Toys of the trade: John Bull outfit and Lilliput typewriter

John Bull outfits came in all sizes - but you had to keep on buying more because it was easy to lose the little black rubber letters...

If you play with Meccano do you grow up to be an engineer? Did my childhood toys make me a journalist, or was it an in-born love of writing that made me ask for John Bull printing sets and a typewriter?

On Saturdays we shopped in the nearby town and I went through a phase when my special treat was a new John Bull outfit. It’s a funny use of the word “outfit”, but that’s what I remember them as – John Bull outfits. We could only ever afford the small sets, but they gave me hours of pleasure.

I could usually afford only small John Bull sets like this one...

For those who don’t know what on earth I am on about, I’d better explain that John Bull was the brand name and the set included long bendy strips of black rubber letters and numbers, which you cut into single letters with scissors and composed into words and sentences in a small red plastic rack with a handle at the back. So you could then press this into the inky pad provided and “print” on paper.

There was a pair of tweezers for handling the fiddly letters, but I was always losing some as they fell on the floor and bounced away, which is why every so often a new set was needed. The letters were in reverse, of course, as the thing worked on a “letterpress” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterpress_printing) principle, so you had to make sure they were the right way up.

Maybe that’s why a decade or so later I was pretty good as the “stone sub” on a real newspaper, being able to read what it said in the galleys upside-down and back-to-front.

As a child I always dreamed of producing my own newspaper but didn’t follow it through, just printing odds and ends with that John Bull outfit.

I think my Lilliput typewriter was a bit like this - certainly I remember it had green keys - I really wanted a pink plastic Petite one...

On the same lines, I asked for a typewriter for Christmas. I really wanted a pink, plastic Petite typewriter, which was all the rage. So as often happened in my childhood, I was disappointed when I received a very workmanlike tin Lilliput typewriter instead. But I have to say it was probably more realistic than the Petite and gave me years of pleasure.

The first (terrible) story I wrote on my typewriter featured the characters from Gerry Anderson's Fireball XL5...

The first story I typed was called “They Stole the Sun!” and it was based on the characters of my favourite Gerry Anderson TV series, Fireball XL5. Oh dear, I’m sure it was absolutely terrible!

I typed on what seems now to be very small paper – around the size of what we now call A5, although the size probably had some quaint old-fashioned name like half-letter or memo. I remember buying packs from the stationery shop – Henry Mullock & Son, in Newport. I had an addiction to pens and paper and artists’ materials from a young age…
But back to the junior typewriter… I seem to remember it had no keys for the numbers one and zero, so I used a lower-case L and capital O instead (although the pictured model does seem to have a 1).

I was so surprised when I finally got my hands on a real grown-up typewriter – in fact I used L as 1 for months when I first started training as a journalist.

My final “toy of the trade” was a big old dark-red dictionary, which I browsed just for fun. It became so worn that the covers eventually fell off and then the first and last pages – the aardvarks were the first to go…

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