Project: British Toy Making Project

Mr Bob Brechin Designer for Palitoy, 1967 - 1984

Interview conducted by Ieuan Hopkins and Sarah Wood

May 2010

Transcribed by Elizabeth Morgan

January 2011

Edited by Bob Brechin and Laura Wood

August 2013

Copyright © 2010 Museum of Childhood

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FULL NAME: Bob Brechin

INTERVIEWER: Ieuan Hopkins and Sarah Wood

DATE: 11 May 2010

TYPE OF EQUIP: PMD Marantz 660, Wav, 48Hz, 16 bit

LENGTH OF INTERVIEW: 1 hour 16 minutes 58 seconds

CAREER BACKGROUND

Bob Brechin studied product design at Aston University, Birmingham. After

graduating he worked for about six months as a design draftsman in

Birmingham, on seeing an advert for a toy designer in the newspaper he

applied for the job and started work at Palitoy in June 1967.

Brechin worked in Palitoy's design department, responsible for designing toys

such as Action Man (the British version of the American product G.I. Joe) and

Star Wars figures. After a few years he was promoted to chief designer and

remained working for Palitoy until its closure in 1984. He next worked briefly

for Spears who produced Scrabble before he joined forces with several ex

Palitoy employees to form a company who did marketing, design and

development for a Dutch toy company. This lasted for five years before Brechin

and two of his fellow colleagues, Les Cook and Brian Turner set up their own

limited company to design and develop toys which were sold within the toy

industry. As more and more small toy companies went out of business they

decided to scale down their operations though continued to develop the Girls

World product.

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INTERVIEW SYNOPSIS

Bob Brechin discusses the work he did for Palitoy - in particular his work on

the Action Man and Star Wars ranges; what Palitoy was like to work for;

attending toy fairs; the decline in the toy industry and the work he did

following the closure of Palitoy.

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BOB BRECHIN: I joined Palitoy in 1967, I think it was June 1967. I did a

product design course at Birmingham Aston University and after I

finished that I had about six months as a design draftsman in

Birmingham. Saw the advert for this job as toy designer in the paper,

applied for it and I got the job. So I joined them in as I said in June 1967

as a designer and when I joined the company, it was the second year

after Action Man had been launched.

Action Man was launched in ‘66. Obviously it was an American product

G.I. Joe which was launched the year before in America, but before I

came the company had agreed this license with this American company

to do the product in the UK. And we, they called it Action Man so I joined

sort of that you know the year after. In the department, in the design

department there was Bill Pugh, who was the director of the department,

and two other designers that were designing toys. And but the biggest

department was the dress design for the dolls ‘cause Palitoy at that time

was still a big doll producing company. Action Man wasn’t a doll by the

way, it was an action figure, if you said Action Man was a doll you had to

wash your mouth out.

So I joined this team, there was another person who was responsible for

doing the packaging, so that was the design department and so I was

there for about a couple of years and then I was promoted to chief

designer and took responsibility for the, you know, design side of that

department, not the packaging but just the products, and there was

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somebody else in charge of the dolls dresses, you know all the dress

design.

So that was basically my introduction to the company, how I started.

IEUAN HOPKINS: And what attracted you, was it the fact that it was a toy

company or…

BB: Oh yeah it was toys, yeah it was very attractive that the advert that

was in the paper you know that toys and it was you know it was

something that I was quite interested in ‘cause I was making, before I

joined them I was making little toys and things for people as little gifts.

IH: So it was an area that you were wanting to get into I guess?

BB: Oh yes it’s – I’m glad I did actually ‘cause I was there till 84 when the

design department closed down.

IH: And what sort of company was it like to work for, when you joined?

BB: Well when I joined, it was a British company it was a company, it

was a toy company within the Cascelloid group which was part of BXL,

British Xyonlite Limited. But that year I joined, I think towards the end of

the year, we had a big meeting in the canteen, everyone was called into

the canteen by the managing director which was Miles Fletcher and he

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said that Palitoy has just been bought by an American company called

General Mills, he said.

IH: Just like that?

BB: Just like that and he said that I’m not staying and got up and walked

out. So that year it became an American company.

IH: And so was that a common reaction with other people as well or?

BB: Oh no no no, it was just him. I think he, I don’t know what the story

was but he part of the [inaudible] of the company was that he was going

to move on and somebody else was going to come in as managing

director. The new managing director was Bob Simpson, who was

marketing director at the time, so he just moved up to managing

director.

IH: And how did the acquisition by GM, how did that change for the company

or did it change it?

BB: Not a lot really no. The company wasn’t changed much by that

acquisition. General Mills bought the company but they just they left

Palitoy to their own devices, they gave them a lot of freedom to develop

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the company as they wanted to. They just had to report to the parent

company on what they were doing just to get agreement.

IH: And what about the relationship between the management and the staff?

BB: Relationship between the management and the staff was very good.

It was a very very friendly company when I joined. I mean the factory

had about a thousand people in it working, making toys at that stage,

and it was a very sort of friendly family type of atmosphere.

IH: And did it change because presumably you must have seen lots of changes

throughout the time you were there did it?

BB: Oh yes. I mean the company grew very very rapidly from the

introduction of Action Man, the company grew rapidly from ‘67, ‘66-‘67,

through to about, well, the Jubilee, the 25th anniversary in ‘79. The

turnover was tremendous and Action Man was probably about two –

thirds of the turnover.

IH: And then I suppose the Star Wars figures as well did that?

BB: Oh Star Wars came in, the film came out in ‘78 didn’t it? Star Wars

was offered to Kenner. Products which was part of the General Mills

group in America, it was the major toy company in America. They, Bernie

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Loomis? Who was the managing director there of, oh I don’t know what

they call them in America, equivalent. He got to know about this film

and went to the company and said we can make toys based around this

film and they said to him well go away and come back with some models

and prove it you can do it. So he got the whole design team over there in

America cheevering away, that’s all they were doing, making Star Wars

toys from the films and got the contract to do the toys so we had the

license to sell the toys in this country. And course the first year was

basically just taking what the Americans had done, but from then on we

did develop our own products as well, you know, based upon the film

and so forth. Mainly because we couldn’t afford to invest in the tooling

like the Americans could invest, they had a much bigger market than we

had, so they could invest a lot of money in tooling for Star Wars but we

couldn’t do that so we would reduce the tooling down to sort of more

manageable sort of costs and develop toys to suit our market.

IH: Turning to the actual design and development process can you just talk me

through the stages that you would go through from the initial ideas of the

product to it actually being sold or is that too complicated?

BB: Yeah its, well going from design, from initial idea of a concept we

call it, you know have an idea through to production. Basically the toy

industry revolves around Christmas obviously. Soon after Christmas,

there’s what they call the toy fairs they have one in Harrogate and they

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have another one, when I was there we had one in Brighton but in other

years it moved to the NEC, it moved to Earl’s Court at various stages and

it’s now being, it’s now shown at that new exhibition place down in the

docklands area.

IH: Oh yes ExCel?

BB: ExCel yeah. But that’s how the toy industry works, it revolves

around Christmas and these two toy fairs that would come immediately

after Christmas so the toys that are going to be sold at Christmas are

being shown at these toy fairs for the toy people to buy, come in and buy

and so forth.

So soon after that we would then think of new ideas that we would

develop. So we would come up with a new concept for let’s say for

Action Man soon after the toy fairs in January. We come up with the

concept, we develop models, and well, drawings and models, show them

to the marketing people. They’d decide on a range of new Action Man

items, we’d develop and through that year we’d make prototypes which

would be shown at the next toy fairs after that Christmas.

So what the trade would be looking at probably wouldn’t be actual

production of items but probably be prototypes and then they would be

developed into tooling so that they’d be ready for production during the

summer and hit the toy fairs at Christmas. If you can understand that

process.

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IH: So, it’s almost a two year process.

BB: It’s like a two year programme basically, yeah.

IH: And how did you come up with ideas. Was it just anybody had an idea you’d

put it on the table?

BB: Yeah, one idea that is talked a lot within the collectors groups is the

way Action Man got his hair.

IH: Right.

BB: The original GI Joe figure the hair was painted on. So on his head

there’d be painted brown you know to represent hair. That’s the first

Action Man were like that ‘cause they came from the States. Bill Pugh,

my boss, director of the design department, he was sitting watching

Tomorrow’s World one evening and saw this process called ‘flocking’ on

Tomorrow’s World, new thing you know. So he phoned the BBC and

found out who the company was who was doing it, rang them up and

invited them in and the chap he turned up in a car with flock all over the

car in different tones of blue, drove into the car park with this car. He

came into the office and those, myself and Bill sitting with him and he

then got this box and took out a full tea set, tea pot, milk jug, cups and

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saucers all flocked in different colours so they’re like hairy cups and

saucers and then Bill got out the Action Man head like and held it up to

him and said “Can you flock that?” and he said, “well, give me a few and

I’ll take them away” and he went away and came back with the process

to do it.

And the process, it’s electrostatic process where you have a box which is

full of these little tiny fibres, little nylon fibres, ever so small. And you

have a positive electrode that goes inside the head of the Action Man

‘cause the head’s hollow and what happens is the person who’s making

the head would paint on glue onto the head where the original painted

hair was, stick it inside this box and the little fibres would be negatively

charged and the head would be positively charged so that fibres would

just go onto the head and glue onto the head. And that’s how the Action

Man hair was invented by Bill Pugh.

IH: He was, reading his obituary and things, he seemed to be very much at the

sort of forefront of design and interested in new techniques the whole time.

BB: Oh Bill was yeah. He was, he invented the squeezy lemon, the

plastic lemon. He, when he first came he [inaudible] in the old days in

the fifties he developed the, you probably won’t remember Archie

Andrews, before your time! Have you got an Archie Andrews doll? Yeah

well Bill Pugh designed that.

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So he was always looking, we were very close to the actual development

of the products but Bill would be able to stand back a bit and see

something which we didn’t see, you know.

I mean the gripping hand for instance on Action Man, the flexible

gripping hand, the original GI Joe that came over and we did was just a

solid hand. But one day at the toy fair in Brighton, Bill Pugh’s come

down because one of the jobs we had to do as a design department was

go to the toy fair, the contractors would put up the stands but we would

have to dress the stands with the product, that was one of our jobs as a

design department, to make it look good.

And Bill would come down and help out and he came down one day and

he was trying to put the, a rifle in Action Man’s hands and he couldn’t do

it, it kept falling out. And he says ‘Oh, it’s hopeless, this hand is

ridiculous, it doesn’t, you know, hold the rifle’ and somebody said, I don’t

know who it was might’ve been him or somebody else said it needs to

have a gripping hand. So Bill, he knew of this material called kraton? It’s

a plastic material it’s injection moulded, but it has a memory so if you

can, you can stretch it quite a long way and it always go back to the

original moulded position and so if you took the hand and pulled the

fingers out the fingers will always go back to their original moulded

position. So it could grip round things and it was great for holding his

rifle, it was great for gripping onto handlebars on the motorbike. You

could actually put two hands locking together say if he was climbing up

a mountain, he could pull up his friend and that was another thing that

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Bill thought of, you know. So he was a man that was, you know, that

was at the front end of thinking of things. He could see things that we

couldn’t see, us being too close to the products.

IH: That must have made things, must have been challenging at times as well

to work with someone like that?

BB: Oh yes yeah yeah.

IH: And how much notice did you take of say competitors products, are you

always keeping an eye out on what other people are doing? I know Action Man

is unique to a certain degree.

BB: Of course Action Man when it first, when it first when we got the

license from GI Joe to do Action Man in the UK. At the toy fair in New

York where the Palitoy management saw it, you know the year before.

Other companies were over in the New York and there was another

company, who was it? I can’t remember the name now. They decided to

copy it. Well we took the license, we said we’ll have the license, we’ll

take your products and sell them over here. They decided to copy, so

they came up with Tommy Gun. Tommy Gun didn’t last very long.

Because they were developing it from scratch and trying to find money

to invest in tooling and so forth, it was very difficult for them to come up

with a good range of product but ‘cause we were taking it from license

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under the States, they had already developed it. So everything was done,

so we could bring it over, have a great range, great products, different

products and Tommy Gun couldn’t compete with that.

IH: Yes and then I suppose you got a head start and then you can start

developing?

BB: That’s right, we had a head start, we had a good range of products

which we didn’t have to develop so from them on we were developing

our own products within the range. So we’d look at things that were in

the news perhaps or something like that. Say the SAS for instance, when

the Iranian siege was on. We, somebody thought oh we’ll do the SSA,

SASA, you know we did that sort of iconic one with the hood and the

mask and –. Very controversial at the time by the way.

IH: Because it was the recovering?

BB: Because of that siege which yeah ---.

IH: And did the products sort of feed back to GI Joe as well? I think I read

somewhere that it was the sort of process was ---.

BB: Well yeah. I mean the, we thought of the hair and Bill immediately

wrote to his opposite number over in the States and told him about this

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process of doing hair on Action Man and when they heard about it, they

saw a little sample and they were straight over on the plane and they

that was the process over there to do…and also the gripping hand. Bill

told them about that. They were straight onto that, you know, ‘course

they called it the Kung Fu grip. Great want it? Kung Fu grip.

IH: Yes. And how did the sort of technical aspects of the plastics, how did that

affect, you mentioned about the gripping hands and specific type of plastic.

BB: Well going back to into history when Mr. Pallet founded Palitoy back

in 1919. He was making things out of Celluloid sheet, like windmills and

things like that. And then they met, he came up with this idea called

Plastex? Which was actually made out of rabbit bones and glue and

things like that. He was making dolls which were flammable out of this

Plastex and it was the Queen, Queen Mary weren’t it? She was the

Queen of, was it George the fifth? She wanted a doll, that was

inflammable and she asked Mr. Pallet if he could do one and they came

up. The first doll, the first doll was in 1925 I believe, plastic doll, made by

Palitoy. But the first one that was made in vinyl which was not

flammable, was it 1935? So you know he was, he was being encouraged

to develop plastics, from then on it was developing things like vinyl

heads where which are soft and squidgey, rather than hard, the hard

plastic previous.

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They were made of a plastic material in a thing called an oven where you

have a mould where you pour the molten plastic in to the mould and it

gets swivelled around inside an oven which kills the plastic and when to

get the head out you just pull it with a pair of pliers and it comes out

through that hole, the neck hole of the mould ‘cause it’s flexible and you

pull it out. It hardens a little bit but its still flexible enough that you can

stitch with like a sewing machine, you can stitch hair into it, nylon

filaments. They weren’t able to do that in the past you see, until they

came up with this vinyl, this soft vinyl. And then bodies would be made

out of blow mould, what are called blow moulding, which is another

technique of moulding plastic where you have a mould that you put

plastic into the mould in a liquid type of form and there’s like an air

syringe that goes into the mould which blows the plastic out, to the

outside, well the inside of the mould, right so it’s hollow and the mould

opens up and you got a blow moulded body. Now that’s not as flexible

as the vinyl ‘cause it’s made of polythene but it means you got an easy

way of making a body of a doll.

IH: So it’s the technology was leading the products or was it the other way

round?

BB: Well in those days, the technology probably was leading and the

products were coming from it, yeah. But there were things like the

Queen saying I wanna doll that doesn’t burst into flames and that led Mr.

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Pallet to look at different types of plastics that do that and he managed

to come up with it, you know.

IH: Now you mentioned earlier with, going back to the design process itself,

that the initial ideas would be sort of produced and drawings and things and

then it would be taken to marketing who would design. How would they

decide which products to run with?

BB: Various things. They’d look at the market place and see where there

were gaps or where, which particular products were selling well, so not

necessarily a gap but you know an up and coming market. Or if they

weren’t sure they would go and get some research done with children.

So we’d make a prototype and get a research company to get a few

children in and watch them play with it. With other toys, you know and

see if they went to that toy or ---.

IH: And was that part of the process that you could be involved with or watch?

BB: Oh yeah, we could, yeah we could do that yeah, yeah see what, how

they did it which ones they looked at and which they went to, yeah.

IH: And I suppose back in general as well about the company you said it was

very friendly and you know see a lot of people there. Presumably most of the

people that worked there were from the area, the local area.

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BB: Well, as you know Coalville was a coal mining town right so a good

percentage of men would be working down the coal mines. And a good

percentage of their wives would be working in the Palitoy factory.

There were other industries in the town but the toy factory was one of

the biggest. As I say there was about a thousand people in the factory,

making dolls, making Action Men.

It was only later when China started coming up and you know other

different places of making things were coming up and costs were being

looked a very carefully, profits were being looked at very carefully. So in

other places to make things would have been looked at. There was a

product called Care Bears, that was an American product that we did

have the license for in this country and one of the factory managers

went to Haiti to look at the production there where they filling the care

bears with some sort of husks of nuts or something so we had a factory

who set up in Malta to make the dolls dresses, that was another place

and I went there to set up a printing machine for printing the striker.

Striker was a game, a football game, little figure where you tap him on

his head and his foot would kick the ball and it was like a spring and

lever mechanism that went from the head down to the foot. So you tap

the head, foot kicks the ball. And we decided to expand the striker range

into different kits. So Manchester United kit, Liverpool Kit and so forth.

And we came up with the method of doing it using a method printing

called Tampo? Printing, which was a German idea originally.

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So we had a machine made in Germany to print these figures and it’s

very difficult to print because the figures are three dimensional, it’s not a

flat like you’re printing onto paper. So you have to have a very squidgey

silicon thing which can squash down onto a plate, pick up the ink and

deposit it onto the figure and so that the print would look like the

Manchester United kit. So we had to have the machine made in

Germany and that was sent to Malta and they were all made and printed

in Malta so I had to go to Malta to make sure that was all running

correctly.

So we were looking at all different markets after awhile, you know

during the 80’s, during the late 70s early 80s.

IH: And the company itself, the company in the community because obviously

it was a big part of it. Were there Palitoy football team or social clubs?

BB: Oh yeah yeah yeah, we had a Palitoy football team, Palitoy table

tennis team. Yeah there were people doing marathons and 20K walking

races and ---.

IH: It was a big part of, was it the life of the town I suppose?

BB: Yeah, yeah it was, yeah and there was, they had, course they had the

annual Christmas dance and the annual outings to Blackpool and couple

of buses to Blackpool.

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IH: So all the staff?

BB: So…yeah whoever wanted to go.

IH: And you mentioned the sort of the end of the ‘70s there as well. From the

reading I’ve done the ‘70s seemed to be a very difficult time for obviously all the

industry but the toy industry as well. What were your memories of working

through the ‘70s?

BB: Well there was the three day week wasn’t there? And the oil crisis

when OPEC started putting up the prices of oil and so forth and we

managed to get through that I think. I always remember at one stage

there was a run on toilet rolls. You couldn’t get toilet rolls for love nor

money. But they were quite difficult times then and three day week

when the electricity was turned off, but we managed to get through that

I think, yeah.

IH: How did it affect the sort of toy production and the toy design?

BB: Well with oil prices going up, plastic prices went up of course, ‘cause

plastic’s made from oil. So we were looking at ways of cheapening toys

with regards plastic I mean, this is why Star Wars made a killing really

‘cause the Star Wars figures are only three and three quarter inches high

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whereas Action Man is twelve inches high. There was toy called Little Big

Man which we did, which was about four/five inches high to reduce the

plastic.

We also did, what else did we do? The Action Men twelve inch figure still

carried on right to ‘84 but we decided to come to do a figure very similar,

well exactly the same size as Star Wars and we called it Action Force.

And it was designed exactly the way the original Star Wars figures,

exactly the way it was sonic welded body that traps the arms and legs

and the head between two like clam shell mouldings. And we developed

that range from scratch and that was because of you know price of

plastics. But the competitor was, oh what was the name of the product?

He-Man. Do you remember He-Man? It was about, I think that was

about six inches, so about half the size of Action Man and it was Arnie

Schwarzernegger was doing all his muscle building all that sort of stuff

and it was all the big rage and they came up with this figure called He-

Man and he was a muscle man and he was a sort of alien from outer

space and it was ---.It did hit Action Man quite a lot that product, you

know, and we had to counteract the sales of that because it was doing

really well. But of course it was half the size of Action Man, so the cost of

making it was, well not half the cost, you know quite a lot less.

IH: And as we’re moving from the ‘70’s, early ‘80s and coming to the closure of

Palitoy. Can you talk a little bit about that, how it came about and what

happened and maybe why as well?

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BB: It started happening, when did it start happening? It started

happening in about ‘81 was it? It was well, the conservatives came in in

‘79 and unemployment started to rise there was a big recession, you

know industries were changing completely. It affected the toy industry

of course so there were three sort of stages of redundancy at Palitoy and

so they had to cut down the staff there was one series, there were a first

series of redundancy and we had to all the different departments had to

lose somebody so the design department shrank a bit.

And then there was another one shrank a bit more and then in 1984

Action Man was sort of struggling to survive and we came up, we came

up with completely new Action Man range, new vehicles and new outfits,

etc etc and it was presented to management to try keep Action Man

going.

But the Americans pulled the plug on it. They were you know, at the

beginning in 67 when we became an American company they let us get

on with things but as the years went by they got more involved and they

couldn’t see economically that this new Action Man range would be

sensible. So they pulled the plug on all that development and what

happened was all the Action Men products that were still around they

sort of cobbled together a bit of a range and showed that at the toy fair

and that was the last time Action Man was shown and sold to the public.

But it was really getting rid of stock basically that was already been

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made and they closed the design department in August of ‘84 so the

whole department was closed down.

IH: How big was it at that point?

BB: We got up to about over 20 people in the department, 24 people. So

but at that point there was I don’t know 15 probably.

IH: And was the decision to close down the design and development was that

quite a sudden decision in terms of?

BB: Well we sort of, once they decided they wouldn’t go with Action

Man, the new developed Action Man, most of the other products were

being brought in from the States or being developed abroad or you know.

Action Man was basically our only lifeline to stay alive.

Once they decided to pull the plug on that, you know the writing was on

the wall really. Action Force was still going, the little Star Wars sized

Action Man, that was still going but Hasbro who was the original

inventors of Action Man, they developed their own similar figure and

developing lots of vehicles to go with it. So ‘cause they closed the design

department down so there was no development of Action Force, they

were just buying in Hasbros called GI Joe figures and vehicles and just

repackaging them in Palitoy packaging. So there was no development at

all.

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So after that the warehouse, there was a warehouse at Ashby that was

closed. There was no development at the Coalville site so the factory

was used as the warehouse. Having sold the one in Ashby. And then

Tonka bought General Mills so that they bought Palitoy as well of course

and then Hasbro bought Tonka.

IH: What happened to the staff? Did they all find other jobs in the toy industry

or did they have to?

BB: Well what happened to me? When I left I went to work at Spears,

Enfield who make Scrabble or who made Scrabble. ‘Cause they were

bought by Hasbro just to get Scrabble, all the other products just boof,

went, they just wanted Scrabble.

Other people went into other industries like Point of Sale.

The chap who ran the airfix side of the development, he went to Hasbro

in Stockley Park by the airport and I think he took over pre-school

development for them.

Yeah…you know Palitoy made Mainline Trains, yeah the chap who did

the development on that, he went into Point of Sale but then Mainline

was bought by a company and he managed to get a job with them, a few

years later, say he’s still doing that at the moment, still working for them,

developing railways and stock and so forth.

But I stayed at Spears for about six months and my old managing

director from Palitoy, Les Cook. He gave me a ring one day and he said

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he’s setting up a, some marketing and design and development for a

Dutch company so there was myself and John Hawkes and Brian Turner

and Ken Woolhouse who were all ex-Palitoy. We joined him at a place

near the airport, East Midlands Airport, a business centre there. We set

up all this company there, for this Dutch company ‘cause we didn’t want

to go across to Holland. And that survived for about five years and they

got out of toys in the end. So we set up our own, three of us, Les Cook,

myself and Brian Turner, set up a little limited company to design and

develop toys and to sell them within the toy industry. And that lasted a

few years and all the toy companies we were dealing with were

disappearing, like Bluebird toys had gone and one or two others are

going. Waddington’s games are gone. And so we left really with just

Hasbro and Mattel made toys now and perhaps a few little ones. So we

decided that was you know, we shouldn’t carry on with that so we, but

we still keep in touch and we still, we still develop one product which

we’re still getting a little royalty from.

IH: Can I ask which one?

BB: Girls World.

IH: How did the, obviously you’re still involved, or did very recently all the

technology? Do you still keep? I mean how did it feel like when you see Action

Men re-released for example in the early 90s, how does that ---?

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BB: Yeah, course that the old Action Man, the Palitoy Action Man

finished in ‘84 and the Hasbro Action Man came back in, was it ‘94?

IH: ‘93 or ’94.

BB: ‘93 or ‘94 yeah, ‘93 or ‘94. Course he’s sort of streetwise Action Man

isn’t he? You know fantasy Action Man as it were. Whereas we did

Action Man and you know we did Action Man, SAS Action Man and was

based on reality, the Palitoy Action Man. Whereas the Hasbro one is

based on fantasy and streetwise stuff you know. What was the thing

you ride on? The thing, skateboard Action Man and things like that with

all the. We did the sledge and dog team and they did one with sort of

rocket propelled sledge and dog team, weird sort of fantasy things on it.

It’s interesting actually ‘cause when I was at Palitoy I always thought

that that Action Man based on this reality we ought to have gone into

the fantasy things. When He-Man came out you know, it was more

fantasy, and we did, we did things like Captain Zargon and things like

that and we brought things from the States called The Gargon which

was like a monster, which had a chip inside it and it worked with an

infra-red and. But when did, when we developed Action Force, the little

three and three quarter inch Action Man, based on Star Wars, it started

off as just a copy of Action Man. So the marketing manager at the time

said oh just do the, we’ll just do the twelve most best selling Action Man

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outfits and copy them. And after a year he’d left, he’d gone, he went for

another job and they brought in some other people to take over

marketing and the chap who came in, Andy Lowe, he decided you know

he wanted to have a different Action Force based upon more fantasy.

And that gave us a great scope to be more creative and we created Baron

Ironblood and his red shadows and they had, they were the baddies and

it was a bit like James Bond you know with with Doctor No and that sort

of thing.

So it was sort of a mixture of James Bond and space and so forth. Where

you got these baddies trying to take over the world and the goodies

trying to stop him do it.

So we had one team and three good teams. And we were able to

develop things and I developed a thing called the Roboskull for the

baddies. It was a flying skull. And, so we did have an opportunity to be

more creative like that and course that’s what they did, Hasbro did when

they brought back Action Man, they had more opportunity, their

designers had more opportunity to be creative rather than just copy

things, you know just copy an SAS outfit or a Red Devil outfit or a British

infantryman.

But when Action Man started of course in the early 60s we were far off

from the end of the war, you know and kids were reading war comics

based on the war you know and so that’s why and course Bill Pugh, he

was an ex-navy and his counterpart in the States, he was an ex- US

Marine you know, they were very close to the war. So you can see why

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Action Man developed the way it did in the early days and you can see

why Hasbro when they brought it back ten years later, why they

developed it the way they did. You know, kids were more streetwise and

they had much more influence of different things like Star Wars and

different space films and James Bond and things like that so. But it must

have been an exciting time for their designers to be more creative

because it was good for us when we did the Action Force to be creative

like that. But it didn’t last very long, it only lasted about three years for

us.

IH: And have you seen the, I think it’s the Ministry of Defence outfits? What do

you make of that?

BB: The Ministry of Defence outfits, I was very unsure about them.

The BBC as I said, I went to Snibston about two or three years ago to talk

to the BBC about it, ‘cause it was just before it came out and he asked

me the same question, what I thought about this Ministry of Defence

and I thought, I was very unsure but it’s been very popular hasn’t it?

Yeah it’s been very popular ‘cause I thought that children were still

interested in the fantasy side, the space side but it’s obviously because of

the Iraq and the you know the war in Iraq, obviously and course it’s

controversial but it’s been very popular.

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29

IH: And it seems to be going back to what you were saying, the original Action

Man which was the true to life ---.

BB: Yeah, that’s right, precisely, it’s like I say it’s going back to the

original Action Man when Hasbro decided to do this figure and dress him

up as a marine, a US marine and a German stormtrooper, you know and

we took it over here and we developed British outfits, you know a British

Marine and the SAS outfit which I told you about, about the Iranian siege,

you know and things that were topical you know, that you could see in

every day life.

IH: And with that because it was so sort of true to life, did you ever sort of come

across the not so much the anti-war movement but the sort of move towards

anti-war toys and things, how did that sort of interact with?

BB: Oh the anti-war toys, it was always an issue with Action Man. It was

a bigger issue in the States obviously with the Vietnam War and that’s

what destroyed, well not destroyed but it did slow down their

development of GI Joe. And they did go, they did move it into other

areas because of the Vietnam War. It wasn’t such an issue over here but

there was always that sort of underlying thing that you know, it’s a war

toy.

We always thought it as a, we always thought that kids that they always

played with you know cowboy outfits, they always had bows and arrows,

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30

you know. It’s the way children play and we always thought Action Man

as it may be you know it maybe slow, it was military but it gave a child

the opportunity to play out. You know his imagination and I grew up, I

mean I was a kid, I grew up with cowboys and Indians and I’d got

weapons and went round shooting but you know I don’t think I’m a

necessarily a violent person.

IH: And then I mean you’ve also got the fact now I suppose that Action Man

generates you know, there’s a huge amount of nostalgia and it’s a global brand

and things. How does it feel to be a part of that or to be responsible?

BB: Well you say that Action Man got this nostalgia that there is a big

collectors scene with Action Man not the new Hasbro Action Man but

the old Palitoy Action Man.

And I do go to the fairs that they have.

The first one that I went to I was invited down by this guy who was

running it and it was at Bovington Tank Museum down in Dorset and I

heard about this and I, and Bill Pugh was, he was alive then but he was

suffering from leukaemia, that’s what, he died of leukaemia.

And I rang him up and I said, Bill do you want to come down to this, to

this fair down in Bovington Tank Museum? Oh great you know so I took

him down with Brian Turner, who was our display manager at Palitoy.

Who, he started off as display manager but he came over to the design

department but we went down to the Bovington Museum to see this,

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31

this fair with the collectors round. We couldn’t believe it. We couldn’t

believe that there were collectors in these? And they were going mad,

you know they were asking us questions we couldn’t answer which they

knew, ‘why did you design this? Why did you put this on here? Oh I can’t

remember that, Why did he have this?’ you know, ‘why did he have

that?’ And we put on a bit of a show for them, we had a bit of a

slideshow and a bit of a lecture and question and answer session with

them you know. But it was an eye opener that was and since then I’ve

been going every so often to these fairs that they still have and they

always want to shake my left hand. ‘Cause my left hand is the hand I

copied when I was sculpting the gripping hand for Action Man.

IH: So that is Action Man’s?

BB: So that left hand there is the one that was used to model the Action

Man gripping hand.

IH: And probably the last questions. You obviously you know started out

designing back in the ‘60s. What advice would you give to people just starting

out on their career now? What would you say to them?

BB: Don’t go into toys I think! What would I say if somebody was going

out to on a design career?

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IH: Wanting to become involved, as you’ve done, in the toy business…

BB: In the toy business?

IH: In toy design.

BB: Well, if somebody wanted to go into toy design in this country …I

think it would be very difficult, because there’s not really many

opportunities here. You’d have to go to the States …and… probably out

to Hong Kong… and China. I think things are still…ideas are still

conceived in the States, that’s the main place where ideas are conceived

for toys. But once the idea’s conceived, most of the development work is

done in Hong Kong and China. And as I’ve been out of the toy industry a

long while now I’m not too sure whether, what the situation is, but it

was like that a few years ago, where…companies within Hong Kong

would perhaps … take the idea, go into China to the factories and

develop the idea with their model makers, there tool makers, their

designers …and with the, with the electronic age it’s so easy to do now

with, you know, with the internet. I mean, you can be a designer sitting

on the drawing board and it could be being made in the factory in Hong

Kong…you know, as you’re designing it (laughs)…‘cause it’s been sent

electronically down to the factory, and it can be sent straight on to

the…if you’re designing the mould to, to injection mould something, it

could be straight onto the tool that is actually cutting the steel. So, you

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33

know, whereas I started in ‘67, you know, you’d have to do drawings and

models and working drawings and they’d have to be posted out to Hong

Kong (laughs)…or they’d have to be sent to a factory in this country for it

to be made, I mean, in this electronic age it’s mind-boggling really.

IH: It’s a different world.

BB: A different world.

IH: So, the impression I get is that you thought it would be much harder now

to become involved in it?

BB: I would think so, yeah, there’s less toy companies around

obviously…I mean, in the UK when I joined there were quite a few toy

companies that were actually…thinking up ideas, developing them,

getting tools made, moulds made, and putting them in their own factory

on the site, moulding them or moulding them outside and bringing in

the plastic components, they had a production line, they were going

down the line, they were making up the toys, putting them in a box

which…which was printed in this country, I mean all of that’s gone

really...so it’s much more difficult for somebody who’s setting out to be a

designer in toys these days, but if they wanted to get into toys, go to the

States I’d say, you know, try and get into Hasbro or Mattel or one of

these companies. There are some Far Eastern companies now that you

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34

can go there and become a designer. There’s Tomy from Japan, which

we dealt with years ago…we bought their products and put them in our

own fact…our own boxes under license from Tomy. They were very

innovative at the time, so…it would be very difficult in this country to

become a toy designer I would have thought unless you wanted to

design them yourself and then that’s difficult ‘cause to get a toy… if you

think of an idea of a toy and design it, make a model you’ve got to…go

through some sort of agent to get to the toy company…and then the

agent will split the royalties with you fifty-fifty if the toy company

decides to make it. So, it is difficult.

IH: Expensive as well, it sounds expensive.

BB: It can be expensive, yeah, to make a proper prototype. I mean to

make a proper prototype you’re talking thousands of pounds…‘cause the

toy company, if you went to them with just a sketch on a piece of paper,

unless it really was really good, they wouldn’t entertain it, they’d want to

see something that was actually working. Not necessarily exactly

working, but looked like the real thing and do things that you want it to

do.

IH: Ok. I suppose, to finish, what are the…not you’re favourite moments, but

what are the fondest memories you have of working in Palitoy? What are the

things that are, sort of, proudest moments?

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35

BB: I think…I think the Action Force range, the small uh Star Wars-

sized range, and developing that after year one when we went into

the, when we were allowed more freedom to develop ranges, rather

than just copy Action Man. The Robo-skull was a favourite of mine,

his flying…‘cause Baron Ironblood and his Red Shadows, their

symbol was a skull and crossbones ‘‘cause they’re like pirates, you

know, space pirates or whatever you want to call them. So I decided

to do this flying skull based on their symbol, which was like a

spaceship that flew around with, with the characters in …so that

was quite, I was quite proud of all that sort of stuff…I enjoyed the

early days of developing…Action Man into different…the, the, the

Adventure series that we did, the Mountaineer and the...the

Underwater Explorer and things like that, ‘cause that, that took a lot

of development and looking in to things …actually we wrote off to

America to uh, to NASA to get some bits and pieces for space stuff.

IH: So you were very conscious about, you know, making it accurate…

BB: Yeah, oh yeah, you had to get it right in those days it’s…I mean it,

you know, it was getting it right … we developed the 105mm gun which

was developed down at um…the Arsenal, down at London, at um, what’s

it called, the Arsenal? And that was like a miniature version of it. And

the Scorpion Tank, we went to Alvis in Coventry to climb all over it and

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36

measure it up and take photographs and get drawings off them…it’s not

actually a tank, it’s a, it’s an armoured reconnaissance vehicle, but we

called it a tank. So that was exciting, and a Land Rover, we went to Land

Rover and talked to all their people and got drawings off them,

photographs in the, you know, watching it being built, and we virtually

would come back and recreate a six scale version of it, you know. So

those were good days, and going to things like uh, doing the adverts for

Action Man, for TV, going to those, that was good, that was exciting. We

went to one to do - when the SAS outfits came out…we went down to

London, we made the advert with a production company in a big house

in, in Wimbledon, one of those big houses, you know, with a big garden

with trees and everything, and we had, we had Action Man sliding down,

sliding down ropes and doing all sorts of things, and they even had a

chuckwagon outside, you know, for breakfast and dinner and stuff, you

know, like they have in these production companies, and I was down

there sort of supervising, getting it right so they were doing the right

things with Action Man, and, you know, not getting it wrong, and the

woman at the house came out and started talking to me. I told her what

we were doing: ‘oh, we’re doing, this is Action Man, we’re doing the SAS’,

she told me that her husband had been in the SAS (laughs). I thought ‘I

don’t think you should have told me that’ (laughs). And then when we

did the Action Force we did that down in London as well, on that island

in the middle of the Thames, where they make eel pie and, Eel Pie Island,

that was it …we made the Action Force tv advert there, and that’s on

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37

YouTube. If you look on YouTube you’ll see that one. So those are

exciting times, yeah.

IH: How long will it take to film? Presumably it’s a…

BB: Yes, it’s an all-day – yeah, I went down in the morning with all the

film all day, so they’d rent it for the day, wouldn’t they, and then they’d

go back to the studio and put it all together, edit it and so forth.

IH: I think that’s tremendous. And is there anything else that you would like to

put on the record as it were? (Laughs)

BB: I don’t know…

SARAH WOOD: I was just wondering – I remember you saying about Girls

World and obviously a lot of the things that you designed were very gender-

specific to boys…could you say something about designing for girls and what

went into that and whether there was a crossover, because, for instance, I

played with Action Man as a child…

BB: You did?

SW: Yes.

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38

BB: Not with Sindy?

SW: No, with Action Man – I used to steal my brother’s (laughs).

BB: (Laughs) I was involved in a film, that was made for Channel 4, and it

was for young film makers, and this is just off the side, and, they put

their ideas for making these films and the top six, Channel 4 made them

and it was sponsored by Lloyds bank I think, and one person wanted to

make this film about Action Man – how celebrities played with their

Action Men, so they had people like, oh what’s his name, Harry Enfield’s

mate Paul Whitehouse and the other one – what’s the other one called?

His mate? Anyway…

IH: Charlie Higson

BB: Charlie Higson…they were talking about it and then they had

Alisha’s Attic – remember them? The pop group. And they were talking

about it, and she was talking about…she had…she pinched her brother’s

Action Man with her Sindy and they were…used to play mums and dads

(laughs) and the film was shown on TV, and they interviewed me for that,

you know, talking about it…but, going back to dolls, …doll designer at

Palitoy was a chap called Stuart Moore, who I think I mentioned to you,

and, he was the one who developed Tiny Tears, you know the crying and

wetting mechanism and so forth and also he was the one who

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39

developed the original Girls World, which was made under license

from…from some outside agency developed for us and he had a…he had

about, well different stages…there were perhaps three or four girls just

designing dresses, and another woman that was a machinist, she would

machine them up, and there were…there were girls that had come from

er, a dress design course at an art college somewhere, so at art college

they had been designing dresses for people, they’d come to toy company

and were making six scale dresses, you know, for Tressy…

SW: That’s how originally fashion started, doing a miniature version and then

scaling it up…

BB: That’s right, yeah. So they would be following fashion, you know,

very closely. And, um…they would do the Action Man outfits as well, so

when we come up with a different Action Man, they would um…design

the actual outfit part, the dress part and make the samples of that. So

they would do the dresses, all these dresses and make samples, they

would go out to Hong Kong, because we had a company out there,

Palitoy Far East it was called, set up there to get everything made in

Hong Kong and China, and we’d send the sample dresses for the dolls –

Action Man, Tressy and so forth – out to the Far East, they’d go to the

factory and they would do a counter sample so that…perhaps three or

four counter samples. The office in Hong Kong would keep one, the

factory would keep one, they’d send a couple over to us, and we’d sort

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40

of…the girls and Stuart would approve it, saying ‘well, you haven’t quite

got that colour right’, or ‘that pattern’s not right’ and that’s how it

worked. And then once that was approve, we’d keep a sample here and

then send one back to them so it matches up with their sample and then

they’d copy that and make it in production. So that’s how the doll’s

dresses…and then, as I said earlier on, we had a factory in Malta which

was set up to make dolls dresses, ‘‘cause they were quite good at

machining over there and making little things.

SW: And you also talked a little bit about, how in the early days you used a lot

of focus groups when you tested out toys on children, and I know that in

America they do a hell of a lot of development and research in to that –was

there some of that in the later stages at Palitoy or generally in the British toy

industry – did that continue?

BB: Yeah, I mean in the early days it was more suck it and see, you know,

‘this is a good idea, we’ll make this’ (laughs) but things started to get

more technical and more sophisticated, and market research was coming

in more, and there was some market research companies just

concentrating on children and they’d have rooms with TV’s and one way

mirrors and so you could go and watch them play with them, so towards

the end, you know, that’s what happened, they…perhaps you’d try and

have the toys and you’d watch…you wouldn’t tell them what to do, you’d

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41

watch which toys they went to and how often they’d touch that toy and

how often they’d play with that toy compared to that toy.

SW: Who came up with the Eagle Eyes?

IH: (Laughs) You’ve been dying to ask that!

SW: (Laughs) I just thought of it as we were going through…to think about the

hand grip.

BB: The thing with Action Man, going back to Action Man, that was

really my baby…as I said before, it was under license from Hasbro and it

came over here just exactly as their product, but every so often the sales

would go up like that [gestures] and then like that [gestures] so they’d

go up, sales would go up, sales would come down. When they’re coming

down you want to make them go up again so you’d have to have

something on the Action Man figure that would…or with Action Man…

that would, you know, bring the sales back up again. So, the first one

was the talking Action Man Commander which was an American idea,

which is…in the body of the Action Man is a, was a record so that if you

pull a string out to a certain point there was like little coloured marks on

the string so bringing it out to red would bring out a different t voice, a

different…order like ‘Dig in!’ or ‘Watch out, the enemy’s about!’ and it

was a little record inside the body of the Action Man, so he was called

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42

Action Man Commander. So that was…that meant… that kept the sales,

as they were slipping, to go up again. So, when Bill Pugh came out with

the idea of the hair, the real hair, that kept the sales going. So, every sort

of two to three years we’d have to…from then on we’d have to come up

with another idea. So, the next idea was the gripping hands, so sales

started to dip, they went back up again. So, what’s the next idea? We

didn’t think of one, but the Americans came up with the…Hasbro came

up with the Eagle Eyes, where you have the little lever at the back of the

head, and when you twist it the eyes move back and forth. It’s great for

tv because you can have a close up of his eyes, you know…’Where’s the

enemy?’ (laughs), you know, ‘There he is!’. So, they’re the Eagle Eyes, and

then the next idea…what was the next idea? So, we came up with the

dynamic physique where we…the American, original American

mannequin or figure was made with, obviously in plastic, made up of

twenty-one components held together by an elastic band in the waist

area in the hips with metal rivets through the joints which got rusty. We

designed a completely new figure just for our market, for the British

market, and we called it ‘dynamic physique’, which was all plastic, no

metal rivets, no elastic bands, totally plastic. And it didn’t need much to

put it together because you could pull it together by just clicking

components together. So, that was… that managed to …revitalise sales a

bit. I mean, the general trend was sort of gradually going down after a

peak...but it did generate a few more sales. So, what was the next idea?

You know, two years later out come another idea, and the next idea

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43

was…came from John Hawkes who was then my boss, director of the

department, his son come up with the idea of, the sharp-shooter

position…‘cause before then, if you laid Action Man down on his stomach

like if he’s got his rifle in his hand, lay him on his stomach looking over,

looking over an embankment or something, his head was always looking

sort of down into the ground, but we came up with this idea to put like

an Adam’s Apple on the body so if you, if you pulled the head back, the

bottom part of the head would click across this little Adam’s Apple piece

and hold his head up in that position, so he was looking ahead while he

was lying on his stomach, so that was the sharp… and all these sort of

names like ‘gripping hand’, ‘dynamic physique’, ‘sharp-shooting position’

you could market them and put them on the packaging or in the adverts

– ‘Action Man, now with sharp-shooter position!’, and sales went up

again. We were coming towards the end now and we had to think of

another idea (laughs), you know, two years later, and we were thinking

of …the old Action Man Commander with the record inside, we were

thinking more then of electronics and electronic voices and we were

starting to work with a company called Texas Instruments, and we were

trying to devise a voice inside the body which came from the child…so he

could record his own, his own commands that would come out of the

Action Man, but we never got into that um…

SW: That was done subsequently by other…

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44

BB: Er no, I think it probably would, yeah. And another idea I was

thinking of was the Eagle Eye was a little lever at the back of the head

which turned the eyes…it gave him sort of a personality, a bit of a

personality didn’t it, with the eyes moving? We came up with…we were

trying to work on this idea towards the end call ‘the grimace, we called it

‘the grimace’ in inverted commas ‘‘cause that’s all we could think of at

the time. It was another little lever at the back of the head, when you

twisted it, it made his mouth go [gestures]…it gave expression to his

mouth by forcing the plastic (laughs) to give him more personality, so we

had prototypes of that, but that didn’t come off at the end because, you

know…it was the demise of Action Man in ’84.

IH: There must have been lots of sort of weird and wonderful ideas…

BB: Oh yeah

IH: …that never made it past…

BB: Oh yeah. One of the marketing men came in to one meeting with er

Action Man smoking (laughs) a cigarette with smoke coming out!

SW: It’s quite a surprise that wasn’t ever done

IH: Well, yes

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45

BB: Of course, there’s a famous cartoon of the little boy going like this

with the box [gestures], looking in the box like this and on the box it’s

got ‘Action Man Deserter’ (laughs). There’s nothing in the box! (Laughs).

IH: Well, the Star Wars figures were sold as empty boxes originally, weren’t

they?

BB: Yes, yes, Star Wars …I think, was it the Millennium Falcon? The

Americans couldn’t sell enough Millennium Falcons, and we couldn’t get

them…the moulds off them to mould them over here, and we had

committed to sell them at the Toy Fair, you know, these Millennium

Falcons, so…I think it was the Millennium Falcon, or was it the AT-AT? It

was one of those things, and, we were selling empty boxes with coupons

inside to redeem later.

SW: There was another video on YouTube about inside the factory, somebody

sticking the legs into the AT-AT – it looks so barbaric! It’s just like, shoving them

in, but I suppose that was actually quite a slick process, being able to just push

the legs in.

IH: Have you got any other (laughs)…you’ve got a list over there!

SW: No, I’m alright. There’s loads.

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46

BB: You had a Girls World?

SW: Yeah.

BB: Yeah, Girls World…it was a good product that.

SW: Although, yeah, I was more into…I had two brothers, so more boys toys.

Action Man with a parachute, used to chuck it out the window, that was my

favourite pastime.

BB: We did sell a lot of games, we did develop a lot of games and …of

course character merchandising was a big thing in toys, that developed

quite…well it still is, isn’t it? Dr Who and all that sort of stuff. I mean

the original, the original character merchandise doll was the Diddums

doll, Mabel Lucie Atwell. And the first doll to be advertised on TV was

Tressy.

IH: It seems now that the…it is just different characters and the actual products

are, at their core they are the same, it’s sort of just tweaking isn’t it?

BB: Yeah. I mean there’s a good Bob the Builder, I mean that…TV cartoon, and

then look at Harry Potter…I mean she made pots of money out of the books but

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what’s she made out of the merchandise? They’re talking about a Harry Potter

theme park now, aren’t they?

SW: It’s being built.

BB: Is it being built?

SW: In Florida, yeah.

BB: Is it? But Action Man itself was character merchandise ‘cause you

got Action Man duvets and wall paper (laughs), you know.

IH: That’s marvellous.

[END OF RECORDING 1.16.58]