Of Men and Models

Written by Ian Marchant; published 2003 by New Holland Publishers

I remember as a child, aged perhaps eight or nine, being taken by my grandmother to visit an elderly neighbour of hers - a kindly old countryman with nut brown skin, twinkling blue eyes, and the strong hands of a craftsman. I was taken to visit this paragon (I can no longer remember his name) because he made beautiful models of gypsy caravans from used matchsticks. Around the walls was ranged a matchwood caravanersai: brightly painted boxtops, elegant Reading wagons and gaudy showman’s vans.

Sitting in the old man’s sunlit parlour that afternoon, surrounded by the fruit of a lifetime’s work, I thought to myself, ’Stupid old fool. Why on earth would anybody go to all the bother of sticking together hundreds of matchsticks, when you could get a nice kit at the toyshop for two-and-six?’

He died a few months after our meeting, just as the new money came in, from a smoking related illness.

How naive I was. Plastic construction kits, which were what lads of my generation thought of as ‘models’, were, in fact, a very new phenomenon. Older people, if they wanted to make models, didn’t have kits, they had matchsticks, or lollipop sticks, or cardboard and balsa. They had tissue paper and flour and water. Above all, they had skill and patience. Growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we had neither. We had Airfix.

From the introduction to Ian Marchant's Men and Models.

I came across this book last year. It wasn't quite what I expected, but it turned out to be a fun and quick read about, as the title says, some men and the models they've built.