Simon Tait’s Mews No.14

Ron, the village toymaker
We’ve been to Suffolk to visit the workshop of, first, Tim Hunkin, about whom more news later. But a few miles nearer the border with Norfolk in the village of Laxfield is another workshop belonging to another of Cabaret’s presiding geniuses, perhaps the first: Tim’s friend Ron Fuller.

If Tim is an engineer-cartoonist at heart, Ron is a carver-toymaker who could have been the model for Pinocchio’s creator, Geppetto – though this toymaker did not have to make wooden lads, he has three of his own and now a band of grandchildren to delight with his craftsmanship. Here he stands with the circus he first made 30 years ago, and is in such demand since he is putting the finishing touches, he reckons, to perhaps his seventeenth, this time for an American customer. Remember the Ticket Stamping Man that used to be on duty at the entrance to the Cabaret shop in Covent Garden? Ron made that.

A Cornishman down to his deep burr, Ron was trained at Falmouth School of Art and the Royal College of Art, and went on to teach in colleges and schools. He’d had a career teaching art and model-making, and in 1972 began making wooden toys for a living, developing his own techniques at his bench. While he was at the RCA he met a Suffolk girl, Moss, `a painter and print maker now, and they have lived here in this rambling cottage in the woods for 38 years. The son of a carpenter, Ron had been fascinated with making toys since childhood, and nothing is too basic or too complicated, it seems, from the simple folk toys like the Whingydinger, a propeller which turns on the end of a notched stick as a pencil is rubbed along the shaft, to the life-size Adam and Eve pub he made for Cabaret’s Ride of Life in the 1980s. In 1995 his designs were published by Quarto Publishing in Simple Wooden Toys, and you can buy some of his simpler delights at the Southwold shop owned by the co-operative of which he is a part.

You know the model cooper on the eaves of the Chandos pub at the bottom of St Martin’s Lane in the West End, that rolls his barrels out at the chime of the hour? Ron’s, and here he is with a spare cooper’s bonce. This year the telephone people decided to put all Laxfield’s cables underground, and Ron asked if he could have the telegraph pole that was standing uselessly in his garden waiting to be taken away. They were only too delighted, and he’s replanted it with ropes festooning from a turntable at its top, from which the kids who always seem to be around can swing and swoop through the summer afternoon.

In fact, Ron seems to play in his workshop as much as work. In a corner is an electric motor racing circuit he has made, whose cars, based on 1930s designs, hug the track as commercial rivals’ never can. Elsewhere are the beginnings of a new piece, an American preacher on-hand instant confessor inspired by the ‘Wash Away Your Sins Towelette – heavenly scented’ sent to him by a friend in the United States. And in the Museum of Oxfordshire at Woodstock you can see the animated creatures he created as Forest Animals – insects, birds, moles, squirrels. ‘Making things is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do’ he says, ‘and making toys is what I do best’.

Mexican Chickens

Carlos Zapata has just finished this colourful one off piece. These South American chickens are taking a break from their usual diet of corn, for something more refreshing. Carlos’ ingenious mechanism evokes the noise of pecking.

Height 34 cm (13 inches)

£1,195 (excl. VAT)

Simon Tait’s Mews No.13

Suffolk Punch – Part 1
To the Suffolk chapter of the Cabaret club, and a delightful June day with two of the key members, Tim Hunkin and Ron Fuller, makers for whom their workshops are their worlds. Tim first, Ron next time.

Southwold Pier, rescued and restored in 2001 by Chris Iredale and then bought by the present owner, Stephen Bourne, in 2005, is one of the Britain’s peers of piers, bringing, Stephen Bourne says, three-quarters of a million visitors a year. Each morning Mr Bourne must wake and thank god for Tim Hunkin, one of the reasons why they go. Apart from devising and creating the pier entrance, the open picnic booths, the idiosyncratic water clock and the binoculars at the pier-end, Tim is the creator of the amusement arcade, The Under the Pier Show, so called because of the first amusement was the Bathyscape, devised at the request of Chris Iredale.

The Bathyscape is an epic underwater adventure, offering views of estate agents gazumping, canisters of nuclear waste mating, and the opportunity to track down the last cod – reflecting the issues uppermost in 2001 when it was fist installed. Wit and subversive humour is the USP of what Tim calls his four-dimensional cartoons. A new creation is added each year, with last year’s offering being Whack a Banker ‘A truly rewarding banking experience‘ offering ‘unrivalled customer satisfaction, 0% VAR guaranteed, no hidden charges’, in which you are invited to knock five bankers as their heads pop up at random. This year’s is My Nuke in which you have to delicately feed fuel pellets into your Personal Nuclear Reactor using a remote pincer claw. If you fail, The Earth Moves, the radioactive alarm siren sounds, and you are required to call the National Help Centre at £1 a second; if you succeed, you win a slice of nuclear rock, with the radioactive symbol all the way through. You can go on a Micro-Break, which takes you to the Costa Bollente via a bumpy airline flight and a nightmare taxi ride, and back again within two minutes. If you’re worried about security you can get yourself rather intimately searched by the Autofrisk; get yourself fit under the tutelage of a Hollywood star through a new aerobics programme which requires you to lie perfectly still on a bed; or you can Test Your Nerve by attempting to break in where a ferocious alsatian awaits with a truly terrifying experience from which you emerge with your courage rather than your person in tatters. And there are dozens more that will unravel the secrets of your DNA, give you a chiropody treatment, invite you to ‘witness an extraordinary rodent experience’ or take home a prescription for all your medical problems. You can even award yourself an honour.

Home is a short drive inland, to a cottage between a secluded woodland and a tranquil lake which has been the Hunkin hideaway for 35 years, a footprint. ‘To be honest, I’m not that interested in the house: this is where I come alive, in the workshop’ he says. Almost as large as the cottage seems to be the suite of workshops where Tim, for 14 years the author of the Observer’s Rudiments of Knowledge strip before giving up to make models, builds his four-dimensional cartoons. Outside the statue of Michael Faraday he made for an exhibition, stands watch, alongside a giant clock made for another, an over-sized calculator, an enormous carved fist and his ancient Mercedes, passed on to him by a neighbour. On his bench is a figure from the Southwold Pier clock which has been vandalised by, apparently, some French students, a mercifully rare occurrence. ‘I could make a new one, but repairing it sort of adds to the history of the clock, don’t you think?” he muses.

Mewsette 1
Highlight of the first Milton Keynes Festival on July 16-25 July will be the Manège Carré Sénart, the Magical Menagerie. It’s 14 metres tall, covers a 300 metre area and weighs 40 tons, With 18-meter-long sides, an over-300-m area, giving a ride to 49 people on this giant carousel, with three giant buffalos, four climbing insects, ten other insects, three fish heads, and a few jokes. Apart from the enormity and grotesquery, the Menagerie offers one other unique feature: riders can set the whole thing moving themselves. Adults and children can act directly on the elements by activating some parts.

Mewsette 2
If you go down to the woods around Beaulieu Abbey anytime between now and August, you’re likely to come across more than a few moth-eaten teddy bears. There’ll be this monstrous recreation of a legendary automaton for a start. Tippu’s Tiger was made for the Sultan of Mysore, a serious thorn in the side of John Company 200 years ago. It depicts a soldier of the East India Company being mauled by a tiger, with the animal’s roars ands the man’s pathetic cries reproduced by an organ inside the bopdy of the tiger. It’s in the V&A. This one has been created by the Gilbert Whyman from welded car parts, and it’s one of 80 pieces in the Surrey Sculptures exhibition there.

The Clockwork Automataumbrella

Keith Newstead and Gonzo artist Ralph Steadman have created this incredible new machine, ‘The Clockwork Automataumbrella’. It forms the centrepiece at the Clockwork and Automata Exhibition (18th June to 22nd August 2010).
Having collaborated on the critically acclaimed Terry Gilliam commissioned piece ‘Mad God Universe’ Ralph and Keith have teamed up again.

In this new exhibition Ralph Steadman takes on the soft and wonky world of Clockwork. Inspired by the comedy of Jacques Tati, the random and awkward movement of old clockwork toys and a genuine affection for things that just seem a little bit wrong.
‘Clockwork is hard and precise – let’s do soft and wonky’.

Pushing the boundaries of the traditional materials generally found in the world of clockwork and automata making – Ralph is pushing latex, paper and water to the limits with the help of genius maker Keith Newstead.

Water drips from the large umbrella into funnels, and partly powers the unlikely clockwork mechanism, via a series of tubes and waterwheels. Keith’s vibrant mechanics feature giant flowers and Ralph’s crazy drawings. Finally, an unfortunate rabbit dispenses drinks in an unlikely way. A real conversation piece for parties!

Here are some extracts from Keith’s blog on the process of making the machine with Ralph Steadman.

‘In Ralph’s photo he had some drawings of circles behind the umbrella. He told me he would like one of these to be the sun. We decided that they should form part of some crazy clockwork. A few days later I found some gardening mats that were shaped like sunflowers. The edge of the petals formed perfect gear teeth. I tried to get them to mesh but unfortunately they were not perfectly circular and would not work as gear wheels ( Although they did come tantalisingly close). Undaunted, I used the profile of the petals as the teeth of my own ply gear wheels. I am hoping that Mr Steadman will provide some lovely sun flower art work for the large wheel.’

‘I have always been fasinated with the idea of making a machine that could produce a completely random sound or movement. This is a doomed mission, the reason being that as time and space are infinite, at some point, in some place, all the necessary components will come together to produce me typing this again.
So at some point, my random machine won’t be very random any more.’

‘The Automataumbrella is up and running. The water is dripping into the funnels, the sad soft toy is gushing wine from it’s willy, the clockwork is grumbling and grinding. So now it’s just painting and sticking on Ralphs glorious graphics to finish.’

The exhibit is for sale, and can be shipped at the end of August when the exhibition closes.
£17,550 (Excl. VAT)

Please contact us for more information.

Frustrated Felines

This free download contains Paul Spooner’s plans for an automata called ‘Frustrated Felines’.

The detailed plans give an insight into how the automata was constructed, (a small edition was made and sold at CMT in the 1980’s). It makes a challenging project for an automata enthusiast!

You can find more plans and insights into automata making in the downloads section of our store.

14 page PDF (6.8 MB) – FREE