Born in 1904, Hilary “Harry” Fisher Page became a well known writer, broadcaster and designer of children’s educational toys.

He founded Kiddicraft in 1932 with a capital of £100.  He initially made wooden toys but was frustrated with the quality of the painted surface and so started to experiment with plastics.

He became one of the pioneers of the use of plastics as a new manufacturing medium for children’s toys.  Although this article will look at the Kiddicraft Miniatures range primarily, an interesting point to note is that Kiddicraft produced an interlocking plastic building brick range which was copied almost exactly by LEGO later on.

The Kiddicraft Miniatures were small reproductions of food and household items such as washing powder boxes, soup cans, jam and marmalade jars, ice cream cartons, soft and alcoholic drinks and even cigarette packets.  Kiddicraft Miniatures was the last project he worked on and became an all consuming passion.

This is an advertisement for the Miniatures range but as the image is such poor quality here is what it says:

Kiddicraft Miniatures…… are beautifully produced replicas of well known British food, drink and domestic products, eventually to number over 300 items.  All the little tins and cartons will contain packets of sugar sweets, and the little bottles pure sugar syrup.  Children can first stock the “shops” with one or other of the made up gift assortments and then continue to collect other items singly as they become available.  All single items will be within the scope of “pocket money”.

Hilary planned to make “over 300” different products and set out on what was perhaps the largest licensing arrangement in the toy industry with many different companies.

Kiddicraft eventually produced over 200 of these miniatures but the company simply could not deliver on all of Page’s promises and could not honour their agreement with the licensors.

Page became deeply troubled with the pressures on the business and feared the company would fold and tragically, he committed suicide on 24^th June 1957.

The collection pictured here features many items that were purchased at the Arcade and belongs to a regular customer and friend, Susan Mayes. She has very kindly written most of what you have just read, with a few additions from me. 

Happy belated birthday to our friends and neighbours at Hungerford Bookshop!  Emma and Alex have owned the bookshop for ten years now and to coincide with Hungerford Literary Festival, they decided to throw a party to celebrate.  

The shop was absolutely packed with people drinking champagne, nibbling on cupcakes and of course, reading books!  Thank you to Emma and Alex for inviting me and also for running such a brilliant bookshop for so long.  The town wouldn’t be the same without you!

This year’s festival will run from Friday 21st – Sunday 23rd October. Tickets are available from the bookshop.

To find out more about upcoming LitFest events check out this page to see if there’s anything you might enjoy participating in.  

Watch out for a brand new episode of BBC Bargain Hunt tomorrow, Friday 14th Octoberat 12.15 on BBC1.  

Featuring experts John Cameron and David Harper, the episode will take place in The Arcade and other shops in and around Hungerford.

If you miss it, it will be available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.

When we think of the 1960s we often think of The Beatles, Woodstock and the summer of ’69.  But it wasn’t all free love and rock n roll.  

The Cold War between The United States of America and Soviet Russia was at its height and the threat of nuclear war was a very real prospect for people all around the world.  

Leaflets and posters like the ones shown here were a common sight – as far as the general public were concerned, a bomb could drop at any time – and they would have no more than 4 minutes to prepare for it.

The threat of nuclear war was so real that the British government built hundreds of fallout shelters around the country and some more well-off home owners actually had their own private shelters installed on their property.  The shelter pictured was built by Fall Out Shelters (Deal, Kent) in 1962 and is in the back garden of a cottage in a village called Pluckley.  The current owner used it as a wine cellar until the damp got  to be too much of a problem. Photo credit Nick Catford.

But the purpose of this article is to
showcase an interesting item I was shown the other day.  The RADIAC Calculator No. 1 was produced by a company called Blundell Rules Ltd in the early 1950s.  The purpose of the item is to determine when it might be safe to emerge from a fallout shelter by calculating how badly contaminated your surrounding area will be at certain times after a nuclear explosion.

An ebay search shows that it is not a particularly rare item, but I have never seen one before.  

The disc can be taken apart and reassembled in a different configuration depending on whether the radiation was caused by a “sea burst” or a “land burst”.  

The disc is small and robust and the instructions are clear but whether or not it works remains a bit of a mystery.  Luckily, nobody ever had to test whether this little calculator was accurate or not.  

The Cold War eventually died down and for the current generation, it’s difficult to imagine that the threat of nuclear war was ever a reality.

West Berks Classic Vehicle Club

www.classicvehicles.org.uk

Hungerford Antiques Arcade

Classic Vehicle Display

Sunday 25^th September 2016

We would like to invite you to the WBCVC’s Autumn visit to the Hungerford Antiques Arcade, as seen on Bargain Hunt and many other TV programmes.  The visit will take place, this Sunday, 25^th September.  We are now in our 5^th year of this twice yearly event (May & September). 

Those of you that have attended this event before will remember the warm welcome the club receives, from Adrian, Rita and Alex, the Arcade traders, and general public.  

We have been asked if we could get to the Arcade around 9:30am, in order to get us settled before the High Street gets busy.  Adrian, Rita, Alex and all the traders in the Antiques Arcade are really looking forward to meeting the WBCVC again and our classic vehicles, so please try and attend if you can.

            As well as the Antiques Arcade Rafters Cafe there are several places to get lunch in Hungerford, (3 course or snack), or maybe a picnic or stroll by the side of the Kennet & Avon Canal, weather permitting.

Mike & Colleen

0794 905 5030 or email kents@mikekent.plus.com

Bizarre

There are some designers so iconic that even somebody who is not in the least bit interested in antiques can recognise them.  You’ve only got to watch one episode of bargain hunt or similar and the chances are you will hear certain names; Moorcroft, Murano, Whitefriars, Clarice Cliff.

With Clarice Cliff in particular, it is the colours and the simplicity of the designs that make the pieces so easily recognisable.

She started as a gilder at the age of 13 in potteries around the Stoke-on-Trent area before moving to A.J. Wilkinson in Burslem as an apprentice potter, where she was given the opportunity to practice some of her own work.  

By the time she was 25 her talent had been noticed and by age 28, she was signing her name along with the backstamp of the pottery.  It didn’t take long before her designs caught the eye of the public and she became a household name.

Crocus

The most iconic of all of Cliff’s designs are probably those based around crocuses as this was one of the most long produced patterns. It is still possible to pick up a piece of the more common designs for under £100 and although not as popular with the general public as it was 20-30 years ago, Cliff’s more unusual designs can still command staggering prices at auction.  In 2009, an 18 inch wall charger sold for an incredible £20,500!

It is this interest in Cliff’s work which has driven people in the past to fake popular designs and try to pass them off as originals.  If done well, it can take years for these forgeries to come to light, passing from collector to collector through auction house and private sales.  

Honolulu

One such forgery is pictured below.  The scene painted on the front of the plate is called “Idyll” (sometimes referred to as Crinoline Lady) and genuine examples of this pattern can be worth thousands of pounds.  

This one, however, is not a genuine article.  It is a forgery, produced with the intention to deceive, and to my knowledge it passed from an auction house, to a dealer and then onto another dealer until it was eventually spotted by a member of the Clarice Cliff Collector’s Club and it has now been taken off the market.  Forgeries like this actually harm the collectors market and it is also illegal to sell them under the Trade Descriptions Act.

The Clarice Cliff “Idyll” forgery

An interesting thing about this item is that the actual platter is a genuine piece of Clarice Cliff from sometime around the 1930s.  The backstamp is genuine and the orange and black banding around the edge are original and hand-painted.  However, this platter was never produced with the Idyll pattern painted on the front, so it immediately stood out when an expert saw it.  Also, the shades of orange in the banding should match the shade used for the foreground and the flower bed in the background.  To a trained eye, this is a definite forgery.  But to the average person, or even a casual collector, this looks like the real thing, and it fooled quite a few different people.

Having said all that, I actually think this item has some merit.  It is fascinating to think that somebody went to great lengths to hand paint this scene on an item that did have a certain appeal and a value and in doing so, they made the entire thing completely worthless.  The original platter will never be the same.

Genuine backstamp on the fake platter

It was certainly interesting to learn that there are some forgeries out there and that some of them are so good that they may very well be in your collection at home.

So beware if you are looking for the real thing.  Always check with a reputable source and don’t part with your money until you are sure.  

As a rule of thumb poets from World War One tend to spring to mind more than poets from the Second World War.

This year we are remembering the First World War as it is exactly one hundred years since the Battle of the Somme and it is important that we remember the great sacrifices made during those terrible years.

But as I walked along the High Street on a fine August day this was the last thing that I was thinking about.

Hungerford was vibrant and bathed in the bright August light and as I had a little time to kill I decided to pop into the arcade and look at the books.  It is a pleasant pastime and you are always likely to find something interesting.

On this occasion I found a first edition of The Collected Poems of Richard Spender which immediately stimulated my interest; I had come across Richard many years ago when studying the poets of World War Two.  But for everybody who remembers Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke who really remembers Richard Spender?

And because of this I thought I would write this very short article about the poet on the day that I purchased his collected poems.

Richard was born in Hereford on the 27th of June 1921 the youngest of four children.  After a period spent in London he moved to Stratford-on-Avon where he was educated.

Initially he was a delicate child but he soon grew stronger and spent his early days roaming the countryside and exploring the river.  He grew into a fine athlete and was a keen rower and a boxer and also enjoyed rugby a great deal.

In 1940 at the age of nineteen he found himself planning to go Oxford to study Modern History but this never took place because he, like a great number of young men of his generation decided to enlist.

He was at first in the young soldier’s battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment and then progressed into the Royal Ulster Rifles.  At first he was an instructor, but in October 1942 he volunteered to join the Parachute Regiment and soon was on his way to Africa with the 2nd Battalion.

Just over six months later on the night of the 28th – 29th of March 1943 he was killed leading his men in attack against German machine-gun positions in Sedjenane in Northern Tunisia.

He was later buried in the Military Cemetery in Tabarka.

Sadly, like many other young men in the various theatres of war, Richard died at a very young age.  But in his short life he left us with some fine poetry which I have always been fond of.  However, I am not going to quote any of his poetry in this article as I do not think that I should do so; instead I urge you to either find a book of his poetry or failing that read some of his poems on the internet.  His work may not be to all tastes but I am sure that you will admire it.

I did not venture out on that warm afternoon thinking that I would find a book of Richard’s poetry.  As normal I walked blindly into the arcade just to see what was there.  It is more fun that way.

Indeed I had not read any of Richard’s poetry for many years.  I thought of him occasionally if I was reading Second World War poetry but that was all.  If I had planned to locate a book of his work in Hungerford on that day then it is likely I would have drawn a blank, but there it was on the top of a pile of books facing the stairs which led to the Rafters Cafe.

I will leave you with the dedication that is to be found in his collected poems.

To my Mother and Father
and to King Edward VI School, Stratford-on-Avon,
because their joint conspiracy gave me
the happiest first twenty-one years of life
that anyone could dream of having.

Happy hunting.

This article was written by Stuart Miller-Osbourne

Hungerford Arcade know that we all like to have our little pleasures in life and antiques and collectables are amongst the most popular these days.  People who started their collections many years ago come into the Arcade to find that elusive piece that they have spent many months or years looking for.  When they find it, the excitement and pleasure is there for all to see.

When Kevin and Mary McLaren-Dunbar, along with their dog Kountess Kiki came into the Arcade looking for character jugs, they were not disappointed.  In fact, they were over-the-moon to find some that did did not have and had been searching for for quite a long time.  When they came to the desk to purchase the jugs, Kevin told us that he has a collection of at least 7,000 which will all be going to his Strathgart Hunting Lodge in Inverness.

Kevin and Mary live in London but they have been renovating the Strathgart Hunting Lodge for the past four years.  When it is finished all 7,000 character jugs will be moving in.    Hopefully, they will send us some photographs when they are settled.

Thank you Kevin and Mary for sharing a part of your life with us.  Rita