“Of course you can’t start a company with one product so I spent the next few months developing half a dozen more ideas to make up a small range of products. Among them were a beautiful traditional sweetshop and a new design of lunchbox. At that time Margaret Thatcher had hugely increased the price of school lunches and so more and more children were taking their lunch to school in plastic bags. I thought they would much prefer something with a great character like Superman on it than a plastic bag. I also designed a flask with a wide lid so that they could take soup or fruit salad in their packed lunches.”[1]
The Bluebird lunchboxes were ubiquitous in the 1980s. Legend has it that the explosives for the Brighton Bombing by the IRA which targeted Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet at the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Brighton Hotel on the 12th October 1984 were carried in one.
The hinge system developed by Bluebird went on to have significance for future container toys beyond the Big Yellow Teapot, there was the Big Red Fun Bus and the A La Cart Kitchen (the no é was deliberate as it was a kitchenette on wheels).
Torquil told me about Bluebird’s specific gearbox hinge system:
“We made the gearbox. It was a plastic carry all which was made of one piece of plastic and the hinges were living hinges, built into the same tool that makes it and when you release it from the tool you have a complete gearbox and all you need to do is fit the little clips on the end to keep it shut. And we called it a gearbox, for all your gear. And it was very popular, it still is, people have still, I’m sure they’ve either found the tools or borrowed them or copied them.
It had a corrugated outside with rounded ends, and the corrugations meant that the product was really quite strong, and it just had two little clips and it was really quite clever.”[2]
So from container vehicles to container dolls houses and boxes for children’s lunch and gear, Bluebird was at the forefront of toy design and responded to children’s fascination with things that open and close and putting things inside other things. The living hinge system would be important for their most famous toy line, one that became a huge phenomenon despite the tininess of its characters.
[1] Torquil Norman, p57 “Light the Fires, Kick the Tyres: One man’s vision for Britain’s future and how we can make it work” published by Infinite Ideas, 2010: UK
[2] Interview with Sir Torquil Norman, London, 15th May 2019