Hello Girls & Boys!: A New Zealand Toy Story

By David Veart

A seriously fun New Zealand toy story! Toys are made for playing with, but they are also serious business, as this remarkable story of New Zealanders and their toys makes clear. In Hello Girls and Boys! David Veart digs through a few centuries of pocket knives and plasticine to take us deep into the childhoods of Aotearoa - under the eye of mum or running wild at the end of the orchard, with a doll in the hand or an arrow in the ear, hula hooping or assembling kitsets. Veart tells a big story of how our two peoples made their fun on the far side of the ocean - Maori and Pakeha learned knucklebones from each other, young Aucklanders established the largest Meccano club in the world, and Fun Ho! and Torro, Lincoln and Luvme helped to build a successful local toy industry under the shade of import protection. But the book also covers little things and little people - homemade dolls and cereal toys, miniatures and marbles. From double happys and golliwogs to Buzzy Bees, tin canoes, Meccano and Tonka trucks - Hello Boys and Girls! revisits the crazes and collecting, playtimes and preoccupations of big and little New Zealand kids for generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781775587620

Book preview

Hello Girls & Boys!

Hello Girls & Boys!

A NEW ZEALAND TOY STROY

DAVID VEART

Introduction

Out of the Toy Box 1

Toys from the Waka

Flying a Kite

On Top

Sharing: Toys for Māori and Pākehā

Out of the Toy Box 2

New Arrivals, 1840–1900

Required on the Voyage

Toys on the Manifest

Looking Good: Optical Toys

Entertaining the Wild Children

Beloved and Broken Dolls

Sailing Boats and Riding Horses

Playing Together: Marbles and Knucklebones

Out of the Toy Box 3

Toys in Depression & War, 1900–1945

Making It: Meccano in New Zealand

On Track: Hornby Trains

Dolls’ Houses

Dolls and the Cult of Domesticity

Painted Pieces of Wood

War and the Consolation of Toys

Getting Around: Tin Canoes and Trolleys

Out of the Toy Box 4

A Golden Age? 1946–1960

Walter Nash Meets Walter Lines

Facing the Great Post-war Train Famine

Miniature Modern: Dolls’ Houses after 1945

The New Zealand Board of Trade and the Toy Inquiry

Telling Toy Tales

Toy Makers in Fortress New Zealand

Luvme and Cuddly Toys for All

Plasticine, Playway and Toys to Teach

Crazes

Come Fly with Me

Out of the Toy Box 5

Toys to the World, 1960s–1970s

The Big Four: Lincoln, Tonka, Torro and the End of Lines Bros

The Small Fish: Swimming Hard Right to the End

Māori Dolls

Rummaging through the Ricies: Cereal Toys

Getting Around 2: Skateboards

Out of the Toy Box 6

The Elves & the Rogernomes, 1980s

The New Hard Sell

The War Against War Toys

Off with a Bang!

Counter Culture: The Toy Shops

Dolls Grow Up and the Rise and Rise of Girls’ Toys

Out of the Toy Box 7

End Games, 1990s–2000s

Little Wars, Little Armies

The Great Survivor: Thos Holdsworth & Sons

Conclusion

Toys in the Joined-up World

Notes

Sources & Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Image Credits

Index

The author as a young train enthusiast. As a child growing up in the 1950s I had the advantage of having an Australian grandfather who arrived every Christmas with a bag of toys, many of which were unobtainable in New Zealand. These included trains and over five or six Christmases my railway grew. I note now that the items he brought included both British Hornby and Australian Robilt material.

Introduction

It could be the State picture theatre, Onehunga, in 1960. The familiar music and the antipodean-BBC accent of the narration take me straight back to the Saturday matinees of my childhood. It is in fact the viewing room at Archives New Zealand in Wellington, 52 years later, and I am watching a National Film Unit feature, Pictorial Parade, produced in pre-television New Zealand so people could share images of the country’s post-war progress. ‘With a quarter of the nation’s population under nine years of age the toy industry is booming,’ intones the voice, followed by high-speed dum-dum-dum-dum-dum music indicating that we are in a modern factory and that this is the machine age. Close-up shots show workers, both Māori and Pākehā, assembling toys.

A woman’s hand, armed with what look alarmingly like forceps, reaches into a metal tube and pulls out a doll’s head, which she stacks in a pile next to her machine, an ossuary of pink plastic skulls. The voice again: ‘Eternal toys to take a child a million miles away but still keep him under the watchful eye of Mum.’ Men assemble toy Jeeps and women pack train sets; disembodied hands air-brush doll faces to plastic perfection.¹

This government propaganda from another age was filmed in the South Auckland toy factory of Tri-ang,² a company whose presence in New Zealand was the product of high-level negotiations with English toy giant Lines Bros Ltd by Walter Nash, minister of finance in the first Labour government, which not only looked after us from the cradle to the grave but also helped to supply toys to amuse us along the way.

The toys shown in this film are part of our culture and they tell our story, often in ways that more ‘serious’ things cannot. At play, people let their guard down and allow cultural insights that may otherwise be obscured. As an archaeologist I have spent much of my adult life studying the history of human behaviour by examining the things we leave behind: potsherds, food refuse and stains in the soil showing where houses and buildings once stood. So why not toys? They, too, are artefacts. Most children do not leave written records; toys tell their story. For New Zealanders, this is a story of a country settled by Polynesian explorers followed by waves of Europeans, people of the Pacific and migrants from Asia. The tamariki climbing off the first waka brought things we recognise as toys although, in the Māori world, adults – and occasionally demi-gods – played with toys as well. They were joined in the nineteenth century by other children, bringing their own playthings, and a few that both groups shared: toys like knucklebones, tops and kites.

For many children, Sunday was a day without toys, a day to be spent in contemplation, not having fun. As with most rules there was an out-clause: if the toy was in some way ‘religious’ then play could continue and toys like this Noah’s ark became popular.

Initially, these children were seen as wild, running out of control in a wild new land. The newspapers were filled with accounts of the ‘shanghai menace’ and thousands of birds, windows and glass insulators on power poles fell victim to apparently feral and armed children. And they were not just boys. Until adolescence, when domestic tasks and adult clothing changed their world, many girls played in the same way as boys. When there were only fifteen children in the district and you needed a rugby team, some of the players just tucked up their skirts and ran onto the field.³ And then there are all the smashed dolls found in nineteenth-century rubbish pits: the result of wildness or simply careless play?

In the nineteenth century, toys were sometimes simply miniatures of the real thing, made by the same manufacturers. Toys like this miniature pot and kettle were probably produced by the local tinsmith.

Gradually, children were tamed, although the commentator’s description of children playing ‘under Mum’s watchful eye’ may have been a little optimistic. I was ten years old when that film was made and can still remember a few wild episodes with the ‘watchful eye’ at least a mile away.

Toys help to define the place of children in New Zealand. In Māori society the association of toys with childhood was not sharply differentiated, but the distinction was more certain in later periods and the Customs Department in 1956 assessed toys as ‘things designed principally for the entertainment of children’.⁴ To adults, toys seemed ephemeral. When hard times arrived toy imports were restricted; toys were banned in wartime and toy manufacture was cut back in later periods of economic stress. In the 1960s one toy retailer commented that the monthly bill for imported Scotch whisky was the equivalent of a whole year of toy imports – but then children do not vote. Toy safety was a factor too: government was slow to regulate toys that used fire, had sharp edges or were covered in toxic paint. And it was not just a matter of possible physical damage; the psychological effects of war toys and associated violent television programming in the 1980s concerned many parents. Opposition grew and petitions were collected, with minimal governmental response.

Toys allow the exploration of our casual multiculturalism. In 1968, the New Zealand Herald ran a story on the approach of Guy Fawkes with a photo of a group of Māori children buying fireworks from Wah Lee’s shop in Hobson Street before going on, by their own later recollection, to cause mayhem in Ponsonby.⁵ Māori children celebrating an English festival with explosive toys bought from a Chinese shopkeeper – who celebrated his own cultural festival, Chinese New Year, at a time when firework sales were usually banned.

In this Northwood Brothers’ photograph, taken somewhere in Northland, a group of children, Māori and Pākehā, admire a fine model yacht.

The economic history of New Zealand is spelled out in the sources of our toys. At first the wealthier colonists brought them from Home; the rest of the settlers made their own. Then, as the mass shipments of barely processed Kiwi protein flooded toward London, the toys poured back, many from Britain but many more from Germany, to the consternation of loyal imperialists.

After the First World War the German connections loosened and catalogues and toy cupboards filled with the products of Meccano Ltd and Lines Bros Ltd, the British toy giants and makers of the playthings of empire. New Zealanders loved these toys. The world’s largest Meccano club was formed in Auckland in the 1920s and boys all over New Zealand set up branches of the grandly named Hornby Railway Company, while their sisters played with Lines Pedigree dolls, sold in all sizes.

The cheapest and most common of the Hornby trains, very battered now after generations of hard play and neglect.

In the late 1930s this world vanished as the government cut and then banned all toy imports, unnecessary luxuries in a world at war. For a while Santa’s sack was empty and from this grew a New Zealand toy industry: simple toys at first, and then more sophisticated as Mortie Foreman mixed up sawdust and glue to create New Zealand’s first real dolls, Donald Cranko made his red-hot toy steam engines and giants like Lines Bros began to hire hundreds of people in a New Zealand with full employment.

The toy companies of the 1960s and 1970s soldiered on using, manipulating and sometimes avoiding the stringent economic regulations of the day. This was New Zealand in microcosm: in an industry that made toy tractors, the implications of the managed economy became much more visible. ‘Rogernomics’ brought this to an end: the toy factories closed and our children became global customers like the rest of us. Rather than popping down to the local toy maker we queued at The Warehouse for the play products of a new empire – American toy companies allied to cheap Chinese labour.

Throughout this story are the toy makers, like ‘Mr Mo-Bo’ on the left. There are famous ones, such as Lincoln Laidlaw of ‘Boy oh boy, a Lincoln toy!’, and Jack Underwood, the feisty boss of Fun Ho!. Then there are the less famous: ‘Johnny’ Prowse, the owner of the North Shore Toy Company, who for more than 30 years kept government regulators on their toes with a barrage of correspondence, and twelve-year-old Keith Stewart who, during the Great Depression, supported his family by making thousands of jigsaw puzzles in his bedroom.

This shop card from the 1940s provided the title of this book and an insight into how the local toy industry once worked. Mobo was a well-known British toy company; the ‘Mo-Bo’ company, based in Petone, simply took and registered a slightly changed version of the name.

Although many of our toys were produced in factories, others came from the backyard shed and the kitchen table: trolleys, tin canoes, dolls’ houses, dolls’ clothes, soft toys, made by cash- or import-strapped parents or by children themselves. In a world where basic sewing, woodwork and metalwork skills were taught, toys could be homemade, although they were not always the wholesome things parents and teachers were expecting: shanghais and cracker pistols sneaked through the classroom and out into the world.

Toys are the products of the society that makes them. The traditional toys of my childhood – trains, trucks, cars and soldiers, dolls, dolls’ houses and play kitchens – reflected a time when gender roles were more rigid and facilitated the acting out of the grown-up worlds of motherhood, work and warfare. Today, when Japanese popular culture has joined with American toy companies, the worlds of play are infinite. Why be an imaginary housewife or train driver when shows like Power Rangers, Transformers and ThunderCats provide the framework for play at another level, play in imaginary places where most adults have never been?

This pressed steel horse was made by the ‘real’ Mobo company and was sold in New Zealand after the war. They came in many forms: some moved forward when you sat on them and bounced up and down, others pulled trotting sulkies. This example works like a child’s walker.

Attempting to unravel how children use toys is a fascinating and difficult task. Are toys a fantasy version of the adult world or something different and unexpected? Why, for example, do some girls describe a favourite game with the pink icon of consumerism as ‘Barbie torture’?

As I was writing this book, and as I spent time with toy makers and collectors’ groups, I realised that in the twenty-first century something else was happening, something not seen here in over 200 years. Māori stories involving toys do not speak only of children: kites, tops and stilts were often in the hands of adults, and powerful adults at that. Now we are seeing this pattern again. In the 1950s, the Customs Department may have been confident enough to define toys as things used by children, but these days kites, jigsaw puzzles, dolls, toy trains and soldiers are made specifically for adult customers. Once again toys entertain us all, adults and children – a return to a time when everyone played.

Out of the Toy Box 1

TOYS FROM THE WAKA

Aotearoa New Zealand was the last major landmass discovered and settled by humans. East Polynesian explorers and settlers first arrived some time in the thirteenth century, bringing with them a highly developed portable culture – a culture which had evolved in the thousands of years since their departure from SouthEast Asia. These people arrived on double-hulled waka, carrying with them their crops (kūmara, yams and taro) and animals (dogs and probably pigs and chickens). They brought skills and tools, songs and toys. People everywhere play – Dutch historian Johan Huizinga even described us as Homo ludens , ‘man the player’ and argued that play is central to the development of culture. The way Māori played, and still play, is remembered and continued through stories, songs and the toys themselves. Knowledge of these ways of play adds to our understanding of the first culture of Aotearoa.

Flying a Kite

Wiremu Kīngi’s huge birdman kite, made in Gisborne in the 1880s for Sir George Grey, looks down upon the visitors to the Māori galleries at Auckland War Memorial Museum – trapped in its glass case, a giant butterfly pinned to a board. But if you look behind the case, a trick of the museum lighting shows that the kite’s shadow has escaped the cage, soaring across the wall, flying as it should over the assembled taonga: waka, whare and toki.

Kites, te manu tukutuku, are the perfect place to start exploring the toys of Aotearoa New Zealand. Kite makers know how to harness the wind, and in the beginning Aotearoa was a place that only people who understood the wind could reach. Kites arrived here on the first waka as part of the portable culture of Polynesian colonisation. They had travelled across the Pacific from the South East Asian homeland and were found wherever Polynesians settled. They had many uses: for fun or fishing, for divination or war, and occasionally as sails, manu whara, to drive canoes.¹ A story from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands happily makes the connection between the voyaging waka and kites.

The chief Rata Ariki was putting together an expedition to search for his parents, who had vanished in suspicious circumstances. He started by looking for the perfect tree to build a canoe and when he found it there were many gods waiting for him.

The gods exclaimed, ‘Is it you, O our child? do you desire a canoe?’ Then they further asked, ‘Why do you want a canoe?’ Rata replied, ‘I am going to search for my parents, Vaieroa and Tairiiri-tokerau.’ The gods said, ‘Your parents have been devoured by the sons of Puna; your mother’s eye-balls are in possession of their sister, Te-vaine-uarei; that is so, our child; now return home, and we will make your canoe.’

When the canoe arrived, Rata set about recruiting a crew for this voyage of vengeance. The men he gathered around him sound like an ancient version of an America’s Cup team: rope makers, shipwrights, navigators and helmsmen. Finally a man named Ngănăōa turned up.

‘What do you do?’ asked Rata.

Ngănăōa said, ‘I fly kites.’

Rata said, ‘You fly kites; and what then?’

Ngănăōa said, ‘I leap up to the heavens and extol my mother with exalting song.’

Rata said, ‘You extol your mother, and what then?’

Ngănăōa replied, ‘O, I exalt our mother, and that is all.’

Rata said, ‘I do not want you, you cannot come.’ He forthwith threw Ngănăōa overboard and sailed his canoe out to sea.²

Rejecting the fool was a big mistake; in stories from around the world, it usually is. Although Rata had men in his crew with a multitude of practical skills, he had left Ngănăōa, the holy fool, the tohunga, the kite-flying wind master, behind.

Luckily for Rata, Ngănăōa was a difficult character to get rid of. He turns up again and again in the story to rescue Rata and his crew from, among other things, a giant octopus, man-eating sharks and a giant clam. With Ngănăōa’s assistance, Rata Ariki reaches his destination and avenges his parents’ deaths. Kite flying in this story becomes a metaphor for the ability to control unseen powers, whether they be winds or taniwha.

Kites appear in many Pacific stories. Māui, half man, half god and pan-Polynesian trickster, was a kite flyer. So, too, was Tāwhaki, who appears in many tales. In some versions he is the grandson of Whaitiri, the female deity who personifies thunder. Often he attempts to reach the heavens – once to search for his grandmother, once for his missing wife. First he climbs Aratiatia, the path to the sky, with his brother Karihi, but the latter falls and is killed. Then Tāwhaki makes another attempt, this time riding on a kite, but because the kite is manmade he cannot finish the journey and in a subsequent attempt he falls and is killed.³

Throughout the Pacific kites were usually made with aute, the bark of the paper mulberry, which is also used to produce tapa. Paper mulberry trees were such an important part of the Polynesian cultural kit that the voyagers brought seedlings to Aotearoa, together with such basic foods as taro and kūmara. The generic name for Māori kites was manu aute, the name still given to Wiremu Kīngi’s giant at the Auckland Museum. In New Zealand, however, the paper mulberry did not grow very well – the bark cloth became so valuable that small pieces were used as earrings and Tupaia, the Tahitian priest who travelled with James Cook on the Endeavour, could calm tense confrontations with Māori by offering pieces of the very valuable bark cloth brought by Cook in large quantities from Tonga.⁴

This ūpoko tangata is named for the material it is made from – cutty grass. A humble child’s toy kite made by Ngāpuhi iwi from Northland, it is an unusual survivor.

There were, of course, many other materials suitable for local kite making, and Māori exploited them all. Raupō leaves replaced aute in many places; cutty grass and flax were also used. Māori made the frames of kites from kareao or supplejack, mānuka and toetoe.⁵ As soon as European materials became available local kite makers used them, too. Both the surviving birdman kites use European cloth or paper in their construction.

Kites were an important part of Māori work and play, but our knowledge of them is limited. This is partly because kites, by their very nature, are ephemeral things. While perishable materials like wooden carvings may occasionally survive in the right conditions, kites do not, and humans tend to look after the precious rather than the mundane. Worldwide, there are now only seven examples of Māori kites that predate the early twentieth century, kept in museums in London, Hawai‘i and New Zealand. They include three manu taratahi, special triangular kites with one point, which were flown when Ruhanui was celebrated, the time when the kūmara was stored and gifts were given.⁶ The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa has an example of a rectangular child’s kite, ūpoko tangata.

On Top

Gods, chiefs, ariki – all these people of power used artefacts that we would call toys, but for purposes transcending play. When examining toys within the Māori world, the status and social rank of the people involved must be taken into account because their mana affects the story. When Pākehā arrived in Aotearoa they found a complete society, consisting of all social levels from the equivalent of aristocracy to peasantry (and a little later with a king as well): all these people are remembered with ‘toys’.

But Pākehā commentators described what they saw from their own class and cultural perspective: toys equal children. When describing Māori society they ignored the very similar ‘toy stories’ within European aristocratic circles; the rich and powerful have time to play. Marie Antoinette had her play farm, wealthy eighteenth-century dinner guests were entertained by complex and hugely expensive automata and well-heeled Edwardian middle-class gents like H. G. Wells played with toy soldiers on the drawing room floor. This involvement of adults in toy play is something that would re-emerge only in the late twentieth century, when wealth and leisure in Aotearoa returned to the level enjoyed by Māori aristocracy two centuries before.

New Zealander Brian Sutton-Smith, who became a world authority on children’s play, started his research into New Zealand children’s games during the 1940s, when it was still easy to find people with memories stretching back into the nineteenth century. He attempted to assess what changes had occurred in Māori toys and play and which ones had survived this Pākehā winnowing of tradition.⁷

To do this, he concentrated on toys and games that he described as having survived the ‘cultural disintegration’ of the nineteenth century when, especially after the passing of the Native Schools Act in 1867, Māori children fell increasingly under Pākehā influence. He noted that there were many surviving games and toys but also some that appeared to be later introductions – non-traditional activities seen as beneficial and educational that had been encouraged by the Young Māori Party in the 1890s and ‘phys. ed.’ section of the Education Department in the 1930s. The Māori toys that had survived, he believed, were those which had a Pākehā equivalent and which missionaries and later teachers could not view as ‘uncivilised’ and discourage or ban.

The elaborate carving on these poutoti from the Bay of Plenty indicate the high status of the person who once owned them.

Similarly, the ethnographers chose not to record games that were either too difficult to describe or, in their eyes, had sexual connotations. Surfing, whakahekeheke, was done using kōpapa, small boards about the size of modern boogie boards, or kelp bags or occasionally small waka. But the pastime became a victim of missionary prudery and fell from favour because the participants surfed naked. Māori comedian Billy T. James once did a sketch in which, as a child, he was presented by a practical relative with a pair of shorts with one pocket cut out, so he had ‘something to wear and something to play with’. This story has a rich traditional origin: one of the games avoided by missionary and ethnographer alike was rito ure, in which the erect penis (or stiffened finger) was skilfully looped with string to the accompaniment of music. There were other prohibitions on play: early ethnologist Elsdon Best recorded one kaumātua telling him that ‘We were not to spin our humming tops on Sunday’.⁸

Among the survivors of this culling, puritanical or otherwise, Sutton-Smith listed knucklebones (see p. 60), stilts, tops and string games, as well as other adventurous pastimes that required little in the way of equipment: hunting, sliding, ‘pipi shell skipping’ (more like flying pipi shells, which I remember from my own childhood, requiring a dexterous flick of the fingers) and a number of games played with the hands – the Māori equivalents of paper, stone, scissors. On occasion traditional games survived even without Pākehā equivalents: he cites hand games played by older workers in East Coast shearing gangs. He does not mention kites. They may have fallen from use, but modern Māori commentaries on play and toys suggest that many more survived, under the radar of both Smith and the missionaries.⁹

Kōruru (sometimes ruru), the Māori form of knucklebones, arrived from Polynesia with the first waka. You can imagine bored, becalmed tamariki amusing themselves with the game during the voyage. The names for the various stages of play differed throughout the country. This is the Ngāi Tahu version as collected by F. R. Chapman in the nineteenth century.

1. Paka (North Island dialect, panga) or ruke. Place four stones on the ground in twos; throw one up; pick up two; catch; repeat.

2. Takitoru. Place four on the ground; throw one up; pick up three; catch; repeat; pick up one.

3. Tuawha, or takiwha. Throw one up; pick up four; catch.

4. Koriwha. Hold four in hand; throw up one and catch it; repeat; then put four on ground, and do the ruke again.

5. Raraki (rarangi)-te-whawha. Place four in a square; throw up one four times in succession, touching a corner stone each time, and so heaping them. Then throw up one; sweep up four; and catch fifth. (This they have learned to call ‘stockyard.’)

6. Piu. Throw up one, and put four down.

7. Huri. Throw up all five, and catch on back of hand.

8. Koruru. Throw four up; pick up one, and catch four. This is the last one, and is also the name of the game.¹⁰

Using small pebbles, berries or whatever was to hand, kōruru was played by both children and adults.

Among the great survivors were pōtaka, spinning or whipping tops, which came in many forms and