Donation: In memory of Michael Gilkes

On display: the Great Central 

Today we put out a new display exhibit, a brown, cream and gold Great Central Railway clerestory-windowed Corridor Coach, made by Bing for Bassett-Lowke in gauge 1 in around ~1904.

It's an early, rare and imposing piece produced as part of a promotional arrangement between Bassett-Lowke Ltd. and the Great Central Railway, and it's displayed behind our Bing/B-L GCR 1014 Sir Alexander locomotive, which was part of the same GC-BL production deal. As a historical aside, the high "spine" of the carriage has clerestory windows painted along the sides – the early Pullman carriages used this arrangement, with the overhead space allowing in extra daylight during the day, and also housing gas lamps for lighting during darker hours. This combination of wood, gas and flame was highly dangerous in a crash, and the shape of carriage roofs changed with the later introduction of electric lighting.

The purchase of the coach was funded by Audrey Gilkes in memory of her husband Michael Gilkes (1923-2014), one of the original founding trustees of the museum, who is much missed.

Donation: Britains Farmyard set

Today we received a donation of a Britains Farmyard set, together with a range of Britains Ltd hollowcast lead animals.

The Hugar for Britains Ltd Farmyard

We already have a nice display of farm buildings and hollowcast farm animals on display, but we were missing the "Hugar Models for Britains Ltd" buildings, so we were very pleased to be offered this one by Mary Wyatt, and we'll find some way to cram it into an adjacent display before too long, probably into the area below the main farm section in Arch Two.

Dollhouse Furniture display - My Dolly's Home

My Dolly's Home, front cover

The new dollhouse furniture display areas have now been fitted out with backgrounds adapted from Doris Davey's ~1920/1921 "My Dolly's Home".

Davey's book is a charming book that lets readers explore a flattened-out dollhouse - they can move between rooms by hinged doors, look inside cupboards, and peek over garden fences – it's essentially the equivalent of a modern interactive children's "tablet" app, but executed in paper in the early 1920s.

Changing the backgrounds to fit the proportions of the display space required a certain amount of digital trickery, with items of furniture being moved, new areas of wall being "cloned" or invented, new graduated stipplework being produced to allow pairs of pages to merge seamlessly together (which they sometimes didn't in the original artwork), and the recreation of occasional furniture legs and corners that were no longer obscured by other objects once we'd "stretched" a room.

The justification for all this work was our determination to produce a set of backgrounds that were stylistically absolutely in-period for the early C20th, to create an appropriate context for the actual exhibits. Most people admiring the dollhouse furniture will never stop to look at the backgrounds, and if they do, never notice all the digital reworking that we carried out, but that's exactly as it should be.

Mobaco!

Mobaco manual, front cover

Mobaco was a building construction set popular in the Netherlands between the wars. Consisting of baseboards, slotted wooden rods and panel pieces that drop down between them, it's reminiscent of a giant-sized Bayko set, and it's generally reckoned to have been the inspiration behind the smaller-sized Bakelite-based system designed by Charles Plimpton.

Since we have a significant quantity of Mobaco, we felt that it was high time that we built something from it, as although our construction set cabinets are pretty full, Mobaco buildings are large enough that we could display something made with the system on top of a cabinet.

Flicking through our copy of the No.4 set manual, there was only one real contender: the monster-sized five-storey Town Hall or School featured as a decorative and inspirational line-drawing on the last page of the manual, making it (apparently) the biggest official Mobaco building design.

No sense in starting small, eh?

Matters were somewhat complicated by our never having actually made anything with Mobaco before, and the fact that the picture didn't come with any sort of plans or instructions.

The second floor completed

Mobaco is a little bit more tricky than it looks, at least, for very ambitious models – the floor-pieces hold everything together, and have to be laid as double overlapping layers, a process that becomes progressively more difficult as a large building progresses and one starts to run out of key pieces. Another complication is the careful stacking of vertical pillars to achieve the required height, given the bizarre combinations of pillar-heights and piece heights. Although 90% of the building went up the same day, it took over a week of additional intermittent fiddling to get the complete building finished, with the process of carefully pulling out rods and replacing them with combinations of smaller rods making the process feel something like a cross between assembling a 3D jigsaw puzzle and playing Jenga.

M.C Escher must have had nightmares that looked like this

The final completed masterpiece(!) will be appearing in the museum for the 25th anniversary celebrations, starting on the 7th May 2016.