If play is the work of childhood, Hornby's struggle is grim news for the future of UK manufacturing
On reading that Hornby, the maker of Scalextric and model trains, had lost out badly in Christmas sales to iPads and computer games, I thought of Pete, a friend from my 70s boyhood in York. He and his father, a draughtsman on British Rail, ran "N" gauge trains through a pretty landscape (gently undulating, thanks to papier-mache) that occupied the entirety of their box room. Being jealous, I would take the mickey: the little plastic figure of a porter had tipped over, as had the lady-with-shopping-basket. A massacre had occurred within a scene supposed to be as quotidian as possible. Pete, a shy lad, would go red as he stood them up. I myself had to be content with a bog standard "OO" gauge Hornby oval with one siding, a signal and a coal bunker.
My own sons – now in their mid-teens, and perhaps the last Hornby generation – have had to make do with equally minimalistic train sets. By way of compensation, I would take them to the Pendon Museum near Abingdon to see the greatest model railway layout in England. It was commenced in the 60s by the late Roye England, a thin, bespectacled vicar manque in beret and mac who ate only Crunchies, black bananas and boiled eggs "because they were quick", so leaving time for his layout. He once spent six years making a lineside pub; it was thatched with human hair from a hairdresser's in Swindon; the basis of the hollyhocks in the garden was cats' whiskers.
While my boys and I were still in thrall to Pendon, I learned that an older, divorced friend of mine had retained the model railway base he'd made with his own sons. It was propped behind a cupboard in his hallway, and I asked whether I might take it off his hands. "Well no," he said, "I mean … the memories." It had been a crass request, because if there's one thing every father knows about raising boys, it's that time spent making things with them is sacred. (Another is that computer games put them in a foul mood.) But the news from Hornby has implications beyond the domestic sphere.
Before going into model trains, Frank Hornby had patented Meccano in 1901, a toy inspired by his childhood love of the cranes at Liverpool docks. Both products reflected his view that "play is the work of childhood", and the boy who owned the one also had the other. Roye England certainly did, and when he was about 10 years old he had shocked his parents by making – when everyone else was out – a Meccano model of the Forth railway bridge. It was 16ft long.
Pete too was a Meccano boy, and I know he became an engineer of some sort. His birthright was a path to follow, and a coherent worldview, not least since central York was a full-sized railway layout when he and I were growing up there. Today that area is barren, except for some office suites, one of which houses a call centre for a credit card firm.
A few years ago, I was cycling past it, and I saw the young men in there, talking into their mouthpieces or looking vacantly out of the window. I wanted to try to write something about why it was sad that Britain had lost most of its manufacturing, and a piece was commissioned by an editor who enjoined me to interview some economists. This was the height of the Blair boom, and I spent hours on the phone before I could find one who minded in the least. The economists would chortle down the line: "We were an entirely agricultural economy in the 18th century. Do you propose going back to that?" One said: "If it suddenly proved impossible to import manufactured goods, we'd simply start making them again ourselves."
Now everyone wants manufacturing back, even the party that killed it off. Yet George Osborne's "march of the makers" seems about as chimerical as "big society", and the bad news from Hornby will do nothing to help matters at all.