Sweeping Up My Dairy Milk Crumbs with My Plastic Toy Broom

I've just been watching a Gtech AIR Ram advert on TV. You know the one, where the inventor Nick Grey promises that you'll break free. It still looks like hoovering to me!

It did remind me of something though. I'm pretty sure that there was a toy hoover in my parent's house. Now I can't swear to it being mine but it would make sense as I was the only small kid in the house. I did have some younger nieces so it may well have been theirs.

I don't have a problem with hoovering as a lad but imagine that gender-based toy buying was strong in the Sixties. 

To muddy the water even more I know that I had access to some toy sweeping brushes, a hand brush and a dustpan. I can see them now but again they may not have been mine.

Another household gizmo in toy form that I recall was a plastic iron. It had a dial and a cable with a suckered plug on the end.

One gadget I did own was a plastic telephone. It was an old fashioned BT payphone toy like those once found in BT phone-boxes [what's happening to those - no-one uses a pay phone now surely?]. It was a great toy with a phone dial and a slot for shoving in plastic money. I knew I'd got this from a lodger called Len who lodged in our house along with other lodgers. 

I had thought they were dockers from Preston docks nearby but my Sister told me last year that they were GPO workers. GPO stood for General Post Office and was the state-owned supplier of mail and phone services until around 1980 I think. This made even more sense as I can well imagine a GPO worker giving me a toy payphone.

For some reason this has reminded me of a lovely thing I also had. It was a chocolate vending dispenser made of red plastic. It stood up and when you pushed in a coin a little bar of Dairy Milk chocolate popped out the bottom! It stood up and I suppose it was a money box as well.

Did you have any toy household items like these readers?