Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 2 (2014), p. 371

As the story goes, toy manufacturers realized the potential for playing at farming in the aftermath of the First World War. With a dip in consumers’ enthusiasm for lead soldiers and all things military, the London-based company Britains launched its Home Farm for Christmas 1921, beginning with a horse-drawn tumbrel. By the mid-1930s, one could buy a Model Home Farm set featuring ‘a nice assortment of Animals, Sheep, Pigs, Cows etc., Farm People, Horse Plough with Driver, and Four-wheeled Farm Waggon (sic) with Driver’. Toy tractors joined Britains’ range only from 1948, by which time the attractions of what the authors of Farming in Miniature refer to as ‘carpet farming’ (p. 64) were well established. Later cohorts of children had combine harvesters and crop sprayers to play with, as well as plastic churns and hay bales to load and stack.

Farming in Miniature presents a catalogue of the toy and scale-model farm vehicles made in Britain during the period c.1920 to 1980. Before then, the market depended on wooden or tinplate toy wagons from Germany, or more modern models from the United States; after 1980, some British brand names survived, but most toy manufacture had moved overseas. The study will eventually fill two volumes, the content organized alphabetically by maker’s name. Most of these miniature vehicles were meant to be played with, raising obvious questions about the attraction of agricultural themes for children in an increasingly urbanized society. Lone Star marketed a Farmer’s Boy series of tractors and implements from 1978 to 1979, though one assumes it wasn’t just farmers’ boys who bought them.

There were some interesting connections to the makers of full-size machinery. Ferguson – always innovative in its marketing – brokered an arrangement with Airfix, who produced models of Ferguson tractors to be given away by salesmen. Chad Valley, maker of wooden and die-cast tractors, branched out with To Market (early 1950s), a board game with little Ferguson playing pieces: players landed on squares carrying promotional messages for the brand, such as ‘Hydraulic control prevents damage from hidden obstacles – go forward 3’. Links with machinery firms also led to models aimed more explicitly at adults: Denzil Skinner advertised for business in Farm Mechanization magazine in the early 1950s, showcasing its expertise in making ‘perfect miniatures’ for ‘display and demonstration’.

The book includes a few novelty tractors: Die Casting Machine Tools (DCMT) created a clockwork Tricky Tractor in 1949, which did stunts, and a subsidiary of the firm produced squeaky vinyl tractors for babies in the late 1960s. But model tractors were rarely generic. There were lots of model Fergusons, Massey-Fergusons, Fordson Majors, and a few David Browns. The colour of these vehicles – such a distinctive feature of branding in agricultural machinery – could be surprisingly varied in their interpretation for the toy market. Airfix’s Ferguson tractor came in a rather random range of colours, apparently reflecting the difficulties of sourcing plastics in the late 1940s.

Some striking features emerge from this overview: large numbers of toy tractors in the late 1940s and early 1950s were driven by toy land girls; trailers hauling timber were clearly very popular; old-fashioned horse-drawn wagons and hay carts were the mainstay of many manufacturers’ catalogues well into the 1960s. Most farm toys before and after the Second World War drew on traditional forms of country life rather than reflecting changes in agricultural practice, and working horses persisted long after they had disappeared from most farms. By the 1960s, however, toy farms were embracing technical development and modernity, and motor vehicles and implements became more of a focus. From the 1970s, Britains employed a consultant for their farm models who spent the rest of his time working for the Agricultural Development Advisory Service.

The collectors’ market has inspired most publications on the subject, and this volume is also aimed primarily at that specialist readership, providing a well-illustrated guide to variations in models produced, and reproducing images of packaging and trade catalogues where available. Most of the book is devoted to the technical and manufacturing history, with only brief excursions into reflection on the phenomenon of ‘farming in miniature’ and the ways in which it did and did not relate to contemporary agriculture at a scale of 1:1. But one of the problems in studying the history of toy farms has been access to adequate source material. With its companion volume (which will cover the remaining manufacturers, from Dinky to Wend-al), Farming in Miniature offers the first thorough survey of what was marketed and when, opening up opportunities for historians to take a closer look at this aspect in the popular representation of agriculture, prominent in the lives of so many children as they were growing up.