General Chat

Dear Gwyn and All

Hello

The memories those stamps have evoked.

I particularly loved playing with feezy-felt as illustrated on one of the commerative
stamps.

I loved my dolls. I had a tea set and would have a little party where the guests would the dolls and the couple of Disney toys.

Very enjoyable times.

Take gentle care
Love Elizabeth, EOS
xx

I loved my doll's pram, with proper canopysecond hand (toys short in war time) and my beautiful little China tea set that Mum queued up for, which daughter has in her attic. Dad made a little round table and chair and a dresser for the tea set. He also made a huge dolls house with lots of rooms and lighting. And also a doll's cot., I loved dolls and all that went with them. Favourite occupation was always reading..

I still have my 60yr or so Big Ted. He looks a bit bald now but still as handsome as he was when I first had him. He has lost his Growl though :-(....
Fuzzy felts are something I loved as a child and enjoyed them again when I had my children. Bunty comic with the cut out girl and clothes to dress her with the tabs that folded over the shoulders and sides :-D :-D

For Christmas when I was nine my Aunty bought me a doll.
My best friend's Mum bought the same doll for her, but with blonde hair.
We used to laugh about it as I was the blonde and she was the brunette.

I still have her. I recently got her out of a cupboard and bought her new clothes :-D

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/keepsafe/asset/details/55849885

Some great choices here and fond memories of favourites.

Most of our games when young involved imagination using a few 'props'.
My sister and I had a hand-made box, which opened up to become 'The Village Stores'. With cash register and weighing scales and little jars of miniature sweets, we spent hours playing and serving family customers.

When I was a bit older, I had a Viewmaster. I had new reels bought for birthdays and loved 'visiting' other countries through the photos I saw.
I still have all the films and my bakolite viewer.

Also here somewhere is my teddy. He was made with sheepskin and apparently spent a lot of time over my shoulder, as I copied my mother winding my younger sister.
Poor Ted consequently got rubbed a bit bare on his back.

Rollo. Ahh, boys toys.

Hornby in the attic. Duchess of Athol (Maroon), Nigel Gresley (Blue) and a 2-6-4 (or maybe it's a 4-6-2?) tank engine (Black).

Jetex engines. I guess that every boy owning one would have lit an exposed fuel pellet just to see what happened. Fast fizz/burn yes. But not explosive?

Airfix Avro Vulcan needed two Jetex though never flew far. But building the plane - the glue and the dope!! What would HSE think today?

Milbro alloy catapult, with a yard of 1/4" rubber.

Went to the local (Woolwich) 'cop shop' every year to pay for my licence to "carry and use a gun".

Last but not least. Fireworks over the counter. And make-your-own gunpowder (salt petre and sulfur from the local oil shop, plus some soot from the chimney)

My dad and brother combined to build a doll house for me about 1944, they even installed little tiny bulbs and wired them to a battery so I could have "electric light". I also had a farm yard that they might have built.

I was told when I was 12 that I was too old t keep my toys and I had to pass them down to my brother's children ......... that included my already threadbare bear that Dad had managed to buy in London in early 1940. :-(


In the basement here, we have OH's Hornby Dublo train ............. he had it sent over here when his parents were moving house and, by some miracle, they had not got rid of it. When our daughter was about 10, he got a sheet of plywood, attached the rails to that, got a transformer, and she used to play trains with it.

We also have his Meccano set, which is a combination of the sets he was given in the early 1940s and the ones that his father had been given in the 1920s. My daughter loved that set, built all kinds of very complicated operating things with it.


Sindy was my daughter's era .............. she had 3 or 4 dolls, several sets of "furniture", OH built a doll house sized down to exact measurements, and she built furniture, fireplaces, etc out of wood cotton reels, cardboard, etc.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised when she became an architect :-D

I had a teddy bear the same size as myself at 5years old and he had elastic at the bottom of his feet so they could be attached to mine and would dance together all day long :-D <3 <3

I also had a game called Perfection in which you had to get all the shapes in the right places in certain time..if yu didn't they all popped out so had to start again I was obcessed :-0 :-D :-D

Ann, I took the ball with me on holidays to my relatives house in Oxford. I left it too near the gas fire and it became egg shaped :-D

At this point I no longer needed the mesh (it was in bits by now anyway) because I could now hold on to the pointy bit :-D :-D

Money was short when I was a child but my paternal Grandparents were better off.

I remember my 9th birthday and I really wanted a Sindy (1966) but wouldn't have dreamed of asking my parent for it.

Mum and Dad bought me a watch, which in hindsight probably cost more than a Sindy, but I remember being ecstatic when my Grandparents came up trumps with the much wanted Sindy doll.

I expect girls now would probably turn up their noses at receiving a 'doll' for their 9th birthday.....How times have changed ;-)

Chris

My Teddy :-D :-D

and

My Brothers pedal car :-D :-D

Hornby Dublo (Duchess of Atholl).
Chemistry Set.
Steam engine (heated by meths).

I loved my dolls. I still have them

My grandaughter now says "How could you play with them they have such creepy faces they freak me out!" :-D :-D :-D

It's got to be my bicycle....freedom :-D :-D :-D :-D

Shocked you didn't burst it Jem :-D :-D :-D ;-)

I've just clicked on the link

I always wanted a Space Hopper! I never had one, but I won a big ball on a bingo stall at a fair in Porthcawl on a Sunday School Outing.
It had a mesh netting on it and I would use the ball as a Space Hopper holding on to the netting.D

One day, I was playing with the ball on the beach of our village and it got took out to sea :-(

In WW2 I was a London evacuee to Kent

Was taken in by a young married couple of 18 months who didn't have children at that time

I was 2 and half years old

I was accepted into both of the families and aunties mumand dad were also auntie and uncle

In 1943 they wanted to get me a dolls pram and managed to get a second hand one and have it repainted and recovered

They found a doll but it needed a head so they wrote to my parents in London for help
A dolls head was found and sent and was attached to the doll

Auntie was a tailoress so she made loads of dolls clothes

I remember walking into her mums house on Boxing Day and there in the front room was the pram and baby doll all dressed up
There was other pressies but I made a beeline for the pram

After I went back to london in 1946 we eventually got the pram home

When I was 12 I was persuaded I was too old for the pram and pressured to give it to my sister who was 9

I hated seeing her playing with MY pram

I don't remember having a favourite toy. How sad is that?

Being a girl, I used to get presents like knitting or sewing sets, toy cooking things etc. and none of these appealed to me much. I always loved reading - still do - and if I was indoors I would have my head stuck in a book. But when I was a child you could go off to the park with your friends or play out in the street, so if I wasn't reading I would be playing outside.

The most irritating toys were hula hoops, roller skates / skateboards.
For boys cheap vinyl footballs were no.1 and the plague of next door neighbours.

It seems odd now but back in the early 60s a boy of 14 could easily buy over the counter sharp knives, catapults, glues and resin, jetex Explosive, iso-alcohol, meth spirits, cross bow and arrows, air gun,. 22 rifle, shotgun. Yet extreme street violence was very rare and young drug addicts unknown.

Hold on tight to your teddy bear and his button the bears are a precious link to a time before current insanities.

I remember having a pocket money priced Lady Penelope (Thunderbirds) set comprising a powder compact that had a concealed gun that shot bullets out of a discreet hole and a "lipstick" that was really a missile :-D

I kept losing the bullets and loved it so much that I would buy another set just for the bullets :-D :-D



I also really wanted the dress-up teenage dolls (Sindy, Barbie and Tressie) but alas! It was not to be:-(
So I made do with "tidying-up" my daughter's Sindy house while she was in school :-D

Books, from a young age, an old-fashioned trike and those roller skates with straps that fastened over the top of your shoe and around your ankle.

From the age of about ten, more books, a bicycle and a tennis racquet.

I never was a dolly lover like some young girls were. :-D