In the autumn of 1971, the most profitable model empire Britain had ever produced stood at its highest point. Airfix, the company that had turned a Hungarian refugee’s plastics gamble into a national institution, held three-quarters of the British market for construction kits and turned out twenty million of them a year. The brand had become the very word for a plastic kit, the way Hoover became the word for a vacuum cleaner. And from that summit, the men who ran it looked down and saw an opportunity they believed was almost too good to refuse.
The story had begun in London in 1939, when Nicholas Kove arrived from Hungary with a history of near-catastrophes behind him. He had run a plastics factory in Barcelona, fled the Spanish Civil War to Milan, patented a process for stiffening shirt collars, and crossed to England just before the war closed in. He wanted his next company to begin with the letter A so it would sit first in any trade directory, and he liked words that ended in fix. His first product was a range of air-filled rubber toys, so he put air and fix together.
The name had nothing to do with airplanes; that would come later, by accident, like almost everything else. The war caught up with Kove. He was interned on the Isle of Man as a suspected enemy alien, and when he returned the raw materials he needed had vanished into the war economy. For years he scrabbled to keep his small plastics business open.
In 1947 he bought the first injection molding machine in Britain and used it to make combs by the million. Within a few years Airfix was the largest comb manufacturer in the country and a supplier of die-stamped metal belt buckles to the War Office. Then in 1949 a tractor changed everything, though Kove would spend years insisting it hadn’t. Harry Ferguson, the agricultural engineer, wanted a promotional replica of his TE20 tractor.
Airfix molded the parts, women workers assembled each one by hand, and the finished tractors kept breaking in transit. So someone at Airfix had a thought born less of genius than of exhaustion: stop assembling them. Sell the tractor as a bag of loose parts and let the customer do the building. It was the birth of the construction kit, and Kove did not believe in it.
There was no money in it, he thought; children would never have the patience. He was about to be more wrong than he had ever been in his life. The decision that built the empire came not from inside Airfix but from a buyer’s desk at Woolworths. In the early 1950s, a buyer named Jim Russon suggested a model of Sir Francis Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, made in the newer, harder plastic, polystyrene, and sold very cheap.
Woolworths had a price point it would not move from: two shillings, the price of true pocket money. You could not sell a model in a printed cardboard box for two shillings; the box alone cost too much. So Airfix threw the box away. The parts went into a clear polythene bag with a folded paper header stapled across the top, the instructions printed on it, and the whole thing hung on a shop hook.
It worked beyond anyone’s hopes. In the mid-1950s came the airplane. The first Airfix aircraft kit was a Supermarine Spitfire at a scale of 1 to 72, and it was, by the standards of what came later, a bit of a disaster. It had been scaled up crudely from an American kit and was riddled with inaccuracies that former RAF men spotted at once.
Complaints arrived by the post bag. But it sold, and sold, and sold, because it was not really a model of an airplane. It was a model of a memory. The war was barely a decade gone; to glue together a Spitfire in 1955 was to hold in miniature the most powerful symbol of national survival Britain possessed.
Airfix understood what it had only slowly. When the accuracy complaints kept arriving, they hired one of their own critics. A modeler named John Edwards came in as chief designer and for around fifteen years set the standard for Airfix kit design until his death at just thirty-eight. The men who knew real aircraft were now drawing the plastic ones.
In 1957 Airfix became a public company, Airfix Industries Limited, and in March 1958, three weeks after the death of his wife, Nicholas Kove died at his home on the Finchley Road. He had built the machine and never believed in the thing it was about to make. Ralph Ehrmann became chairman in 1959, and his own story carried a particular weight. Born in Leipzig in 1925, a German Jew who had fled Nazism as a child, he had volunteered for the Royal Air Force when war came and flown as a navigator and bomb aimer over occupied Europe.
The man who would build his fortune selling plastic Spitfires had ridden in the real ones. He understood that what Airfix was really selling was the chance for a boy to imagine, with his own hands, the wartime experiences of his father and grandfather. Under Ehrmann the range exploded: aircraft, ships, military vehicles, cars, tanks, tiny soldiers, rockets. In 1962 Airfix bought the molds of a rival and acquired a whole range of model locomotives in a single stroke.
The numbers from the 1960s describe a national habit forming. In a single year Airfix sold roughly 350,000 Spitfires, 80,000 Hurricanes, and 60,000 Lancasters. An entire country of children was quietly assembling the Battle of Britain in plastic on a million kitchen tables. What sold those kits before a single child opened one was the art on the box.
Roy Cross, a self-taught aviation illustrator, began painting Airfix box art in 1964 and over the following decade produced action paintings for around two hundred kits. He did not paint the model; he painted the moment. A Lancaster limping home through flak with an engine ablaze. A child standing at the Woolworths rack did not buy a box of gray plastic.
He bought the story Roy Cross had painted on the front of it. By the early 1970s Airfix was releasing as many as seventeen entirely new kits in a single year, each one requiring research, draftsmanship, and the cutting of a new steel tool, while hundreds of existing kits kept rolling off the machines at Haldane Place in Wandsworth. The kit business was healthy, genuinely robustly healthy, and would go on making money almost to the very end. That is worth holding on to, because the story you may think you know, that Airfix lost its touch and children stopped wanting kits, is not what happened.
What happened was a single mistake. In the autumn of 1971, the greatest name in British toy making had just collapsed. Lines Brothers, once the largest toy manufacturer on earth, had posted a record loss of around four and a half million pounds and come apart. Among its treasures were the crown jewels themselves: Meccano, Hornby, and Dinky Toys.
To the board at Haldane Place the logic was beautiful in its simplicity. They already owned the largest range of construction kits in the world; now they could own the most famous construction toy as well, and become in a single stroke the largest toy company in Britain. The Meccano and Dinky business, Binns Road, Liverpool, and everything in it, was bought by Airfix for two million seven hundred and forty thousand pounds. The prize was poisoned.
Binns Road was an aging plant with high labor costs, and Dinky had been losing ground for years. In 1953 came Lesney’s Matchbox models, cheap enough to be true pocket money impulse buys. In 1956 came Corgi, with clear plastic glazing and before long a James Bond Aston Martin with an ejector seat every child wanted. In 1968 came Mattel’s Hot Wheels, faster than anything Dinky had ever made.
Dinky’s response was cautious, expensive, and slow. Its models stayed pricey and its quality slipped. By the time Airfix bought it, Dinky was a structurally declining asset wearing the crown of one. And the wider world turned against them.
In 1973 the first oil shock struck; the price of crude quadrupled, and polystyrene, the very substance of every kit, is made from petroleum. The first casualty was Roy Cross, whose commissions dried up in 1974. Then the children began to leave. In 1977 Star Wars arrived, and the toys that mattered were licensed figures held by the rival Palitoy.
In 1978 Space Invaders arrived in Britain’s pubs and arcades, and a generation that might once have spent a wet Saturday building a Lancaster now fed coins into a cabinet. Around the turn of the decade the pound surged, and for Airfix, an exporter, that was a catastrophe; its kits became something like fifty percent more expensive overnight. And all the while, the Meccano weight dragged. Airfix kept pouring money into Binns Road: five million pounds of losses over three and a half years, a million pounds a year at the end, seven million pounds in total pumped into an aging factory making products that Matchbox and Corgi and Hot Wheels were beating in the shops.
Every pound of it had to come from somewhere, and where it came from was the healthy plastic kit division, the thing that actually worked. Ralph Ehrmann tried desperately to modernize Meccano’s image, but you cannot rebrand your way out of the simple fact that children had stopped wanting the thing you make. The end came first and most cruelly in Liverpool. On Friday the thirtieth of November 1979, at ten minutes past four in the afternoon, management called the workforce together in the canteen at Binns Road and gave them, by most accounts, around twenty minutes notice that the factory was closing for good at half past four.
Around nine hundred and fifty people were in that building. The managing director did not dress it up. “We have run out of money,” he said. “It’s as simple as that.
” Some of the workers sat in all weekend as a protest. The protest lasted fourteen weeks. When management cut the power on Christmas Eve, the workers brought in their own heaters and ran a generator. The Save Meccano campaign put a thousand people onto the streets of Liverpool.
It ended on the eleventh of March 1980, when bailiffs and some thirty policemen forced their way into the site. The occupation had won the workers dignity and time; it had not won them their factory. The weight that had dragged Binns Road down was still tied to Airfix itself. Through 1980 the position grew hopeless.
The banks forced Airfix to sell off its two most profitable businesses just to satisfy them. Then, in January 1981, at the Earl’s Court Toy Fair, the great annual gathering of the British toy trade, Airfix Industries called in the receiver. The crown jewels of British toy making, gathered up so confidently a decade before, were now part of an estate to be sold off. The plastic kit division, the thing that had always worked, went under the hammer along with everything else.
A healthy business killed not by its own failings, but by what had been chained to it. The kit business, along with the railways and, in a final twist, Meccano and Dinky, was bought by the American conglomerate General Mills and placed under its British arm, Palitoy, the holder of the very Star Wars license that had helped pull children away from Airfix. The kit molds were packed up and shipped to a General Mills factory at Calais. The profitable plastics and housewares side was sold to a Midlands group for forty-seven million pounds, a sum that tells its own quiet story about which parts of the old Airfix had real value.
When General Mills got out of toys in 1986, Airfix passed through several owners and the molds moved from Calais to a factory in France run by Heller. In 2006 Heller and Humbrol collapsed together, and for a moment it looked as though the name might finally die. It did not. Hornby, the very name from Binns Road, now a thriving British concern, bought Airfix and Humbrol for two million six hundred thousand pounds and brought the tooling home.
The old catalog turned out to be pretty much complete; most of it had survived its long journey. There were genuine losses. The great mold for the liner SS France went missing. A handful of car tools were ruined, left to spoil in open storage.
But most of it came home, packed into lorries and brought back across the channel to the country that had made it. Go to Binns Road today and there is nothing to find. The works were demolished and the site cleared; what stands there now is a car park with no plaque and no marker. The physical places, one by one, have been erased or repurposed almost beyond recognition.
And yet the thing itself did not die. Walk into a model shop in Britain today and you will find Airfix kits on the shelf, real ones, new ones, reissuing the great classics with the original Roy Cross paintings on the boxes, and tooling brand new kits at a rate not seen since the glory days of the sixties and seventies. The Spitfire is still being molded. A child in Britain today can still buy one, still spread the newspaper on the kitchen table, still smell the polystyrene cement and glue their fingers together learning the old arts of patience and care.
Airfix was not destroyed by one act of folly. It was destroyed by loyalty to a famous name at the very moment the oil price turned and the pound turned and the children turned away toward screens and films and licensed plastic figures. The men who made the decision did not set out to destroy anything. They were the men who had been right about everything, trying to be right one more time.
That is how these things usually happen, not through villainy but through confidence and loyalty and reasonable decisions made by people who could not see the cliff from the summit. The factories are gone, but the Spitfire on the bedroom shelf, hung from its length of black cotton thread, survived all of it.
