B is for Building Brick Blocks . . . I Bloody Loved 'Em!

We all had them, my earliest toy memories are of them, up until about 6 or 7-years of age (when playing 'army' or Cowboys & Indians outside and Lego or Meccano indoors began to take over), these were the toys I played with most; the collection of slowly disappearing bricks which were kept in an old draw-string topped sack or gym-bag.

When I cleared the garage after the leak was fixed, I found a still soggy-bottomed and much the worst for wear cardboard box, that turned out to be our old bricks which Mum had kept; nostalgia, see!

They must have reminded her of our childhood, as much as they did me when I found them - you may remember I also found the old family cake-decorations in the garage a little earlier and Blogged them at the time. Anyway I bagged them, as I saved them from their puddle of nastiness and left them, open, in the greenhouse to dry-out.

A few weeks later I was having the board-game photo-shoot on the lawn and shot them too, the late, great and still missed Girly-Girl thought she would help, first by sitting on them and then by conducting an initial inspection!

I have now bonded with her son - Boysey-Boy, naturally! Actually Katie and Cassius. Basically, I feed him and he fucks-off for hours at a time and comes back with fighty-bitey marks, wanting more food! He recently nearly died from a nasty wound and cost me 1300-quid in vet's bills! It's like American human-healthcare; going to the vet's these days!

And he's been 'done', that's what I don't get, even the vet said his face looked 'intact'; apparently he has choppy-whiskers? After 14-days of confined to house with a cone-of-shame, he went straight back out and got a claw-mark in his shaved-patch, millimeters from his just healed stitches!

Anyway, back to bricks; this is what had survived the 55-odd years since they started accruing, a mixed bunch, here, on the lower left, they have been separated into thematic piles which were then washed - lower right-hand image. You can also see - top left - the little green man from our racing car, already Blogged, who was another strong childhood memory.

If I was the sort of toy collector who wanted to monetise with several websites, a Twitspace, Insta', a Facebook group, Vlogging site and the odd TV appearance (and some do, very successfully) I could - of course - go to a large toy store and buy modern products which are either exactly the same, or so similar as to make no difference, prepare backgrounds, use lights &etc.; to produce something far more polished as an overview of 'Building Bricks' But this is meant to be a vintage Blog, and for reasons of pure nostalgia I'd rather get a Blog post out of this childhood detritus!

While he was Commandant of Brecon, Dad rebuilt a Welsh stone cottage; Tai Hirion, from the ground up, in his spare time, and any useful off-cuts would be added to the brick-bag, and these are what are left after those many years. I suspect the arch and half-moon were more . . . 'custom' pieces!

They, being untreated, had survived the damp worst of all and many went to the compost as shoddy (dry rot) during the recovery phase, but there were enough left for an Airfix 6x6 to take some supplies up to! I imagine an Italian village being liberated, circa 1944!

The truck-load is what's left of one of those 'tap and something' (?) sets, which came with a baize-covered, wood-framed, cork sheet, a hammer, an assortment of coloured wood shapes and lots of little brass nails? They were sort of next thing-up from Fuzzy felt, which we never had, but friends did and I loved that too! There's also half a wooden version of the Christmas Cracker pyramid puzzle toys, we seen before here.

Peg-leg Pete (Kipp brothers?) is defending my favorites of these square blocks, real 'early learning' stuff, they often used (and still do) to come in little wheeled trucks or trolleys, although I don't think his actually did. They have machined alphabet letters on two sides, nicely finished in gloss paint, two numerals branded-in on the other two sides of that 'equator' line, with animals on the bottom, also hot-metal branded, while the top is a blank face.

It meant you could do '3 X DUCKS ڲڲڲ' if that makes sense within the constraints of ASCII code limits! And with about 40 bricks, there were plenty of letters, numbers and pictures. I can find a similar set from Playskool from 1978, but these were pre-1968!

And they were early examples of mechanical 'computer' aided manufacture (CAM), in that a cam-bar with bends, peaks and troughs was followed by a 'pointer' roller, which used a slaved pantograph to transfer the coded information of the contours to a milling-head on a wood-lathe or router, which milled out whichever letter that bar was the 'former' for, the whole process automated, a bit like the holes in the punched cards of self-playing pianos or the pins in the drum of a music-box.

The Hing Fat mob are hiding behind a barrier of blocks I was never that keen on, even as an infant, because (Asperger's!) my visio-spatial sensibilities couldn't get themselves round the fact that the gold-foil letters stamped into the face of the bricks were A) not fucking straight, or centered! And B) faded as they rubbed-off (that's an E on the end) with play! They may have been Hong Kong knock-offs?

The Airfix Guards are establishing the size variation of otherwise similar bricks from different sets.

"X marks the spot"

"There isn't an X though?"

I hate them so much I shot them twice? Another thing which annoyed me about them was that four of the edges were rounded off with ogee profiles, but the other eight weren't, so you had to be careful placing them if you had a form of ADHD which wouldn't be diagnosed for another forty-odd years  . . . and which I don't really believe in anyway; we're all on the 'spectrum' somewhere!

The plastics; they haven't survived at all well, there were several cup towers, which have totally vanished, bar the powder-blue one, while most of Mr. Hilary Page's Pyramid Rings (the other two are 52 and 53) have also gone for a Burton's and not come back! I think the red one is a storage/anti-corrosion cap off the terminal of a Morris Traveller's battery!

While the blow-moulded blocks (pretty-sure these were Blue Box, not because my memory is that good, but I think I've seen them on evilBay) were awful, they crushed easily, the corners could be paper-thin, and I mean cigarette or bible-paper thin! And dogs, cats and young me, or my brother, could chew holes in them!

The other (yellow) item in the pile of rubble being skirted by a contemporaneous Airfix Jeep is the base of a Playcraft railway's road-sign or street-light. The rest of that childhood set are still around, but in storage and I will Blog them, before they go on feeBay - at some point in the future.

I did know (do know, but can't find the resource) who made the little railway, I've a picture of one on the dongles somewhere I think, but surfice to say it came with three ore-hoppers like this one and a little locomotive, a real infant's carpet toy! They were joined with simple chrome-plated hooks-and-eyes, long since rusted to buggery.

Below is one of the things I loved about the sets in the final image below, the way they all nested together in their boxes, trolleys or little lorry/truck to make-up complete layers.

Another comparison, with the Berserker who hasn't been pulling his weight much recently! The church spire was part of a larger modular set, which was probably German, and the orange side bit pivots down to be a wall or ramp? There were various holes in the larger elements, with smaller elements having a matching dowel glued-in, and they all went together in various configurations, the roof is also removable.

These were my favorites of all, we had two or three sets or part sets (we used to get a lot of our toys at the church-fêtes and jumble-sales, so they weren't always complete or 'with packaging'!

And while they all followed  a vague set of 'industry standard' rules, regarding colour and/or shape, they didn’t always match exactly in diameter or length, so you had to be careful pairing them up to build things straight or level!

Glossy painted wood, smaller unit size than most of the above, and there were usually pillars in one or two sizes, acute and equilateral 'roof' pieces, longer beams and shallower half-depth plates, the arch 'bridges' and the half-circles or rounded-corners which went inside them for packing - I loved them, it was all about the colours!

The beams were multiples of the cubes (which matched the rounded corners), they were so bloody tangible, they could keep you playing for a whole rainy-afternoon! I remember one of our friends had a set with different colours and his rounded pieces were apple-green instead of the indigo of ours; I was so jealous!

Most of the wood in the above article started the first fire of autumn 2020, as kindling, it was sad, but nothing last forever and the water damage was too great to keep them hanging about. Little did I know that within three months Girly-Girl and Mum would have gone too.

A bit maudlin, I know; but with all the Monarchy stuff going-on in the background right now, and the inordinate amounts of death in the last three years, I think we are all a tad contemplative these days? And it's the 11th of September today, bloody month needs to be taken out of the calendar and replaced with a happier one  . . . and Autumn is normally my favorite time of year!