Wee Plastic Hats Off to Ole Kirk Christiansen!

Wee Plastic Hats Off to Ole Kirk Christiansen!

In 1949, while most of Europe was scratting around in search of construction materials to rebuild towns and cities destroyed in an horrific war, a carpenter called Ole Kirk Christiansen, in his simple and rustic factory in the Danish town of Billund, began manufacturing coloured interlocking plastic bricks for children to play with. His company, which had already been producing wooden toys for decades, was called ‘Lego’, a word derived from the Danish phrase leg godt, which translates into English as ‘play well’. The brand name Lego was soon given to dear ole Ole’s innovation, replacing the original but less catchy ‘Automatic Binding Bricks.’ Had this change not taken place, I wonder if a million parents every day would hop on their painful feet and say ‘Oh, bloody hell! I’ve just stood on an Automatic Binding Brick!’  

I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been born in 1957 because by then Lego had already been in existence a whole eight years. Even now, not a day goes by without me wondering what people did for entertainment prior to its invention. How did they cope? I suspect that such a void in their culture was a major contributing factor to the post-war baby boom. But the big question is, how would I have coped during my childhood without it?

No matter what we might have learned from the work of psychologist Sigmund Freud, I’d say it’s blatantly obvious that the availability of Lego in the early years of a human life does more to develop a child’s psyche than anything else, including breast milk and Postman Pat pop-up books. To prove my theory, I offer the example that John and Edward Grimes (collectively known as Irish rock legends, Jedward) would have had access to Lego as youngsters, but Adolf Hitler most definitely didn’t.

Although sensible and precautionary, I find it strange and sad that its small pieces are considered unsuitable for children under the age of three. During my infancy I entertained myself by chewing for long hours on a particularly interesting dog-shaped wooden rattle coated in paint of the finest lead content and purchased from a stall in the darkest corner of Middlesbrough market where people these days go to buy the less harmful heroin. By the time I had ingested all of the toy’s toxins I was old enough to join the other kids in the street to kick about an inflated pig’s bladder (kids from poorer families struggled because their pigs’ bladders still had the trotters attached). At that point Lego existed but I was unaware of it. Items on display in the local toy shop window were a ticking time bomb that would one day go off and change my life immeasurably.

It was probably one of those northern industrial Christmases in the early 1960s with black snow, brown ale and adults exchanging gifts of large tins of Willy Woodbine cigarettes when I became the recipient of my first box of Lego. I was instantly hooked. Other popular toys at the time were things that required little more than spinning or throwing or pushing or shooting or whatever it is you do to yo-yos, but with a pile of these little pieces of plastic enchantment I could do almost anything. With my bricks and a bit of thought, ships, rockets, trains and posh houses all became possibilities; as was the pet hamster that I had yearned for, though I would have still preferred a live organic one. In my wildly imaginative mind there was no limit to what I could build, except when I reached a point where I’d used up all the pieces. But subsequent Christmases, birthdays and first Communion day, together with what I bought with the money I earned from my weekend chimney sweeping job, saw my box of Lego grow and my creativity grew with it.

Other plastic construction toys were available but they were all absolute rubbish. There were Stickle Bricks, which resembled the curlers that the grown up female members of the family and odd Uncle Dermot would put in their hair on a Friday evening to make themselves look gorgeous. But you couldn’t build a speedboat with them. There were also Mini Bricks which looked like those very small pieces of Lego but were a thousandth of an inch too big so they were totally incompatible. My mother used to refer to my Lego as my Mini Bricks, which infuriated me. Some hopelessly uneducated aunt once treated me to a box of Mini Bricks for being a good boy. I politely thanked her, put them out of sight under my bed and remained perfectly calm until the day my mother tipped them all into the big box of Lego for tidiness’ sake. That day saw my introduction to the feelings of disbelief, outrage and anger.

Meccano was a bit too scientific and nerdy, and with Bayko it was only possible to build three bedroom pre-war detached houses, so both were disgracefully middle class and totally unacceptable. 

Miraculously, although everything else from my childhood has gone (I blame my mother, so thank you for that Sigmund Freud), I still have that original Lego and it has been played with by many other kids over the course of the sixty years since it came into my possession. I still love it. When my kids were small they loved the fact that I loved Lego and I would play with them using their bricks for up to half an hour after the point at which they had gone off to do something else because I had completely taken over the proceedings.

I could build the Eiffel Tower or Thunderbird Two from memory, so it saddens me these days to see that every box of Lego comes with a set of instructions and the end result is exactly what the children are told to do by a faceless designer in an office in an unknown location, and what is shown in the picture on the box. They’re like three dimensional jigsaw puzzles that are put together once and then left to gather dust until the kids leave home at which point they’re transferred to the loft for a few years before being given away, with intense feelings of reluctance and guilt, to a charity shop.

In my day a pack of these bricks would prepare a child’s mind for an adventure in a world of unfettered inventiveness but now it merely sets him or her up for a lifetime of assembling Ikea flat pack furniture. So I’ve encouraged kids to build their model Harry Potter Fetish Dungeons or Somali Pirate Ships once, dismantle them, hide the instruction booklet and then just build whatever they want with what lies before them, which always turns out to be a lot more fun. No child has ever laughed at not being able to find the red semi-circular piece referred to in step six on page forty-three, but no child has ever burst into tears whilst building their own creation of a flying house on wheels driven by sheep.

I no longer play with my Lego alone (well, not very often) but my interest in it remains strong. Whilst trekking the Inca Trail in Peru not many years ago, I was delighted to learn that all those massive walls, palaces and temples along the way to Machu Picchu were built from stone carved in the same way as the Lego building principle with lumps on the top that interlocked with holes in the bottom. Ancient Incas used neither mortar nor instruction booklets, and I doubt if they had well-meaning aunties who bought them blocks of stone that didn’t quite fit.

Recently my son gave me a kit for building a scale model of Leeds United’s Elland Road stadium but, although being very grateful to him, I haven’t attempted it yet. This is partly because it’s not an official Lego product. It’s a bit like that Mini Bricks abomination. It’s also because there are 2,436 very small pieces which present quite a challenge for someone with deteriorating eyesight, arthritic fingers and the propensity to nod off, such as I. But I need to make a start soon because the football club has announced plans to increase the seating capacity of the ground so, to ensure that the finished item is up to date and realistic, I might find myself having to buy a packet of the inferior rival brand to fill in the gaps.   

Lego is probably now as big a name around the world as Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Apple. Apparently they churn out thirty-six billion bricks every year, so they must employ at least a dozen Irish hod-carriers. I normally detest those vast global corporations but I can always make an exception for Ole Kirk Christiansen’s brainchild. I normally detest the use of plastics in manufacturing and their disposable nature, but who would ever throw away a lovely little bit of Lego?

A few months ago I found a few pieces of Lego on a vacant seat on the bus going into town. My initial reaction was one of great joy at having acquired something that would keep me entertained for the next few hours, but for the remainder of the day my heart ached for the sadness that must have been suffered by the child or sixty-odd-year-old man who had lost them.

I really enjoyed writing this piece. It may seem like a bit of a self-indulgent, nonsensical ramble to you but for me it’s been a wonderful trip down memory lane. I stayed up very late one night to write it and then when I’d finished I decided I needed a photograph to accompany it. The subject of the photograph simply had to be one of my own Lego creations, so I stayed up a further two hours to build a house or hotel or something… you decide! Please don’t tell anybody but I had an absolutely wonderful time and even considered the possibility of going out the next day to buy more plastic bricks. Are you aware of the existence of a sadder sexagenarian than me? Please bear in mind that Ole Kirk Christiansen himself was already fifty-eight years old when he invented the stuff.

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All my own Lego. All my own work.