“I used to be asked what are the qualifications for being in the toy industry and I said I think there are two: one is, an eye for detail, because children are fascinated by detail and little things that open and shut and how they work and stuff, and secondly, a mental age of about seven, and I think to be truthful, I qualified on both counts.”[1]
“Running Berwick’s Toy
Company proved enormously appealing since I discovered I had a real interest in
toys and in industry and, with five young children at home, a home-based
research centre.”[2]
“As our children grew up they were extremely unruly and, of course,
did an enormous amount of crayoning, drawing and painting. In fact it was
almost impossible to stay at a hotel with them on holiday because their first
instinct would be to crayon all over the bedroom walls..”[3]
“I came up with a solution. I bought a 30’ Bedford chassis and
delivered it to Plaxtons the coach builders in Scarborough. They kindly built a
body on it to my design which, when equipped, meant that we could sleep nine
people in it, with a motor scooter in the boot and a small sailing dingy on a
vast roof rack. I think we had the first, the best and undoubtedly the biggest
campervan in the business.” [4]
The impact of family life on creative ideas and inventions, the lateral thinking of the practicalities of family holidays and transportation could be considered to have sparked Torquil Norman’s ideas for container toys, leading to his setting up of Bluebird in 1981 to manufacture a particular design classic in British Toy manufacturing history – more tomorrow. Cuppa anyone?
The converted Bedford campervan, 1971 and later converted Norman family barge, Patricia
[1] British Toy Making
Project: Mr. Torquil Norman, Bluebird Toys, interview transcript, p32-33
interview conducted by Ieuan Hopkins and Sarah Wood, September 2010, edited by
Torquil Norman and Sarah Wood, August 2013
[2] Torquil Norman, Kick the Tyres, Light the
Fires: One man’s vision for Britain’s future and how we can make it work p49, published
by Infinite Ideas, 2010: UK
Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher, economist-philosopher was an unlikely pioneer of the Green movement[1], his book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if people mattered sets out his critique of Western economics, published during the energy crisis of 1973 and emergence of globalization, and is cited as one of the 100 most influential books since the second world war by the TLS. Schumacher’s book influenced a developing consciousness of environmental awareness and interest in sustainability. Schumacher’s insistence that the earth’s resources are finite and thereby should not be assumed as conditions to create capital. His concept of Buddhist Economics and appropriate scale of technology underpin this project. “Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character.”[2]
Born in Bonn in 1911, his father was the first professor of economics at Berlin university. Schumacher formed an academic career in Germany, Britain and the US as assistant lecturer in banking and international finance at Columbia ages 23 but “he always believed one should strive for practical outcomes to philosophy and economic theory which would benefit people in society.”[3]
“He saw the need to provide his colleagues and audience with
philosophical maps and guidelines which related to reality.”[4]
“In the process, his life was one of constant questioning, including
challenging most of the basic assumptions on which Western economic and
academic theory has been based. What are the ‘laws’ that govern the ‘science of
economics’? What is the true value of money? What is the relationship between
time and money? What is the real worth of work? And of development? These were
everyday questions which interested him most as an economist.”[5]
Schumacher fled Hitler’s Germany in 1937 with his wife and son and
came to London where he was granted British citizenship, but was briefly
interned and then hidden away by his family as a farm laborer in
Northamptonshire. With the support of John Maynard Keynes worked for the
government at the Oxord Insitute of
Statistics, working on ideas of debt
relief and international debt clearing schemes. After the war he was
appointed to the Coal Board in 1950 and became Head of the Soil Association.
“He had experienced poverty, social injustice and alienation
first-hand, and felt that with his uniquely varied and practical background he
had something useful to contribute. As an economist he was derided by his peers
for pointing out the fallacy of continuous growth I a finite world dependent on
limited fossil fuel resources, but at the same time he became a champion of the
poor, the marginalized and those who felt misgivings over the shallowness of
contemporary values. This made him a cult figure of the hippie movement in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, with over 5000 students attending some of the
lectures he gave in California on his last visit to the United States in 1977.”
[6]
Schumacher criticized the way that conventional economists measure
the standard of living by the amount of consumption, assuming that those that
consume more are better off and in order to live well we must consume at least
as much if not more than our neighbor, encouraging a keeping up with the
joneses as a measure of a person’s success.
Modern society is consumer-driven. ‘We are not people, still less people
with souls. We are consumers, mere economic functionaries, serving economic
growth.’[7]
“Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It
is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness – where this
applies.”[8]
Macrophilia the cult of bigness is “the prevailing trend in economic
thinking for almost 200 years. It is rooted in the theory of economies of scale which, alongside the hidden hand of market forces and the
dogma of economic growth, is a cornerstone of conventional economics.“[9]
“Macrophilia fails to allow for the small fry of economic life and
thus excludes a substantial proportion of the population from its economic
caluclations and planning.”[10]
“Schumacher wrote of a ‘crisis in the reactions of human nature to
our economic way of life which worships giantism and threatens to submerge the
human person.’ In other words, size matters, but not in the way that the
economists imagine. It matters not because big is best but because small is
beautiful. ‘After all,’ Schumacher continued, ‘people are small in size and can
confidently cope only with people-sized problems. Giantism in oganisation as in
technology may occasionally give them a feeling of elation, but it makes them
unhappy. All modern literature is full of this unhappiness, and so is modern
art.’ “[11]
“What is it that we really require from the scientists and
technologists? I should answer: We need methods and equipment which are
cheap enough so that they are
accessible to virtually everyone;
suitable for small-scale
application and
compatible with man’s need for creativity
Out of these three characteristics is born
non-violence and a relationship of man to nature which guarantees permanence.
If only one of these things is neglected, things are bound to go wrong.”[12]
[1] Diana Schumacher p9 ‘Small is Beautiful in the 21st
Century: The Legacy of E. F. Schumacher,’ Green Books, 2011: UK
[2] E. F. Schumacher p46 in ‘Small is Beautiful:
A study of economics as if people mattered’ published by Abacus, 1983 edition:
UK
[3] Diana Schumacher p9 ‘Small is Beautiful in the 21st
Century: The Legacy of E. F. Schumacher,’ Green Books, 2011: UK
Small is Beautiful: Miniature Worlds and Microeconomics is an ongoing research project that seeks to explore E. F. Schumacher’s Buddhist Economics in light of numerous applications around the theme of toys and the appeal, politics and poetics of miniature scale.
The central case study of this work is Bluebird Toys and the Roundhouse Trust, both set up by Sir Torquil Norman. Bluebird, a British toy company (1981-1998), the proceeds of which were invested by Sir Norman in the purchasing and renovating the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London and establishing the charitable Roundhouse Trust that supports the development of young people’s creative skills.
The central image is one of scale: from Polly Pocket to the Roundhouse.
The project, while initially
conceived as a film is now in the process of being developed with drawings and
text. This blog will be a space to chart the progress of the project and form a
map of the connecting elements.
The end product will be a graphic
exploration that will give an introduction to Schumacher’s economics and an
investigation into the appeal of the miniature in the shifting climate of
ecological accountability and questions of consumption and sustainability.
Polly Pocket in Midge’s Flower Shop, 1990, Bluebird Toys
Railwaywomen is a short film portraying women on the railways. Made as part of the Film maker in the Family project.
The film is structured around the portrayal of two female railwayworkers: a guard and a steam train driver.
Each character encounters an interaction in her work: the driver with a young passenger and the guard wth passengers. The use of narrative is simple, focusing on the iconic representation of each woman in her environment, her labour and the interaction between genders, generations and workers.
Lois Lane drives the train. Stills from Billion Dollar Limited, directed by Dave Fleischer, 1942
Video essay on the relationship between play and creativity, 2017
