Project: British Toy Making Project

Mr Brian Mawdsley Designer/Innovator

Matchbox (Lesney Productions) Corgi & Freelancer

Interview conducted by Juliana Vandegrift

November 2011

Transcribed by Emily Hewitt February 2012

Edited by

Brian Mawdsley and Laura Wood August 2013

Copyright © 2011 Museum of Childhood

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FULL NAME: Brian Mawdsley INTERVIEWER: Juliana Vandegrift

DATE: 9th November 2011 PLACE: Home of Brian Mawdsley,

Sheffield

TYPE OF EQUIP: PMD Marantz 661, Wav, 48 kHz, 16 bit

LENGTH OF INTERVIEW: 2 hours 5 minutes 35 seconds

PERSONAL DATA

DATE & PLACE OF BIRTH: 1943, Heywood, Lancashire

OCCUPATION: Designer/Innovator for Matchbox (Lesney Productions),

Corgi, then freelance designer

EDUCATION: Selborne Secondary Modern School: 1954-1959

UNIVERSITY/COLLEGE: Sir John Cass College, London University: 1961-1964

Leicester Polytechnic. 1967-1969

QUALIFICATIONS: B.Sc in Maths and Physics

H.Dip.Des (MA) in Art and Design

CAREER BIOGRAPHY

Brian joined the toy industry around 1970 from art school after trying for a career in

Industrial Design. He joined Matchbox (Lesney Productions) in 1971 to 1976 as a toy

designer based in Hackney. He was headhunted in 1976 by a new company which was

formed by an ex Texas Instruments manager but this didn't last much more than six

months so Brian joined Corgi in Northampton in the same year. As Corgi suffered staff

cut backs in the early 1980s he was offered a transfer to its Swansea branch but he

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declined and decided to go freelance from 1984 onwards. His agent was Dennis

Wyman.

Key designs which Brian has highlighted are he invented a musical toy 'probably the

world's first computer based keyboard' based on the new Texas Instruments device

called a microprocessor: 'Compute-a-Tune'. Other products he designed were

Matchbox's 'Play Track' and Container Port which won a gold medal (although he's not

sure where). His other major product design was Robotix which went on to become a

cartoon made in America which he says actually killed off his product because of the

way it was marketed as a 'collectable' rather than an educational toy which could be

pulled apart and used to show how it worked. (Brian has written a two page career

summary which is stored in the MoC archive)

INTERVIEW SYNOPSIS

Brian Mawdsley discusses working for Matchbox; the camaraderie that existed

between colleagues; marketing of the toy industry; toys he designed; working for

Corgi; changing technology in the toy industry; and working as a freelancer.

INTERVIEWER’S COMMENTS

The recording is generally of good quality with a couple of pauses during the interview

when the microphone was disrupted as Brian moved. However, this does not detract

from his stories. Brian is comfortable enough to smoke throughout the interview. He

reflects in some detail and at leisure on the toy industry with room for pauses and

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thinking through his answers carefully. Occasional background noises when his wife

enters the room.

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[00:00.01] : Right it’s recording, and its Juliana Vandegrift talking with Brian

Mawdsley and it’s the 9th of November 2011, and I’m interviewing Brian about his

career as a toy designer for the British Toy Making Project for the Museum of

Childhood so thank you very much Brian.

[00:00.26]: Pleasure.

[00:00:27]: Okay well how about if we just start with you, tell me about how you came

to join the toy industry.

[00:00.34] Um probably through succession of failures (laughs). I did a degree

in Maths and Physics and became employed as a sort of quotes physicist for

Kodak and GEC, then I wanted to go back to college because my social life

wasn’t very good, I went to um, applied for a probation officer course and failed

at that so then I went on a design, industrial design course and got on that and

succeeded with that, and so my thought was to be an industrial designer doing

cars and teapots and all the sort of you know design that people recognise as

industrial design, and failed at that and got, after nine months, got a job of

unemployed, of being unemployed, got a job for a, um with Matchbox Toys and

it was, it was by a succession of like a marble dropping down those marble runs,

I finally got to were I ought to be really, being a toy designer ‘cause I got no

taste whatsoever (laughs).

[00:02.16]: Can you remember roughly what year this was?

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[00:02.19]: It was, hmm, sixty, sorry, around 1970, that I started at the Matchbox

Toys and it was still, felt a relatively young company then, you know.

[00:02:50] So that’s a very interesting point you say about Matchbox feeling like a

young company, can you sort of explain more about that?

[00:02.59]: Well, I was I think the second designer they employed and I worked

in the Research Development Department in the Drawing Office, and I would

say I was um well about 27 or 8, and all the people in the Drawing Office were

between say 22 and 32/35 that sort of thing, so the whole of the Drawing Office

and the engineers underneath, we were…there wasn’t anybody I don’t think,

apart from managers that were over 35 which meant for a great working

atmosphere.

[00:04:00]: Can you remember what the atmosphere was like?

[00:04.04]: Yeah, it, I mean it really was like Only Fools and Horses, there were

just constant ribbing and one particular guy, Colin Archer, whose name was

Smole, everyone called him Smole, I was Monkey. So Smole would just be the

ringleader and taking the piss out of everybody, you know what I mean, and

only kind of got him into trouble a few times you know but mostly it just made

the atmosphere really vibrant, you know.

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[00:04.54]: Yeah, where did the monkey term come from, Brian Monkey, Mawdsley?

[00:04:58]: Oh, Mawdsley I think…

[00:05:01]: What …

[00:05.01]: Yeah, but I was always Monkey, yeah sorry.

[00:05:04]: What can you remember about your, can you remember you first day there

or your first working week at the Matchbox and what happened and…?

[00:05:14]: Not precisely, well in a particular way, when I was living in Luton so I

had to drive every day from Luton to Hackney and back, so I started before 6

o’clock in the morning and got back, I don’t know 7 or 8 o’clock at night for a

few months to begin with, until I moved into Hackney, into the East End, so

there was long days. But what I do remember is keeping some of my first

drawings from those first days and then looking at them later on and they were

diabolical, and you go, why did people actually pay me good money to do these

drawings (laughs) Yeah they were terrible.

[00:06:13]: Have you still got them?

[00:06:15]: No, I wish I had but…

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[00:06:16]: Ahh.

[00:06:17]: In a way I wish I hadn’t, but it just goes to show what the difference

between University education and then doing real life stuff is like, you know.

[00:06:29]: Yeah, I mean what other differences did you notice between the theory at

University and then working in a real life designing office like that?

[00:06:41]: It was just that a reality at the end of the tunnel almost, and I mean

its not that, at the University I did practical projects, you know, we’d do model

making, drawing, drafting, model-making, and that was all very realistic. But in

industry you’ve got a brief, Day one you’ve got a brief to do a particular car and

you’ve got say three days to do it, and it has to fit an end slot where you don’t

know what the end slot is, somehow. If I was working at college, I’d go “Oh well

oh I’ll do one of those,” and there was no end slot that it needed to fit, I could

sort of do it free range. But - at Matchbox in those few --- early days it was ---

we were on a drawing of not one, but perhaps five drawings of a --- I don’t

know a chicken transporter or something (Laughs). And it – it needed to fit to

brief and then be given to a model maker because we worked closely with

model makers and – the model maker would look at a drawing which looks fine

but it actually doesn’t reflect reality, in other words you can actually draw a

vehicle with three wheels on one side and one on the other, or some sort of

spurious perspective and it looks fine on a drawing but when the model maker

says “How am I going to make this?” because it doesn’t fit reality.

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[00:09:15]: So the reality of trying to make a fantasy design fit the practicalities of it

working, like the three wheels on one side thing, it doesn’t --- its very different in real

life when you’ve got to make something practical. You were saying?

[00:09:31]: Yeah, you can twist perspective and it looks okay on a two

dimensional surface but when you come to make it in three dimensions, that

twist of --- that twist doesn’t translate into real life, if that makes sense?

[00:10:02]: I think so, I think it does yes.

[00:10:03]: You can draw a camel with three humps, no that’s not really ---

there is no such thing as a camel with three humps, it’s that sort of thing. And

so recognising --- it’s an example, when I was at Kodak I drew an engineering

drawing of a block with a hole in it, and gave it to the engineer to make and he

came back with this block but no hole in it, and I said “The hole’s not there,” and

he said “It is,” and he pointed to a place next to the block because I had

dimensioned the hole outside the block (Laughs), so it was just another screw-

up.

[00:10:45]: So when you started at Matchbox, did you have an official job title, and was

it a professional grade? I’m trying to get a feel of how Matchbox worked with its

organisational structure.

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[00:10:58]: Okay, right I’ll take you through the building.

[00:11:02]: That would be useful.

[00:11:05]: It was a two storey building, it wasn’t in the main factory it was at

one end, it was between the main factory and the dog track, Hackney dog track.

And specifically for the pre-production Design Development department, on the

top floor there was a drawing office, couple of manager’s offices and a

conference room. In the drawing office there was probably twelve, fourteen

draftsmen – initially there was just me as a designer and then one or two

others. Downstairs there was a small office with maybe four, six project

engineers and again a couple of cubical offices, next to that there was model

makers, and next to that there were pattern makers – and that was – all that

was --- that was the whole design department. From that design department it

went into preproduction, tooling production, sales and all that. I’ve forgotten

your question.

[00:12:43]: The organisational structure, did you have a professional job title?

[00:12:47]: Oh yes well I was just a Designer. So the structure was – in terms of

salary which kind of defines where people are in structure – the managers

would get most, then project engineers because they had a responsibility of

carrying the project through to production, they were next. Then designers, like

me, because we had that creative input, then draftsmen, then model makers

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and stroke pattern makers. So that was the salary structure and I became

aware of that because Matchbox was a non-union firm, and so in place of the

unions we had a representative structure and I became the rep for R and D at

one point so I had to go to meetings with management to sort out salary

increase and stuff like that. So I was the go-between. And if you can imagine in

that salary structure the people at the top wanted to have more money because

they were at the top if you like – and maintain differentials and the people who

got paid less, like the model makers and the pattern makers wanted to reduce

the differentials because they were more important, so I’d have to come back

from the reps meeting, explain all this to all these guys, one lot wanted to

maintain differentials, the other were arguing for reducing the differentials – so

I managed to confuse everybody and it was alright.

[00:15:08]: That’s really interesting, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a factory that

I’ve heard about before that’s non unionised, and do you know the history of that, and

why it wasn’t and how it avoided the unions?

[00:15:24]: Well I think the unions were always wanting to get into it and there

were certain areas, probably like the tool room and the production people, that

were partly represented by it, maybe, I’m not sure about that, partly

represented by unions, but the company as a whole was a non-union thing.

[00:15:58]: I heard one of the ladies on the DVD that’s been done, the recording that I

mentioned before, she said “We didn’t have a pension scheme, we didn’t pay a penny

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towards it but when I retired I got a pension from the company.” And she said it was

wonderful that they treated them like that.

[00:16:19]: Yeah, no I think --- I mean I didn’t have much to do with Jack Odell

and Les Smith, which were the co-founders, except Jack Odell found me

washing me feet in the sink of the conference room toilets after we’d been

playing football at dinnertime, and he didn’t turn a hair you know (Laughs) and

you got the impression, particularly with Jack Odell, that – he was still a lad, you

know one of the lads, and he went on to form Le do Toys after Matchbox failed,

you probably know that – (Laughs) that’s best glossed over.

[00:17:30]: Why do you say that?

[00:17:33]: Well I don’t want to talk about other people’s business. And there’s a

sort of ethos of --- an ethos from the being ex RAF I think, and fighting in the

War, there was a genuine ethos of looking after the people, and being a young

company it made for a good atmosphere.

[00:18:19]: That sounds wonderful. Did you get an impression of, is it Leslie Smith? The

owner? His working style, his managerial style, did you ever come across him enough

to form an impression?

[00:18:32]: No not really, from a distance he was --- there always needs to be like

a Morecambe and Wise chemistry, and Les Smith was the other half, the

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complimentary half of Jack Odell, equally necessary but it was keeping on track,

making sure that they were making a profit, that sort of thing. But he still

needed the entrepreneur, cavalier approach of Jack Odell I think – to make it

work. – So I don’t know where you want to go now, the whole design

development department was a really tight unit and we all got on really well

and we went on --- the Thursday night scene I was telling you, the Thursday

night scene we went every Thursday to go and play golf in the summer or

snooker in the winter, then to the pub and then to have an Indian. That is still

going, twenty five years on.

[00:20:03]: That’s wonderful, all that camaraderie. True friendship.

[00:20:13]: Yeah, yeah, And it’s wonderful for me to go and visit a group of like

60 year old, leery guys still, they’re still – the loudest people in there somehow.

Go on, yes next (laughs).

[00:20:30]: Okay well now we’re sort of talking about your colleagues and the

camaraderie, it would be good to reflect on the team relationships, and how you

interacted with each other. You’ve touched on your own department but between the

departments like the engineers, the model makers, the draughtsmen. How did you

work with them, in which capacity, and how was that?

[00:20:54]: Okay, well I think I touched earlier on the fact that you can draw

anything but when it comes to actually making something physical you actually

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have to follow the laws of physics. So --- I got better at doing drawings that

reflected reality, even so when you’ve got a complicated product or --- pretty

well anything’s complicated when you look at the nuts and bolts of it. The first

stage is to invent it, second stage is to do a drawing and the third stage is to

convert it into reality, which is done by the model maker, means that the

designer and the model maker have to work in a sort of union way. I’ll give the

drawing to the model maker, the model maker comes back and says he can’t do

that, I say well put a bit more clearance in here and make that wheel a bit

bigger, and then he goes back, he makes that and then that’s the constant

dialogue between the model maker and the designer, then hopefully we end up

with something. If that then goes on to being produced, or gets the okay to be

produced, then the Project engineer has to --- comes into this team and says

“What the hell have you been playing at, there’s no way we can produce this!”

So he then has introduced his set of criteria to actually be able to make it into

production because up until then we were just making a one off prototype. So

you can cheat with a one off prototype, works perfectly, looks exactly like it

should do but we’ve bent an axle here to make it work or made something just

so that it works. In production everything has to have a tolerance, so its --- we’d

work to a tolerance of plus or minus two thousandths of an inch or five

thousandths of an inch and we might be able to work to a tolerance of plus or

minus two thousandths of an inch but in making a prototype we can actually

carve it until it just works, and that’s not good enough for production. So the

engineer, project engineer then takes that prototype and converts it into a

production item.

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[00:23:56]: Yes when you say he puts his set of criteria on that, what would his criteria

be for example?

[00:24:02]: Well one tolerance is---.

[00:24:06]: I think I need a definition of tolerance.

[00:24:08]: Okay, (microphone disruption) You can’t make anything exactly to a

drawing, if you can imagine two thousandths of an inch, five thousandths of an

inch, its miniscule, its less than the thickness of your paper so we’re working to

very tight tolerances. But you cant make anything exactly that size so –

production has to build in the variation in size so the cup, for example, even

though its produced, the cup that we’ve got in front of us can vary in size by

probably sixteenth of an inch, something like that and you’ve got to design

around that production variation to be sure that every one that you produced

will work.

[00:25:28]: So like the wheel will spin perfectly and will take into account these

tolerances?

[00:25:35]: Yes, yes that’s what a tolerance is.

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[00:25:36]: So that’s one set of criteria for the project engineer or guy --- can you think

of any other ones that he’d have to consider?

[00:25:49]: Well how the thing is assembled so that the model maker in our

prototype, he can fiddle with it to get all the parts put together, breathe a sigh

of relief and put the final screw in and say “There we are it works.” There’s no

way that can go into production because he probably --- probably took him a

minute or two to put it together, the project engineer’s going to say “Oh well

this design has got to be put together in ten seconds, something like that. And

so where you’ve got a perfectly good working prototype, you’re going to have

to redesign it totally to make it producible and assembleable in ten seconds,

whatever and then the next one comes along the conveyer belt and you’ve got

to that one, and then you’ve got to do that one, and so on.

[00:26:54]: When you’re making these prototypes, what goes through your mind and

the model maker’s mind when you actually know that the project engineer is going to

send this back, literally, to the drawing board?

[00:27:06]: All those criteria go through your mind and – I can probably talk

another time about how long it takes to be a toy designer from another

perspective but from a perspective of understanding all that --- the criteria that

go on throughout the production, it takes two or three years. And so when

you’re --- if you’re sort of new to it, you can draw anything two or three years in,

you’re going “Oh we can’t do that because there’s not enough – draft or angle

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on the mould so it won’t come out of the mould, if every aspect of the mould

has a small angle on it, otherwise the plastic or the metal will stick in the

mould. And that’s the big hurdle to build in all those angles. For example if you

had to make a long tube, and you put draft on it, that small angle to make it

come out of the machine by the time a three inch tube has got to the other end,

it’s like one inch (laughs). And it’s a taper, it’s like a cone and sometimes you

don’t want that. If your guttering or your downpipe for example in your house,

you need a tube that’s 3 inches all the way down so you have to make another --

- produce it in another way. So there’s drafting --- so the draft angles have got

to be maintained, and - every mould has a split line where the two halves of the

mould come together and that split line, if you imagine the split line if you were

moulding your body it’d have to go all the way round your head, round your

shoulders, down that, down that you know stuff like that. If you had your arm

in front of you, where’d you put the split line? It’s fine if your arms and legs

were all splayed out, you could put them all around the edges but you put you

hand in front of you then you can’t mould around it, you see what I mean?

[00:29:51]: Yeah so you have to take all that into consideration?

[00:29:54]: Yeah, yeah.

[00:29:55]: And the product engineer, he comes back to you with feedback, like this set

of criteria?

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[00:30:03]: Yes, in fact it’s the other way round, then the designer will try and

help the project engineer to solve his problems. Yes, because now its his baby,

so he’s now working with the drawing office so the project engineer is going

“Look we can’t do that, we can’t do that we need to make that a little bit bigger,

make more clearance between this part and that part.” And with all that

information he goes to the draftsman and the draftsman then draws up the

engineering drawings for each component.

[00:30:42]: And that’s part of the process of the team-working, who you relate to in

your team?

[00:30:48]: Yeah, so me as a designer sort of, kicks off that process, go through

approval and stuff then it goes to the project engineer, then it comes back to

the draftsman who is possibly sitting opposite me in the drawing office and

he’s slating me, in fun of “How’d you get us into this mess?” And I’m saying

“Well you’re paid to get us out of this mess.” (Laughs)

[00:31:22]: Did --- were there times when frustrations came to the surface, like serious

frustrations, or how was the equilibrium kept?

[00:31:29]: No – I mean – sorry I may be interpreting what you said wrongly.

Yeah there were frustrations, but they didn’t come out in animosity or anything

like that.

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[00:31:48]: It was not like a genuine tension?

[00:31:52]: No, no I mean, how can I put it? You know there’s different ways

you swear at people, ‘you absolute b*****d’ or whatever, or you do it in an angry

way and we were all in the same boat, we were all trying to do the same thing.

[00:32:14]: And what sort of turnaround are we talking about, to get a product, a toy

from your idea to the production?

[00:32:25]: Well a year, a year and a half, something like that.

[00:32:30]: Really? That’s not what I was expecting to hear at all.

[00:32:34]: What, longer or shorter?

[00:32:35]: A lot shorter.

[00:32:37]: Shorter? Oh right. No I think from a design sketch to approval,

through the model making process, well it kind of depends on how simple it is –

a month, something like that. From approval to slotting it into the timescales

of the engineer, a few weeks and then the engineer will work with it for a

month getting --- well a couple of weeks, another couple of weeks for the

drawing, probably got up to two, two and a half months something like that.

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Then you’ve got to make the patterns, at that time you had to make the

patterns for the tools, then it had to go into tooling which took a couple of

months, two to three months, then there’s a sort of pre-production schedule

which puts a few together to begin with, off the production tools, then we find

another set of problems that the production tools aren’t working the way we

thought they were going to. So we’ve solved those problems and then you

finally get to a point where you’ve got production that works every time, then

you’re in a place where ‘Yep, we can go.’ Then you’ve got to build up stocks,

because the toy industry is primarily centred around Christmas, hopefully you

get to that point where you’re ready to go mid-year, May, June, something like

that and then you can turn the tap on for production for the pre-Christmas

period.

[00:34:56]: My next question kind of follows on, it’s sort of linked with your --- where

do you get your inspiration from, for your toy design ideas? But also, is it sort of linked

with the --- driven by the consumer market, i.e. children or the parents that pay for the

toys. Does marketing come to you with an idea and say ‘This would sell really well’, is

it driven by … sell the most of this, or is it driven by more altruistic aims?

[00:35:32]: You got to remember that I’m biased because I’m a designer. If you

went --- I think I said that how I’ve failed being a probation officer, I’ve failed at

my love life etc. etc., it kind of builds up a picture of what a designer might be

like, particularly a toy designer, that we’re kids, if you like. And there would be

a lot of altruism, a lot of connection with kids from a designer’s point of view,

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less so from a marketing point of view because they’re interested in volume

turnover, and we’re, for example, it’s one of my gripes which may come to. For

example, marketing would think collectibles would be a fantastic idea because

you’d sell one, and the child would want to go back and get another, and then

they’ve got six, and then they’ve got eight and yes whatever. And toy

designers, well me anyway, would kind of want to go against that and say ‘but

these aren’t toys, they’re just things to spend your money on, that make you a

consumer.’ So it’s consumer training if you like, I don’t care if they sell loads of

them. So for me, the toy --- the designer has the child, in mind as a person and

marketing has the child in mind as the consumer. And plus the fact – I’m going

to be utterly biased about this, marketing don’t know anything about the

future other than extrapolate the current. So if they said --- if you asked the

marketing, “What could we do that’s better next week” and they would

probably suggest that they try and make it an eight day week, you know

because eight days is better than seven days. And they’ve got really no idea

about the animal that is the present and the future, if you see what I mean.

They know the present, and they just want more of the future, more in the

future, like your computer, every year it has to have more gigabytes and more

processors and stuff like that. And it does --- the material --- a ten year old

computer would do most of everything that anybody wants but we have to

have the numbers increased every year.

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[00:39:02]: That’s a very, no that’s a really good insight into how you work with

marketing and was there like a --- ever an out and out fight between toy designers and

marketing for example?

[00:39:24]: Yeah, - well – yeah, disgust (laughs). Towards the end of my stay in

Matchbox, I’d invented what has turned out to be the first computer based

musical keyboard, and we’re aware now that computer based musical

instruments are a mega industry. And at Matchbox we were approached by a

Texas Instruments, which is a computer microchip manufacturer with this chip

that could do this, that or the other and in the meeting that we had with them,

I’m going “Oh you can do this, can do that, can do that,” and I’m a musician as

well so I’m going “This can make a musical instrument and we can do this and

this and this.” You could have a memory and you could play things, and they

could play them back, everything that we know about now. And it was taken

forward and presented to the marketing meeting and they were really

enthusiastic about it, and because the chip manufacturer had to have an order--

- there’s a word called amortise and that means that to re-coop your costs you

have to make a certain quantity, so the chip manufacturer needed to re-coop

his costs at a sensible price, might have to make a thousand, or five thousand

whatever. And this product which turned out to be ‘Compute-a-Tune later on,

was fine until the project engineer or the design --- the manager who was

showing it to marketing said “Okay, you think its great yeah, we’ll commit to a

certain volume because the chip manufacturer has to have a certain volume”.

And they shrivelled up, you know, like testicles in ice and the whole thing fell

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apart. So I’ve got lots of stories, for me anyway, where marketing don’t have

that – creative enthusiasm and the balls to go forward, knowing that the future

is a different animal, it always will be a different animal, as soon as you’ve got

to grips with this it becomes that, and so on. And marketing only know

extrapolation like Star Wars toys, in Palitoy they made Star Wars toys and they

doubled the production and the sales and it went on and on and on and on, to

the point where pretty well everyone knew that it was going to collapse but

marketing --- there was nobody who could say in marketing, “we’ve increased it

50% of whatever for the last five years, what are we going to do next year?

We’re going to do another 50%.” Well actually no, this is the end; this is where

the train hits the buffers and I think, as I understand it they ended up with

massive amounts of products they couldn’t sell.

[00:43:47]: I wonder if that attitude towards marketing of the toy industry contributed

to the overall downfall of it, in the long-term?

[00:43:59]: Well in my mind it did, this is just a personal view, that – when you

chase the audience and almost the proclivities of the audience – you tend to go

downhill and so the toy industry went towards collectibles, they were faced

with a market of children that were watching more television and television is

just an easy option, and entertainment. And from my childhood, where we

were making plastic kits and going fishing and – doing --- making --- there was

like I made a guitar or --- doing things like that through till when I started at

Matchbox, there were --- going through to nowadays kids are into action

Brian Mawdsley

24

figures, collectibles, toys that don’t do anything, they don’t require any effort. I

mean there’s always been little figures that you go ‘DONK DONK DONK DONK

DONK’ or cars that you go ‘ VROOM VROOM VROOM’ and that’s fine, its got

imagination to it, but products have migrated towards sort of no effort or input,

or little. And just be collectibles, so they’re just consumer items, and for me

that’s how television has been great at promoting toys, because they’re going

to say “Hey, you’re going to need the best Power Rangers,” and kids will go out

and get them but in the end it becomes – a blind alley because toys are about

kids learning and it was bows and arrows because you needed to know how to

shoot bows and arrows, that sort of thing. So the toy industry for me has

declined – because it’s followed its audience’s decline, into ‘well let’s all sit on a

couch’, and there’s no sales in it, you know in a way.

[00:46:56]: Yeah, well that’s a good insight into your opinion of how its changed. – I’m

just looking at my notes. We touched on where you get your inspiration from so you

relate to being a child you said, it’s almost like you’re childlike, I think you were saying?

[00:47:23]: Yeah – recent research has shown that babies work like scientists,

they are actually hypothesising and testing hypothesis far more than us as

adults, and they’re going through it ‘NUM NUM NUM NUM NER’ and that if you

imagine any sort of three or five year old, how active they are in terms of

questioning, and what we think of as play, is not play – is very serious business.

And its not ‘BLUR BLUR’ sort of play, its ‘Oh wow, that goes in there and put a

block on there’, all that stuff.

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[00:48:21]: They’re working things out aren’t they, they’re putting things into a logical

order to understand it in their mind?

[00:48:28]: Yeah.

[00:48:29]: Well can you think of one specific toy or a couple of toys that you

remember inventing, and where your inspiration for those came, and the name of the

toys?

[00:48:46]: Well – partly it became --- it was the seed of an idea when I was

working later on I worked for Corgi and they were making me redundant so I

went for an interview in Hasbro which was a long train journey from

Northampton to Margate, and while I was waiting for the interview, one of the

guys at Hasbro, sorry Hornby was talking about making robot Hoovers, you

know that go round the floor, and I said ‘Oh no if I was doing it, I’d make a sort

of unit construction so that the robot could be taken apart and put together

and do something else.” Then I went into the interview for the job, and they

offered me the job. So anyway, I left Mettoy, well they were offering me a job

in – um South Wales.

[00:50:11]: Oh Swansea?

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26

[00:50:12]: Swansea, that’s right. And I didn’t really fancy, and my wife didn’t

fancy moving to Swansea and so I just accepted redundancy. And then I started

talking to a freelance agent and after a month or two, offered this idea to the

freelance agent and he was --- Dennis Wyman, he’s still working in the States,

in Florida. So I got used to him saying --- I showed him a drawing and he’d say

“Oh that’s super” and ok fine, I’d show him another drawing and he’d say “Oh

super, super.” So that way I got to three supers on some ideas and then I

showed him this idea for a sort of robotic construction kit and he went “Jesus

Christ,” and that was like I’d gone off the end of supers and we may make some

money out of that.

[00:51:30]: So your inspirations can come from conversations with people, it sparks an

idea?

[00:51:38]: Yeah, but for me it tends to come from contrariness, so I’ll disagree

and in a way be pushed into – into a room which I didn’t expect to be pushed

into. And that’s not right to be that way, and obviously usually ideas are usually

– beliefs if you like, are how things are, you know I believe this is a table, and

this a chair, and so the belief is how things are. So being contrary with a belief

is going into areas of how things aren’t; and how things aren’t is novel.

[00:52:34]: That’s really fascinating, sort of challenging people’s --- what they take for

granted?

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[00:52:42]: Yeah, absolutely yeah.

[00:52:45]: So you have touched on Corgi, but it would be good to just find out what ---

I just sort of mean chronologically, what happened when , why did you decide to leave

Lesneys or Matchbox?

[00:53:00]: Well it was because of that computer keyboard. When Matchbox

dropped it the guy who was working for Texas Instruments decided to leave

Texas Instruments, set up a company to make that computer keyboard. They

set up a company in Northampton and they headhunted me to design, to carry

on the design of that sort of product, so I moved to Northampton.

[00:53:40]: So how did Matchbox and your employers, and your team take that when

you handed your notice in for this move?

[00:53:51]: Well I don’t know --- I accept --- I’d decided, plus I think it was coming

to the end of the Matchbox run and – I think there were certain things on the

wall, writings on the wall that it wasn’t going to be as good as it had been.

[00:54:12]: I think yes, I think your notes, the date was ‘76 was it, or ‘79? You said there

was an overlap?

[00:54:22]: Yeah – I can’t remember, about ‘79, oh no no no ‘76. That’s a typing

error, it was about ‘76. Then I left Matchbox to go to this, I think it was called

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Strong Company, to develop the keyboard which lasted all of about six months,

and then they collapsed so I was out of there and I had to get a job, luckily with

Corgi who sort of made a position for me.

[00:55:12]: So how did the two companies, like Corgi and Matchbox compare and

contrast in their approaches to designing toys?

[00:55:25]: That’s a big subject really, the production processes by necessity the

same, there was the same drawing office, designers, model maker drawing

office blah blah all those things have to be in place to make the product. Corgi

was a, or felt at least to be, a more long established firm, and I think it probably

did go back further and made toys before Matchbox. Matchbox felt like a sort of

an upstart and Corgi felt more an old family business. And the toy industry was

changing quite a lot in the 70s, and where I left Matchbox and joining Corgi was

about the time the toy industry saw the possibilities of – importing product

from the Far East for much lower production costs, so Matchbox and – Corgi

were beginning to export the manufacture of products to the Far East. And

that, there was an initial period of – understanding how to work with the Far

East in that --- oh what am I talking about, not really Japan, sort of Hong Kong

sort of China area. They’ve got no word for ‘no’ and so initially the engineers

would go out there and they’d say ‘Oh can you build this,” you know its

probably --- in England it costs maybe a pound to produce, ‘we want you to

produce it for 50p’, and the Far East would say “Ah yah, that’s fine.” And then

the engineer would go ‘Ah umm it’s still a bit high, we want to produce it for

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29

40p or 35p or whatever,’ and the Far East guy would say ‘Yah, yah we can do

that.’ (Paused to reconnect microphone). So it took, it took a few years before

the --- Corgi at least realised that whatever price they asked for, the Far East

would say yes. And in the end you’d end up with sort of a cardboard cut-out of

whatever is was you were asking for and so Corgi – Corgi ended up with a

warehouse full of remote controlled cars which were about as controllable as a

cat with dyslexia or something.

[00:59:46]: So what would be interesting as well to know is because you worked so

closely with the model maker, the draftsman and the project engineer, how would you

incorporate this relationship now, to go back to the new factory in the Far East. Like

the production because how will they --- the tolerance levels you were referring to

earlier, surely they’re the ones that have got to come back to you now and say ‘This

prototype is not going to work because of this this and this.’ And its just being that

much further away, how does that relationship work suddenly?

[01:00:34] Okay – (long pause) There’s a couple of stories that kind of have a

bearing on that, two good friends of mine, Dick Maddox who was a designer

with me at Matchbox and Pete Hall, who was a draftsman at Matchbox, in fact

when Matchbox failed all these --- the people that went out from Matchbox,

they either went out into being a fish round or an insurance salesman, or they

went out into other parts of the toy industry. So Dick Maddox is now in the

States working for Hasbro, and I’m not sure about other people. Dick and Pete

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were called in to do the engineering for, of what are they called? Those furry

things that spoke to you?

[01:02:02]: Furbies?

[01:02:03]: Furbies, yeah. So they had to work with the – Far East on the

engineering, on the design and engineering, and so I only know second hand

that --- the team that was developing Furbies, they included psychologists and

speech experts and things like that, had developed a Furby language and things

and – Dick, Richard Maddox did a lot of the design work on the --- I mean the

eyes open and close, stuff like that. And Pete altered the engineering – and they

worked really closely with the Far East. And this is down stream when toy

companies began to understand how to work with the Far East.- And so Pete

would go over to Hong Kong and talk with the engineers there and do the same

sort of process, - and work it out. But the Far East have got --- when you look at

the detail of the culture, the Far East have got more hands, cheaper hands than

the UK so whether, if it was necessary to build the toy in ten seconds in the UK

because assembly costs were high, in the Far East that’s not necessary so you

can build it in a minute maybe, for the same price. Which then goes back onto

how you design it, because you don’t have to design it to fall together; so the

Furby – if you took one apart is a nightmare in terms of my culture in the

English toy industry, its like how can you produce this? It really is like a

prototype. But it’s do-able in the Far East and I don’t think they had any ---

because they were consistent with their culture they could make the thing

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31

work, reproducibly. And because Furby was really, really successful the one

company that made --- originally manufactured it had to then give it to another

company and another company and they would then manufacture it, but they

would re-engineer it to their manufacturing and so what appears to be exactly

the same product can be totally, well not totally but significantly different

inside depending on whether it was manufactured by A, B or C. And Peter was

like tearing his hair out that ‘My goodness, none of these things are the same,

how can they do this!?’

[01:05:49]: And also if you had --- take the first manufacturing company and you’re

saying they had the luxury of a minute to assemble it for arguments sake. If a product

takes off like the Furby, suddenly the orders next year are nearly double because it’s so

popular then they would have to surely look at that again and reduce the

manufacturing time, or not… so it just meets demand?

[01:06:20]: Yeah I see what you mean. Yes I suppose.

[01:06:23]: I don’t know if that--- I don’t know if my logic’s logical (Laughs)

[01:06:26]: No it would be logical that if you can make it in half the time, you

can make twice as many that sort of thing.

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[01:06:35]: But its really interesting hearing how the --- just working with the different

culture and how it made the designers look at things a bit different. And in terms of

Corgi, what level of autonomy did you have in your job there, as a designer?

[01:07:01]: Oh what’s autonomy? Well in your question, I’m questioning

whether autonomy is a good thing or a bad thing, in that yes I had a great deal

of autonomy which sounds like I would have control over --- doing this, this, this

and this. It’s perhaps understood these days as its good to have autonomy but

actually in that complicated process of bringing a design to market – there’s no

such thing as autonomy because you’re always a servant of everybody else, and

everybody else is a servant. So going back to that design process where you try

and --- designer has to work with the model maker to get the thing to work,

then with the project engineer to get it to work then with pre-production to get

it into working production, when its in production you then have to work with

all the departments inside the factory to help solve all their problems. And their

helping do work- arounds for any design weakness as well, so – autonomy –

kind of didn’t come into it. I mean you can always argue your case, and as a

designer you’ve got to try --- you’ve got to argue your case for this is this. And

you know where you’ve failed if you haven’t managed to get a good idea

accepted, then you know that’s a failure – oh I was going to say something - but

its gone.

[01:09:19]: To do with autonomy?

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[01:09:28]: I have no idea, sorry (laughs).

[01:09:30]: Okay, - what about the physical look and feel of the Corgi office, and the

site?

[01:09:39]: Yeah, again it was in an old building that probably dated back --- like

one of these old factories – where Matchbox was built in the 50s probably, late

50s, 60s. The Corgi building was 1800s or something. And what I remember

was Corgi had three canteens, one for the management--- one for the directors,

one for the management and one for the workers and it was – important which

canteen you went to.

[01:10:28]: I love that old formal structure, ways of working.

[01:10:32]: Yeah, there was --- I was going to say was – industry I mean back

then, industry probably saw designers, particularly designers fresh from art

college, as sort of gay ballet dancers, ‘Oh what’s he coming in here , he doesn’t

know a thing.’ And because we --- I didn’t --- and so there was a process of

learning and then having to fight your case and definitely at Corgi – I did a

design, and it was just for a little motorbike thing and I’m into motorbikes

anyway and it was something or nothing, just a little motorbike thing. It went

into the drawing office and what was a very nice shaped cowling you know to

go on a bike had --- because the draftsman had just used a compass and a

straight line, made this sort of box with rounded corners – and – he’s saying

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34

‘Well that’s easy to make’ and I’m saying, ‘No no its not ---it can’t be like that,

its got to be this sort of swoopy shape or whatever,’ and there’s no way you can

justify it in some – mechanical sense – if I detour and go back to my education, I

did a degree in maths and physics and like everything is down there, if you can’t

prove it, it doesn’t exist, that sort of thing. Then a few years later I go to art

college where proof is totally unnecessary, does it feel right? And that cultural

difference is, well for me really hard to take on board, you know what I mean?

(Laughs) And I think – its still like that to this day.

[01:13:05]: So almost like the aesthetically pleasing to the eye aspect of it, whereas the

draftsman will just like you say get a straight line and a ruler and draw a circle and

that’s --- that represents what you’re trying to achieve but you want to look perfect

and stylish as well?

[01:13:27]: Yeah, how you define style god only knows.

[01:13:41]: It would be interesting to know what it was like working with Marcel Van

Cleemput, what his style of working was like?

[01:13:54]: Well the main thing I remember about Marcel was that he’s French,

or I’m not sure where he comes from, but he’s European. And his habit of

driving on the right hand side of the road hasn’t left him in England because

(laughs) he was absolutely the scariest driver I’ve been with (microphone

disruption). I think maybe we went to – Swansea, or somewhere --- we’d gone

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35

to have a meeting with somebody. And he just was perpetually over-taking

people (laughs) so that’s my main memory of Marcel. But a very nice guy.

[01:14:54]: He said he was working a hundred hours a week because he worked so

hard?

[01:14:59]: Yeah I would imagine so –

[01:15:02]: Was that expected of you?

[01:15:03]: No, no. No – mostly I can remember - trying to organise having to go

into town to buy a washer or something, around about dinner-time so I could

go home and have dinner at home, that’s all I remember. And I don’t think – it

was – it was possibly an expectation - that encompassed the managers and the

older, more established people in the firm, in the company. But it didn’t extend

to me (laughs).

[01:16:00]: What the work ---

[01:16:02]: The --- that sort of work ethic of doing lots of hours.

[01:16:06]: Lots of hours yeah because it sounded just incredibly busy but he loved his

work as well. Was he your boss then, would he have been?

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36

[01:16:16]: Yeah.

[01:16:17]: He was your boss?

[01:16:18]: Yeah, so he – he was a boss over the design development

department, I had a little office --- a little sort of work room if you like with –

kind of in charge of a model maker so that we’d design and model make in

there – who was a – nice guy but he would never---he had no real care over

what he did so – he would make something and you’d go ‘That’s not working’

or ‘That’s not good enough’ and he’d go ‘Yeah fine okay I’ll go and make it

again,’ and where --- I would find that really boring to have to do things two or

three times, he was quite happy to go and make the thing again and --- I’ve got

a feeling he was a gunner, a mid gunner in – you know a bomber in the War and

– oh maybe I’ve got this wrong – nearly shot down by the other planes in the

formation. Another guy who was one of the managers, I can’t remember his

name, with Marcel – in the War, was doing --- recharging the batteries in tanks

and I don’t know if this will make sense. He had to connect half a dozen tanks

in series to charge the batteries so the idea is you connect A to B to C to D to,

and then you connect all that to the battery charger but he – made a mistake of

connecting A to B to C to D and then connecting it back to A again and that

made a circuit which burnt out all the batteries in half a dozen tanks (laughs) so

he was totally screwed.

Brian Mawdsley

37

[01:18:49]: Sounds like Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em or Dads Army (laughs). Well what

was the team relationship like in comparison to Matchbox where you were at Corgi,

and the camaraderie?

[01:19:08]: Yeah there was just not the same level of camaraderie; we didn’t go

out on any Thursday night scenes or anything like that. We got on really well

but that was it.

[01:19:24]: Do you--- have you got any opinion as to why it was different, why it wasn’t

as close, like that?

[01:19:37]: Well there’s no structural difference, like company influence on the

camaraderie, it was in Corgi it was just – we worked well together at work and

just didn’t feel the need to go on a Thursday night scene and it was the fact that

in Matchbox we were all sort of mid-twenties and that’s what you do.

[01:20:09]: Yeah the relationships are different at different ages of your life aren’t

they? Did you ever come across some of the owners like --- I know that Philipp

Ullmann had passed away in 1971, but did you know his business partner Arthur Katz in

any working capacity?

[01:20:30]: Yeah, yeah, well I know Arthur Katz but Peter Katz I think he was his

son.

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38

[01:20:35]: The son yes.

[01:20:37]: And all I can remember is being in his office and he picks up the

phone, the phone rings and he picks up the phone and he goes ‘Katz, P’, and it

just amused me ‘Katz, P’. But also there’s another sort of point about being a

designer, I did a remote controlled handset for cars and was showing it to Peter

Katz and he was – offering suggestions and ways to change it and things like

that. And I mean I’m open to suggestions and that wasn’t the point but the

way he was taking it wasn’t a useful way and so I had to say to him ‘You’re

employing a dog and you’re trying to bark yourself.’ And he took that in good

spirit that ‘okay on your head be it, you go away and design it.’ But that sort of -

-- everyone thinks they can --- I suppose everyone thinks they can win the

lottery, but very few people do (laughs) and everyone thinks they can kind of

design things and design toys that people forever, not now so much but forever

coming up ‘Oh you’re a toy designer, oh yeah I’ve got this idea for a toy,’ and

you’re going ‘Don’t want to hear it, okay, yeah kids love playing with cardboard

box now fuck off!’ (Laughs) - It’s a very subtle process, understanding how to

predict if you like what the marketplace wants.

[01:22:47]: Yeah I mean it would be interesting --- it’s a subtle process but interesting

to see what goes on in your mind…

[01:22:57]: (Laughs) I don’t know about that.

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[01:22:58]: Can you define it?

[01:22:59]: What goes on?

[01:23:00]: How you know what the market wants, for example, is it intuition, is it hard

facts, do you see a trend coming?

[01:23:07]: Oh well it really is about – I think anyway because I’m getting to sort

of romantic duh duh duh --- it is about observing --- perceiving reality because

there’s a kind of an ongoing thread to reality somehow, if somebody is driving

his car, he’s pissed out of his brain and he’s going at 60mph in the back street,

you’re kind of going to figure something’s going to happen, that sort of thing.

But in his brain he’s not perceiving that reality, he’s perceiving he’s having a

good time and he’s absolutely, what do you call it? In……

[01:23:55]: Control?

[01:23:56]: In control and he’s never going to die, that sort of thing. And on a

much more ordinary level I wonder how good we are in day to day life in totally

sensible and sane, how good we are at perceiving reality – And – in a sense

what I feel is that capacity to observe uncoloured reality and sense where it’s

going, that helps that process of --- for example for Matchbox I did a thing

called PlayTrack and I went to the yearly toy fair in Earls Court or wherever it

was. And all the other little car manufacturers, HotWheels and Corgi at the

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time, were all presenting their products on little roadways that they made

specially for the toy fair, so the toy fair was presenting their little cars going

down these little roads, specially for toy fair you know? And you go ‘Hold on, if

they’re presenting their little cars on little roads for toy fair because it makes

them look good and it makes --- adds sort of value to that situation, why don’t

we make a little roadway system for our cars and sell it?’ And so there’s

nothing special about that, it was just kind of being aware that – that was the

hidden desire and that people weren’t perceiving it as --- they were just

perceiving it as ‘This is a good way to show our cars off,’ but that hidden desire

when we made Play Track became a saleable product, became a saleable desire

if you like, a real one, and that soldered on for years. So I think that’s – there’s

inveterate playing with ideas, inveterate objecting to existing ideas, and going

to sleep with a problem and waking up with a solution.

[01:27:16]: Well that’s fantastic. Yeah the mind works subconsciously doesn’t it?

Answers questions you’ve got on your mind.

[01:27:26]: Yeah, yeah.

[01:27:28]: How about --- do you want to reflect on the changing technology? Because

you touched on it in your notes about the drawing, moving to computers in the

70s/80s. How did you cope with that?

Brian Mawdsley

41

[01:27:47]: Oh okay, well just defining because people nowadays may not be

aware of how it was done in the 70s. Drafting was done on drawing boards,

with drafting machines, one I’ve got in the hall which cost me £300 odd quid, I

can’t even give it away now. Design was done with magic markers and pencils,

which are brilliant things – presentation was done with magic markers and

people talking about the product. Engineering was done kind of from the seat

of your pants stroke experience, tool-making was done --- or pattern making ---.

[01:29:00]: I think its where they --- you have to make the template to make the actual

piece of a toy, because it doesn’t exist.

[01:29:09]: Yeah, but in Matchbox they were made about 5 times scale so a little

Matchbox car would be probably 10 inches by 5 inches something like that. Just

as an aside Matchbox cars, well they were real vehicles, were made to scale and

there was a lot of – effort in making them scale models except that they had to

be something like 10% wider because if they did make it to scale it looked

wrong. So all Matchbox cars were 10% wider than scale width. So the pattern

was made by pattern makers who were really skilled woodworking guys and

they would make a big model of the car in wood and so they’re sculpting it, if

you imagine you can get wooden sculptures like – elephants and things like

that you know, but these guys were making these things to tolerances in wood

of plus or minus five thou, with all the two degrees or five degrees angle on

them and accurate to scale. So they were very very skilled guys and that would

then be transferred to the tool, the moulds. – So all of those design

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development aspects were done by hand through skill, this sort of hand skill

and now come to the present day every --- all of those are done by computer –

and so drafting is done by CAD systems, drawing and illustration is done by

illustrator systems, model making is done by taking the CAD drawings and

creating the model directly from the CAD software ---drawing. And tool

machining is done from the CAD drawing, so for example a few years ago,

probably ten years ago now I was making a new gearbox unit for this product

Robotix, so I drew the CAD drawing in --- here in the UK, shipped, emailed that

drawing to a company in the States which made the components directly from

a 3D lithography, where they just build the physical object from the drawing.

That got shipped back, we then moulded the objects and made the

components. So all those things are now done by looking at a screen and the

only hand skill is like clicking a mouse. – And its aided design enormously in

that capacity to put together various objects and components in this complex

3D jigsaw that lets say a car, I’ve got a Renault and under the bonnet everything

fits together, I mean all other cars --- but everything fits together like ‘that fits

there, that fits there, that fits there,’ its like a really tight jigsaw that couldn’t---

wouldn’t be much more difficult to do if you were hand drawing it because

when you’re drawing the component you’ve got no real --- your facility to

construct the 3D reality in your brain is --- can be good but its never that good if

you know what I mean, so you can’t interleave all these objects in your brain

because you’re not that good at it but as soon as you can do it on the computer

you can go ‘Oh does that mesh with that, does that fit with that?’ And so you

end up with a much more compact design but also end up with --- on my

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Renault, it costs £80 in the garage to replace the front headlight bulb and the

reason --- its not that the bulb costs that much, its that you have to dismantle

half the sort of….

[01:34:57]: And the skill to do it yeah, and the know how.

[01:34:59]: And the skill to do it, yeah.

[01:35:03]: Gosh so that’s a --- so are toys better for it now do you think, what’s your

opinion?

[01:35:11]: Okay the first time – me and Dick Maddox went to toy fair and --- CAD

was just about coming out but we weren’t using it at the time, this was

probably mid 70s/80s, no, mid 70s. And we were walking around toy fair and

then suddenly saw this dolls house and we’re going ‘Oh my god what have they

done there?’ And it was one of the first products that had been done on CAD

and because it was so precise where a product --- where we were trying so hard

to make a product cuddly and you know holdable, that sort of thing. This dolls

house was so precise it was horrible, and that was because it was done on CAD

and you’re going ‘Oh a window here and ah I can put it…’ The way you define

the object in the drawing you’re going from point to point, line to line, right-

angles, sharp edges that sort of thing and if you want a --- you want three

windows, you draw one window and then copy it to there, copy it to there so

you want a door, oh you’ve got a front door, oh wouldn’t it be nice to have two

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front doors, yeah I’ll have a door there and a door there. And this first dolls

house that we saw it like reeked of horribleness, you know.

[01:37:08]: Uniformity perhaps?

[01:37:12]: It was --- yeah definitely uniformity….

[01:37:17]: So it really was that different looking as a result of…

[01:37:22]: It hurt, honestly it hurt.

[01:37:23]: Really?

[01:37:24]: Yeah this was the early days of CAD. I mean we’re surrounded --- as

we’re talking we’re surrounded by objects – and natural objects have a --- you

take it totally for granted, a wooden table, a dirty ashtray, a cup and stuff, and

you take it for granted but actually they’re all made, they all have got their

edges knocked off or you know there’s a surface to the table – everything has a

process that is reflected in itself – and this dolls house --- I mean CAD isn’t like

that now but this early dolls house totally reflected the process and it probably

reflected it even worse than it should have done because the people who had

made this dolls house were like the first people who had done the tooling from

CAD drawing and they were really proud of it and they were sort of saying ‘Look

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how accurate it is, look how that window is exactly the same as that window,’

and so they were proud of this CAD produced toy but it was dire.

[01:39:15]: Can you remember the name of the company?

[01:39:17]: No, no, no. I mean it’s not a reflection on the company.

[01:39:24]: No, no, no, no but it might be --- they might have something like that in the

objects in the museum.

[01:39:30]: Oh yeah, no all I can remember it was a dolls house with a couple of--

-

[01:39:42]: Sounds a bit like my dolls house, 1970s design, very plasticy and sharp

edges.

[01:39:52]: (Laughs) Yeah I mean, I think in a general design sense – whatever

object you have and its reflected in quality –comes out of that process of

design, that initial process of design development, and then its manufactured

and then the care is in the manufacturers as well as the design and stuff like

that so you end up with objects which somehow warm to you, that you can

have a relationship with like Apple computers, as a typical example. You have a

relationship with an iPod which is – which if you don’t kind of think about it too

much, its kind of lost its, it stands from its design origins from day 1 on a piece

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of paper, it wants to look like this. Day 2 no it doesn’t want to look like this, it

wants to looks like this. Day 3 you can’t do that, big argument about whether

the radiuses ought to be one mil or two and a half mil that sort of thing, and

then day by day by day what emerges like is an iPhone or whatever, as well as

all the electronics that goes into it. So for me as a designer, to a designer, it’s

like really important that – we make pleasant fun objects.

[01:42:02]: I’ve got a couple more questions, I think it would be good to find out what

your favourite toys were that you personally designed over the years, and reflecting

back on why, if you’ve got any favourite ones?

[01:42:29]: Well there was --- there are probably three categories. Favourite

ones that didn’t get into production, favourite ones that did get into production

and favourite ones because they made me a lot of money (laughs). And the last

category, Robotix was me favourite because it made me quite a lot of money,

and that’s the only one in that category. In the --- there’s quite a few in that I’m

pleased have got into production and you know am happy to say ‘I did that’.

There was PlayTrack for Matchbox, oh and Container Port for Matchbox, which

won the gold medal at the Liepzig toy fair. And everyone that gets into

production is a success, - there was a record player for Corgi which was a

brilliant solution for kids, pre-school kids to play records because they couldn’t

damage the record, but then cassette players came along and so…

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[01:43:44]: Was that those little plastic records with the big grooves on, all different

colours?

[01:43:51]: Yeah, well no this was a record player, it would play 45s.

[01:43:57]: Oh like vinyl 45s?

[01:43:58]: Vinyl 45s yeah.

[01:44:49]: Oh right because I do remember a child’s record player with, it was about

the size of CD discs but well before CD discs, but they were plastic and then they had

the notches on so a bit like a musical box I think. The needle goes ‘ding ding ding ding

ding.’ Anyway sorry to --- I thought you might have been referring to that.

[01:44:22]: No, no it was just a straightforward record player but anyway. –

There’s probably some other ones that I’ve enjoyed, you know. Then there’s a

few that I really enjoyed that hadn’t got into production, which --- one was a

plastic kit, a kit for girls to make dolls houses or dolls rooms and that kind of got

near once or twice, but didn’t. – There was a game --- oh you don’t want to

know all of that --- yeah lots of stuff that didn’t get in, I mean reams and reams

of stuff.

[01:45:29]: I bet, like what was your percentage of the ones that didn’t make it through

to production versus the ones that did?

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[01:45:38]: I guess when you’re in a company – when I was in a company –

things get weeded out fairly early in the process, ‘we don’t want one of those ---

yeah okay do something else.’ And so they didn’t grow very much before they

got knocked off, stopped. So I’d imagine two or three to one were --- went

through the whole process and either did or didn’t make it, so probably two to

one, no one to one so it went through the whole process it was a 50% good

chance that its going to get into production. As a freelancer, anything 1500 to 1,

that sort of thing (laughs).

[01:46:41]: When you left Corgi and you started your own freelance company, worked

as a freelancer, you worked with some American companies and how did they operate

in comparison to British toy companies?

[01:46:55]: Oh well that’s interesting. Okay there’s a major product ‘Robotix ’

which I did. I worked with what was Milton Bradley, which I think is now part of

Hasbro or something like that. And so we had an English design team of Roger

Ford, oh and two others and we --- it was my idea as a freelancer and so I joined

their team inside the company to generate the product.- There was basically a

three man team, an engineer, me and Roger who was –basically your product

champion, he ran with it. We then worked with a German team who were

doing the engineering and an American team, or the American parent company

also doing some design work and stuff. And – the American team were young

and you kind of think of America as a young country and England as an old

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country and it got those impressions of Germany and France as being old

countries --- you know stuff like that. But when we worked with the Americans

they were all young, irrespective of how old they were, they were all young.

And they must have found us incredibly frustrating because we had that sort of

--- an old surety that in a sense had its own slow momentum of going forwards

and they had that sort of youthful momentum of going off like fireworks if you

like. But in comparison I found that American working structure was far more

competitive and fearful than the English structure.

[01:50:09]: With each other? As co-workers they were competing with each other?

[01:50:14]: Yeah yeah so where there was two or three guys working on this

Robotix in an open plan office, they wouldn’t talk to each other, because they

wanted to have a leg up so if they spilled the beans to a co-worker of an idea

then that co-worker could then work on and get some kudos himself, that was

like ‘Woah you don’t want to do that, I’ll keep this to myself.’ So it was an open-

plan office but it was a closed-plan brain structure. And we ---I’m sorry I’m

rambling on but it’s interesting --- We had a big meeting in the States with the

American team and the English team and I had proposed a design and then one

of the American guys had proposed a design and as far as we were concerned

we were knocking backwards and forwards points about --- comparing the two

designs. And part of that process is criticism, well-natured criticism. And at the

end of the meeting, the American designer --- as everyone left the young

American designer sort of hung around and lay into me about never to criticise

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his work in front of his boss and I’m like ‘Well that’s the point of the meetings,

to try and get the best out of stuff.’ And so he laid into me and then I took as

much of it as I could and I sort of fought back and said, sort of fairly calmly that

that was the reason for the meeting. And he stormed out of the room and

when we were packing up he came back in with tears in his eyes and gave me a

massive big hug, and Roger who was --- he was Sir Roger, he wasn’t Sir Roger

but we used to say he was Sir Roger so we could get into restaurants. And he

was like ‘Well Mawdsley’ he always called me ‘Mawdsley,’ ‘I didn’t think you

were into the therapy session here, we were talking about a product.’ But that

was an example of a sort of difference in culture if you like.

[01:53:11]: Completely different working culture, we speak the same language yeah.

[01:53:15]: Yeah yeah and they can go --- in terms of toy design, they can go over

the top, if you look at all of their products they do it totally naturally then

manage some level of over the topness which is quality that even though I tried

to emulate that American Barbie type feel, there’s no way I can do it, it’s not

possible.

[01:53:54]: Its not in your nature?

[01:54:55]: Yeah its --- yeah.

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[01:54:00]: You mentioned in your notes that the States were still doing everything by

hand and when you started working with them, why was this the case?

[01:54:10]: Sorry?

[01:54:11]: The States were still doing all their designs by hand when technology started

to come over into the UK, you mentioned it in your notes. And so they were a little bit

behind?

[01:54:29]: Well what surprised me --- I’m not sure if it’s the same point but

what surprised me was that the States were still working in feet and inches,

and pounds, had not gone metric or anything so all their drawings were in feet

and inches, well inches because we never made anything in feet (laughs), they

were never that big. And it was quite recent that they did drawings because

they --- the engineering guy in Germany used to work in the States and he was

appalled that America didn’t --- only until relatively recently compared with

Germany they didn’t have that same manufacturing – structure and –

[01:55:41]: Production?

[01:55:42]: No rigid structure of how to do things. And that’s the only thing I can

remember. - No I think they --- the States from my recollection would take up

the technology probably faster, the new technology faster than us. That’s why I

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had to go to the States company to get things 3D lythographed to come back to

England.

[01:56:25]: Okay, looking back over your career, how would you say the toy design

process has changed over your career span?

[01:56:35]: Well, computers is the main thing, that everything’s done

computerised. I mean if I were to do it now I would email my agent who’s in

Florida, I’d produce graphics on the computer. Like quite recently I had an idea

from my son which required moving images and voice-over and stuff like that

and I could compose all that on a computer here, email that over to him, he

would then use that as a presentation to a Stateside company. And initially

that was all done by hand and by mouth (laughs). But the overall change in the

toy industry as I perceived it was – change in childhood and I would say largely

from computers from that --- we were saying that initially babies are like

scientists trying to understand everything and at some point, at some age we

kind of click over from the scientist, from the R and D Department to the

Marketing Department. So it’s like now I know everything that I know, now I

can start making decisions about which DFS – front room suite, settee I want to

buy, or flat-screen TV or whatever or what programme I want to watch on

television. So it goes away from curiosity into what do I want, that sort of

thing. And it felt like that was reflected in the toy industry in that cross-over

period, cross-over point came down the age range so we’re --- maybe as a kid I

was interested in making --- it was called--- it was a MIG-15 fighter, Russian

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fighter plane in balsa wood and covering it with tissue paper and flying it.

Where the toy industry was giving me products like that --- towards the end of

when I left the toy industry the equivalent was a hand held game or a

collectible or a Power Rangers thing. So the child’s decision making had moved

from what can I make, what will help my curiosity and could I make that, can I

do this? – How can I learn about the world through toys? To how can I choose

from the world what I want via toys? Be a consumer that sort of thing. So there

was a rise of collectibles and a fall-off of plastic kits and things that needed ---

like musical instruments, you need curiosity and some sort of energy to plough

through that initial period of this just isn’t making the sound that I want it to

make.

[02:01:05]: Yeah and its not actually that much fun during that period. It’s hard graft

yes, before it becomes enjoyable. Do you think it was the toy industry leading the

development in that direction or the child themselves becoming different from media

influences, or other outside influences?

[02:01:28]: I would guess it would be the outside influences and a lot of the

media because we were --- I think trying --- I don’t remember we were still

trying to produce stuff on the old principles but we kind of found that if you

bought a franchise, what do you call it a character merchandising –?

[02:02:00]: A license?

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[02:02:01]: A license for Thomas the Tank Engine to X-Men or Star Wars or

something like that then the product shot off the shelves. And we were forever

like with Star Wars or any of those, you kind of wanted to put in little features

of how it could do this and that. For example, it’s no use on the recording but

this tractor has a working gear stick, it doesn’t change gear but you can move it

into --- and that was like a simple way of using the moulding to make this thing

that worked, and reflected some sort of reality. So you kind of always wanted

to put those features in but there was this wave of ‘Oh I’m not interested in

what it does so long as it’s Luke Skywalker.’ So it was the outside influences I’m

sure.

[02:03:08]: Okay thank you. And do you have any final reflections that you would like

to add about your career or the toy industry?

[02:03:19]: Oh no you’ve given me carte blanche opening to philosophise which

would --- we’d be here thirty years. – Well for me its been a fantastic career, I

thought I was a failure in going to be a toy designer until I caught up with some

of my ex college friends, one of whom went to work for Rolls Royce and he said

he spent a year doing the back light cluster for something or other and now I’m

doing the whole car, or whatever it is. And I guess how important it is to –

somehow fall down this ball run, you know as a marble down a sort of angled

pinboard and it goes PING PING PING PING PING PING PING PING and how

important it is to allow that ball to run because you don’t know --- you kind of

don’t know which nail you’re going to hit next but you’re always gaining

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momentum. You’re always learning, you’ve always got that back, growing back

catalogue of experience which hopefully prepares you for the next nail.

(Laughs) But you can’t --- that’s my experience anyway --- you can’t foretell

where the next nails going to be. But sort of go with it - and don’t go to

University, f*****g waste of time (laughs). Sorry I didn’t say that.

[02:05:28]: Well thank you very much, it’s been absolutely wonderful.

[02:05:31]: Okay it’s been a pleasure.