UPDATED: 1968 And 1969: The Space Hopper In Britain...

From Mettoy - Our wonderful orange friend...

May 1968, England, UK - hop into summer with the spacehopper!

We were puzzled by the BBC's dreadfully researched I Love The 1970s series some years back. We were convinced that the space hopper was a craze well before the 1970s began. Well, feast your eyes on the above. The earliest space hopper ads we can find are from April 1968, and in 1968 there was a charity space hopper race in Hyde Park and toy shops and others were organising space hopper races elsewhere. This was MAINSTREAM pop culture, proven by newspapers of the time.

A carnival space hopper race in England, UK, 1969

The BBC's I Love series was riddled with errors - the series was reaching into 1981 pop culture in I Love 1979. The Rubik's Cube was not named, remanufactured or sold as such until 1980 - the trademark was registered in the UK on 7 May, 1980. The tiny seepage of Magic Cubes (the first incarnation of the Cube) beyond Hungarian borders was nowhere near enough to bring about any mainstream craze in the UK. Jonathan King took a Rubik's Cube onto Top of the Pops during the summer of 1980, describing it as the 'latest craze in America', it was certainly NOT a craze in the UK. The vast majority of us had no idea what it was.

The BBC seems to have a real obsession with pouring crazes from other decades into the '70s. We don't know why. In the case of the 1980s, is it political? The big bad Thatcher/Reagan 1980s rewritten as completely void of fond memories? Or are their researchers simply stupid?

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

Here is an ad for toys, including the space hopper (or SPACEHOPPER, as it is written in the ad!) from the Cambridge Evening News, England, 1969. Click on the illustration for a closer look...

Due to a faintly tedious tendency to hype the 1970s, both the BBC's "I Love 1970s" website and the Toy Retailers website state that the hopper arrived in Britain in 1971. However, the advertisement you are looking at is real, dates from 1969, and describes the Hopper as a "trend"...


For doubting Thomases, here is the date of the ad - 14 November, 1969 (as with the 1968 and other 1969 clippings), and I would be happy to provide photocopies of the entire newspapers to anybody who cares to examine the matter further - simply go to my profile for the e-mail address. Note: our later research has revealed, of course, that the space hopper was quite old news in the UK by the time the 1970s even started.

This British Toy Fair brochure from January 1969 features the space hopper, too (see page illustration on the right).

The Miller's Guide Collecting The 1960s by Madeleine Marsh also lists the space hopper as a late 1960s item.

As early as 1967 something called the "bouncing egg", a space hopper-type toy, was at toy fairs in England. The Science and Society galleries contain an excellent picture from April 1967 (featured above), labelled "12 year old Matthew Redmond entertaining people on Stockport Road with his ‘Bouncing Egg’ from the toy fair".

Copyright SSPL/Manchester Daily Express - not to be reproduced without permission.

The space hopper as we know it today, complete with its distinctive face, came into being in 1968 and was on sale in the UK from April that year - and an immediate trend. See illustration below for a round-up of the hopper state-of-play in England and the USA in 1969.

Hopping mad in 1969... the Space Hopper, complete with its highly distinctive face is in England, UK; the Hoppity Hop and Ride-A-Roo are rampant in the Christmas 1969 Sears and Montgomery Wards mail order catalogues in America.

If you are interested in pop culture, check out your local newspaper archive (I found the 1968 and 1969 space hopper ads in mine). Advertisements for clothes and toys and articles on fads and fashions provide valuable pointers as to what was "hot and what was not" way back then.

Do not, under any circumstances, take the word of the BBC's I Love 1970s, I Love 1980s, or I Love 1990s sites or TV programmes. The BBC's tendency to hype the 1970s ruined the I Love... venture and has infected other sites, like the Toy Retailers. A few years ago, the Toy Retailers site was listing klackers (or klick-klacks) as the "undoubted" toy craze of 1971 - which I'm pretty sure is correct.

In the wake of I Love The 1970s, the Toy Retailers 1971 on-line information was altered to declare the space hopper "Craze Of The Year" - which is completely untrue as the Toy Retailers Association has NEVER made a "Craze of The Year" award and, besides that fact, the space hopper, although still quite popular, was old news by then!

The Hopper was fun, and threw up a lovely echo as I bounced down the path at the side of my gran's house...

Happy days!

Passe Partout Framing - Coming To A Sticky End...

A reel of Samuel Jones Butterfly Brand passe partout tape. Passe partout was becoming passé in the 1960s.

Samuel Jones, a company that had a factory in St Neots, Cambridgeshire, not far from my home town, made passe partout. It was a paper tape - used to frame pictures. The tape could be bought in reels and, once water was applied to the gummed side, would stick to a range of surfaces FOREVER!

Lordy, was it sticky!

For passe partout tape framing, one would select a picture, buy glass cut to measure, make a backing card for the picture, insert passe partout hanging rings into the reverse of the backing card, mount the picture on the front, place the glass over it and tape the whole lot together. There really was an art to passe partout - it could be terribly messy.

But, carefully done, passe partout frames could look pretty darned special. The tape came in a range of attractive finishes.

Passe partout was popular for many, many years, but was in decline by the 1960s. The reels pictured above date from around then. My gran used to get us children doing passe partout pictures on rainy days when we visited her in the 70s, and I last bought a reel of passe partout to frame a picture for my bedsit in 1986.

By then, with a wide range of cheap ready-made picture frames available, passe partout tape framing was really on its last legs. I'm told that the last reels were sold in the early 1990s.

A brand of tape is sold today which is sometimes referred to as "passe partout", but it is cloth, not paper, and bears no resemblance to the tape described here.

Above and below - front and back views of a passe partout picture framing kit box from the 1950s or '60s.

A Brief History of the Lava Lamp...

The history of the lava lamp began in a pub in Hampshire, England, with a very unusual egg timer.

In the 1940s, one Edward Craven-Walker walked into the aforementioned pub and saw a strikingly odd object on the counter behind the bar. It was a glass cocktail shaker containing some kind of mucus-like blob floating in liquid. Mr Craven-Walker made enquiries, and was told by the barman that the device was an egg timer. The 'blob' was actually a clump of solid wax in clear liquid.

How did this “time” your egg, wondered Mr Craven-Walker? The barman elaborated:

“You put the shaker in the boiling water with your egg, and as the boiling water cooks the egg it also melts the wax turning it into an amorphous blob of goo.”

When the wax floated to the top of the jar, the egg was done. Mr Craven-Walker was very impressed by what he saw and he began to wonder - could he turn the egg timer into a lamp with thicker oil that would form sculptural shapes? Would this be a viable commercial product?

The inventor of the blobby egg timer, somebody called Dunnet, was deceased, so Craven-Walker was able to patent the invention for himself. The Astro/Lava Lamp was finally released in 1963. Craven-Walker had spent fifteen years perfecting the design.

In the hippy-trippy Summer of Love in 1967, the lamp gained great popularity - mainly with trendies and people experimenting with mind-expanding drugs.

In the early 1970s, the lamp became deeply naff. It was seen on the serving hatch at Stan and Hilda Ogden’s in Coronation Street - a sure sign of its complete and utter non-trendiness, and then Mildred Roper acquired one in George & Mildred.

Oh dear! My mother, middle aged and with absolutely lousy taste, bought one and we spent the evenings trying to avoid looking at something that resembled a blob of orange liver in yellow bile floating up and down.

At our local pub, which was all plastic beaten copper tables and “genuine” olde Englishe horse brasses, a lava lamp suddenly appeared. Frumpy Nellie and Fred, the mine hosts, were thrilled with the thing and became a bit of a laughing stock amongst right-minded regulars.

Finally, the lava lamp’s fascination for (a minority of) 30 and 40-somethings evaporated, and by 1980 they were just about dead and gone.

C. 1988, the awful blobby shapes associated with lava lamps appeared in a couple of pop videos. The new drug culture of the Acid House/Rave era seemed happy to embrace a couple of icons from the original Summer of Love. The lava lamp was one, the Smiley Face was another. Not that 1988 seemed like a second Summer of Love to me. It was faster and more streetwise - “Right on one, matey!” but, as we moved into the 1990s, 1960s trends became more and more “in” and lava lamp sales boomed.

Apparently more lava lamps were sold in the 1990s than in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s combined.

Bleurgh!!

1969: David Bowie and The Stylophone...

The Dubreq Stylophone, a miniature electronic musical instrument, invented in 1967 by one Brian Jarvis, consisted of a metal keyboard that was played by touching it with a stylus.

David Bowie used a Stylophone on his 1969 hit Space Oddity and Rolf Harris advertised them.

How exciting! A great deal of fuss has been made of the Stylophone on 1970s nostalgia shows and websites (70s? It was actually first available in the 60s!) but that, in my opinion, simply shows desperation to glitz the 70s up.

The only person I ever knew that owned a stylophone was my dear old gran, who had just got rid of her piano to make more space.

Sadly, she found the Stylophone no substitute.

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1969: The Raleigh Chopper Bike Arrives in Britain...

"English High-Rise Bikes..."
Two 1969 advertisements for the Raleigh Chopper bike...

The famous Raleigh Chopper bike went on sale in America in 1968 and in Britain in September 1969.

The bike was invented by one Alan Oakley and enjoyed a long period of popularity here.