More celebrations…interviews and influences!
Wherever you are in the world when you read these words there’s a good chance that you will have heard something about the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations here in the UK this weekend. That got me thinking and reminiscing about times of old and just how far we have come in this great hobby of ours over the past 60 years. Although some more senior readers may know better, this great hobby of (plastic) scale modelling hadn’t even really got going in the form we know sixty years ago!
When you read some of the interviews with members of the SMN Review Team you get an insight into what were and are the major influences on us. Personally I really have enjoyed reading those and you can expect to see many more ‘go-live’ in the next few weeks and beyond.
I can remember it as if it were yesterday… walking around Bromley library in Kent where I grew up thinking what book I should borrow – I should have been looking for ‘work’ books that would be useful for school of course but I suddenly saw this book and couldn’t believe it. Wow! I love aircraft… I go to airshows when Mum and Dad take me – which was every year to Biggin Hill through the Sixties – surely because they couldn’t stand the grief my brothers and I would have given them if they said no!!
… but now, maybe I could make better replicas of the real thing? How cool would that be? It didn’t get much better as I had that book out on loan for weeks and weeks – I just kept renewing it time and again until many years later I saw this book you see here for sale under a club table at a model show – a bit worse for wear (it has had the fly sheet inside ripped out that has the publication date on it), but I didn’t care, I had to have it!
You can see that making models from wood was still pretty mainstream but as the second image shows, plastic was becoming more and more popular with the introduction of injection-moulding techniques.
What were your earliest influences and how did you get into this great hobby? Get involved on Facebook or e-mail me direct and we’ll publish some of these (please use the contact form in the Mag).