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Business

Britain’s long history of model-making may be Olympics’ biggest loser

Published: 01 Oct 2012 - 02:06 pm | Last Updated: 07 Feb 2022 - 01:00 am

By Ian Jack

THE wind bent the rain to the diagonal. In the Just the Ticket cafe at the Hornby Visitor Centre, I ate a cheese toastie and looked across Enterprise Way towards the damp, square bulk of a building branded Halfords, or rather Halors because the f and the d had fallen off. 

It would be a pity if the long history of British model-making should end here, I thought, wherever here was: somewhere on the plateau between Margate and Ramsgate, next to a line of pylons and on the edge of a retail park that was sucking the life out of both town centres. When Lines Brothers, who made Tri-ang toys, moved to this site after the war, it was to an industrial estate in a society that still put its economic effort into production rather than consumption. The firm occupied an extensive factory fronted by two-storey offices in red brick with square metal-framed windows and the name Tri-ang set large above the door; there had been three Lines brothers and three lines make a triangle, hence the name. 

I never much cared for Tri-ang, perhaps because some of my father’s Manichaean spirit had rubbed off on me. In Tony Blair this belief in the conflict of opposites – good versus evil in his case – led to British participation in the disaster of Iraq. As to Hornby versus Tri-ang, it wasn’t a contest. Hornby had been making its little trains and tracks out of steel since the 1920s, while Tri-ang had come to the modelling scene in the 50s and made nearly everything from plastic. The first felt solid in the hand, the second light. Moreover, Hornby trains belonged to the famous Meccano company that produced Dinky toys and the Meccano Magazine as well as its challenging construction kits for would-be engineers.  

But metal models were too expensive for the mass market. Meccano kits began to be perceived as too earnest and self-improving. A fashion passed. By the time the Binns Road factory closed in 1980, management and workers were at each other’s throats. The first said the second were lazy, dishonest and drunk, while the second accused the first of muddle and incompetence. Plastic won. Tri-ang won. Kent won. At least they did for a while.

The Hornby Visitor Centre tells some of this complicated story. Meccano was patented in 1901 by a Liverpool clerk, Frank Hornby, who after the first world war started a line in model railways, powered at first by clockwork and later by electricity. Lines Bros bought Meccano in 1964, merged Hornby with Tri-ang and moved model train production to Margate. In 1971, after Lines Bros went bust, another company took over the model trains division. Ten years on, this company also went bust, and the management bought Hornby from the receiver.

The 80s were hardly a good decade for model train makers anywhere in the world, trains having been replaced in the idolatry of boyhood by planes and cars, but Hornby’s management acted imaginatively. The detailing of its models was improved and the range extended. Thomas the Tank Engine was at the height of his fame on children’s TV; Hornby cashed in with the appropriate model range, and then did the same with a Hogwarts Express for Harry Potter. More importantly – a crucial decision for profitability – Hornby sacked more than 400 workers at its Margate factory and outsourced production to Guangdong in China. Hornby made its last model in Britain in 1999, leaving Margate as a headquarters with a staff of 150, not an overall in sight and plenty of spare room for a shop, a cafe and a small museum.

To the Scalextric racing car business, which it inherited from Lines Bros, Hornby added Corgi and Airfix and then went abroad to buy up European firms: Jouef (“La passion des trains”) in France, Electroten in Spain, Lima and Rivarossi in Italy, Arnold in Germany. And in each case apart from Airfix, which found a factory in India, production was transferred to China. 

Technically, in terms of verisimilitude and smooth running, the results seem almost perfect. The Hornby trains of my childhood made a sizzling noise as they ticked-ticked-ticked round the track and left a smell of burning. At the visitors centre in Margate, they emit the sounds of real steam engines and their variety is astonishing. All kinds of locomotives, all kinds of coaches and wagons, every era from 1900: who would have believed 50 years ago that something so narrowly meaningful as an accurate miniature of a Great Western Railway carriage circa 1910 could be entrusted to poorly paid labour on the other side of the world? It was the kind of enterprise that might have filled the idle hours of a certain kind of Englishman between his retirement and death.

I walked around and discovered some interesting facts. Airfix, for example: the name makes sense when you discover the firm was founded by Nicholas Kove in 1939 to make air-filled toys – the Li-Lo is said to be Kove’s invention. Then, after my cheese toastie, I went to the shop and discovered in a corner, as though ashamed of their presence, the Olympic souvenirs whose abject sales have probably plunged Hornby into the red. Little London taxis with the Olympic logo on the roof; die-casts of the one-eyed mascots Wenlock and Mandeville; key rings with Olympic torches attached: all at fire-sale prices.

I bought a key ring for £1.99. Everything looked fine apart from the dog’s- breakfast logo, which, when it was unveiled in 2007, the designer Wolff Olins had the nerve to tell us was “unexpectedly bold, deliberately spirited and unexpectedly dissonant”.

Iris, the creative agency that came up with Wenlock and Mandeville, is equally full of horseshit: “We are partially defined by irreverence,” says a director on its promotional video.

 Neither of these design tragedies can be blamed foursquare for Hornby’s difficulties, which have to do with an overestimation of the demand for souvenirs amid a miscalculation of the Olympics’ effect on commerce. But it was hard to see them – the pink splotches, the Cyclopean dolls – and resist the idea that Hornby had stepped down from exemplary model-making and into a bucket of tat.

The Guardian