A Cabinet of Wonders

The last few weeks have been a bit of a rollercoaster for me with the loss of my mum at xmas and the consequent clearance of the house where I spent most of my childhood. I'd previously lost my dad ten years earlier and he had been a serial hoarder like me. He was also an aeronautic and railway fanatic and left me a small mountain of books and magazines to pore over. When we recently arrived at the point where we had to remove every item from the old house, I found myself getting to the bottom of each and every pile in order to sort out his collections. In one way it was very sad and moving as I came across dozens of notebooks where he had painstakingly recorded details of trains and planes and made tracings of diagrams and drawings of the machinery. These I naturally kept, but there were also clippings and scraps from dozens of mags that I had to discard. Although there was lots of stuff I couldn't justify keeping, I did take tons of magazines and books on both subjects.

In between sorting out copies of Air Pictorial and Railway World from the fifties onwards, I found old Hobbies Annuals, toy catalogues, plans and instructions from all manner of my old toys and electrical appliances. As I sifted through the reams of papers, I spotted a familiar logo on a folded sheet of paper. When I retrieved it and opened it out, I was utterly stunned to discover the original SWORD Specification sheet from the Scout 2 toy I had as a boy! I distinctly recall buying the toy in the late sixties while on a day trip to West Kirby in the Wirral area of Merseyside and bringing it back on the train. My dad being the careful person he was, obviously retrieved the sheet as I ripped open the box and started flying the spaceship round the beach and had stored it safely on our return for forty years or so. I had no recollection at all of the sheet - even when I saw a version on the blog, it appeared news to me.

Almost at the same time, I looked through various loose books in his cupboard and came across an Aircraft Annual from the mid sixties, which while I flicked through revealed a page on the Dyna Soar project and a reference to the NASA Prospector plan!

 

 

Further rooting about in the piles of mags revealed other amazing illustrations and photographs from the early sixties such as the SNECMA Coleoptre on the front of this issue of Air Pictorial, a radical VTOL design for a plane displayed at the Paris Air Show. Oddly, this plane actually made it into a very rare toy which surfaced on Ebay some time ago. Easily mistaken for a rocket with a fat body, the plane had a radical annular wing and 'tail-sat' on four wheels for vertical take off and landing. Unfortunately, test flights were never truly successful and the craft never made production.

I now have a vast pile of Air Pictorials, Flying Review and a host of hardback books on planes and trains needing a good home - so if you are interested and prepared to collect - let me know before my attic floor gives way with the weight!