Museum #6 Pollock’s Toy Museum

Nice sort of rough-and-ready museum from the outside.

I’m not saying I visited this museum purely to have as many friends as the boy in the picture below… but toys are great, aren’t they?

As are games.
Some of the games we saw had brilliant names / descriptions.

Who Knows – An intellectual exciting game!

‘The New game of Retrieve’

‘Bricks of the Empire’ doesn’t sound quite so nice.

But my I wish I had a Cabinet of Conjuring Tricks like this.

I learnt that ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ were cheap popular fiction for the working class children. It would also make a fantastic band name. Penny Dreadfuls were full of stories about violence and criminal activity.
It wasn’t long before respectable publishers brought out slighter tamer magazines for market.
Penny Dreadfuls began to bring their publications into line, with Boys of England and Boys Leisure Hour.

It wasn’t until much later that the Beano came around.

This amazing kid carved the wooden boats on display by hand. He died at the age of eight. Brilliant craft.

We met the real Sooty, Sweep and Soo.

I never knew these were called Matreosehkas.

During the First World war, toy soldiers were created and proved very popular with young boys.
After the war had finished, the toy manufacturer ‘Britains’ launched a peace toy: the farmyard. The set was pretty expansive, including farmers, labourers, and dairy maids. The legendary, and very rare, village idiot was said to have been suggested by Queen Mary.

Perhaps more than anything though, this museum will be remembered for having the scariest dolls I’ve ever seen.

FIVE FACTS
#1. Snakes and Ladders is based upon an Indian game called Moksha-Patamu, which was often used for religious instruction. The game represented the journey of the soul through life and heaven, with the path shortening by virtue and good deeds, and lengthening by evil and vice.

#2. The earliest printed race game was The Game of Goose. It was invented in Florence and registered in England in 1597. This became the prototype for all European ‘track’ games.

#3. Frank Hornby, the Liverpool entrepreneur created the Dinky Toy, Hornby trains AND Meccano.

#4. The first powered toy trains were steam driven. Just like the real thing.

#5. Matchbox toys came about when two boys, aged twelve, decided they would go into business together when they were old enough to leave school.

2. Churchill War Rooms 
3. Cinema Museum 
4. Dennis Sever’s House 
5. Dr Johnson’s house 
6. Design Museum 
7. Down House 
8. The Geffrye Museum 
9. London Film Museum 
10. London Transport Museum 
11. Mansion House 
12. Brunel Museum 
13. Museum of the Order of St John 
14. Musical Museum 
15. Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret
16. Pollock’s Toy Museum 
17. Rose Theatre exhibition 
18. Fashion and Textile Museum 
19. Royal College of Music Archives and Museum of Instruments 
20. Sherlock Holmes Museum 
21. Twinings Museum 
22. V&A Museum of Childhood 
23. Bank of England museum 
24. The Stephens Museum