Once upon a time between the two world wars, before there were computers, pocket calculators, 3D printers or even televisions, boys left school at fourteen and took up apprenticeships where they learned specific skills under master craftsmen. My father was no different, but he was much more than a craftsman. When he retired the business kept him on for another ten years on an ad hoc consultancy basis simply because there was no one like him. He was an artist capable of drawing anything and making everything he could see in his head in spite of never having an art lesson in his life. He was trained in metal die casting but the age of television offered unparalleled opportunities in the toy industry. However we might view the 1960s and the obsession with toy guns, this was the age of the cowboy heroes such as Wyatt Earp and the Lone Ranger to say nothing of the beginnings of the James Bond franchise. They all needed weapons, and romanticised decorated weapons at that, that we boys could run up and down the streets shooting at each other. The ubiquitous cap guns were everywhere and I was particularly proud of my Buntline Special, the long barrel version of the colt that would ‘take a month of Sundays to draw’ even in the hands of Wyatt Earp.
This was where my father came in. George Todd made the original, one off, positives for the weapons themselves but more specifically the hand carved butts and barrels before the factory set to turning out millions of them in die moulds using soft metal allows. I watched him hand-carve a stagecoach and six horses out of cylinder of resin using an engraving tool, the whole thing to fit beneath or along the barrel. This wasn’t simply etched into the surface but raised above the surface and emerging at an angle as though the lead horses were about to launch into space. The same was true of the horse’s heads and bison heads on the gun butts. They were in the end just adjuncts to the murderous intent of small boys but you could feel the shapes beneath your fingers.
When Roger Moore played James Bond in Moonraker he needed a space age weapon. The so-called ray gun that appeared in the film was at a European trade fair and in the shops within weeks. George Todd said that he knocked in up in a day and had it on the truck as a one-off sample by the following morning. I never owned one of these having moved onto other pursuits in my teenage years such as folk guitar, girls and the Beatles but nevertheless, a whole generation of small boys re-enacted the exploits of James bond on street corners and in the woods behind the housing estate where we all grew up. They just never knew who had created them or that he lived at number 321 and probably wouldn’t have cared if they did.
But it wasn’t just guns. He spent weeks in the garage on winter nights one year working on a toy for blind children. Taking a spherical ball of resin about fifteen centimetres across he mapped out the alphabet and accompanying images on the surface and then carved them about five millimetres deep so that inquisitive fingers could trace the three-dimensional shapes. There were no spaces between the letter forms so it all had to fit like a jigsaw. This was hollow cast in rubber eventually and we had one of the first knocking about the house for years. I remember the difficulty he had with H for house and making the house look like a house on the curving surface. A remarkable achievement. In the end though he was just the beginning of a factory process and his name was never included in any of the promotion material.
He never called himself an artist and knew little or nothing about the world of artists, but the drawings on the walls of his house of cityscapes and the portraits he drew as a teenager said otherwise. Born at a different time, who knows. He died in March 2021 a few months shy of his 99th birthday. A life lived.