”
As if all that wasn’t enough, Hicken – in true English village style – also found the time to run the post office next door for 13 years as he built up the museum.
“It was either that or be lynched by the community who wanted the post office to stay open. Luckily, the people who ran the saddlery eventually took it over.”
