Pollock's Toy Museum Trust

Toy Boats exhibition – The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, to 31 October 2010

This is a delightful exhibition that shows how successful and popular toy exhibitions can be, even in museums that are not dedicated to this subject. Much of the material comes from the Musée National de la Marine in Paris, a city where you can still hire model yachts to sail on the ponds in several parks. In London, one sees pond yachts in antique shops more often than in the water.

Other items come from private collections. Most are from the 19th century when tinplate toys began to be mass-produced. The designers did not care about exact reproduction of the real world, but went for the spirit of the thing. There are boats that go on ponds and in the bath, and others on wheels for use on the floor or tabletop. Some of the boats still have their original box, such as the one from Sutcliffe, c.1950, that reads ‘Take Command of the UNDA-WUNDA DIVING SUBMARINE."

There is no printed catalogue, but quite a lot of information is on the NMM website.

Will this exhibition help a revival of model yacht sailing among children? There are a few yachts available in the shops, although nothing as nice to handle as the Star yachts ‘guaranteed to sail’ from Birkenhead that ran from around 1920 to 1990.
The problem is not so much lack of boats as lack of suitable water. The Whitestone Pond in Hampstead, for example, was once a Mecca for small children carrying boats, but for many years the water has been too shallow to allow a good launch from the edge.