Austin Somerset A40 1/18 electric scale model car in box

Model car, a single-piece black plastic shell mounted on a black plastic chassis. It is battery-powered, with a 'Mighty Midget' motor to propel the vehicle forwards and illuminate the headlights. The car has cast aluminium detailing representing the radiator grille, bumpers, lights, hood ornament and door handles. Inside there are moulded red plastic seats and a white steering wheel, the windows and windscreen are of clear plastic (possibly polyethylene or cellulose acetate) with aluminium detailing. The rubber wheels are mounted on metal axles. Underneath is an activation switch.

With the car is its original two-part card box, consisting of an off-white lid printed in red and blue to show product information and a handwritten note, plus a plain base.

Given by Raymond Coe

Given to the museum by Raymond Coe [2017/628]

The donor later recollected about both items in the gift: 'the traffic lights were given to me as a birthday or Christmas present by my grandparents in the mid-1950s when I was 9/10 years old. My grandfather was chairman of the then Coulsden and Purley Urban District Council in 1955/56. In March 1956 there was a Road Safety Exhibition in the Council's area... I think he may well have obtained the traffic lights at the exhibition as he was very concerned about road safety and had sat on Council highway committees whose remit would have included road safety'

The widening of access to personal cars and their exponential growth in importance is one of the twentieth century’s most important design and manufacturing stories. The first petrol-burning internal combustion engine-powered cars only took to the road in the late-nineteenth century. However, the importance of cars to society grew so much that, by the mid-twentieth century, national infrastructures were redesigned wholesale to better serve drivers.

The rise of the car changed the way people used cities. Roads were given-over to motor traffic, and historic fabric was removed from many towns to redirect cars away from high streets and onto ring roads. The growth of car-use had a major impact on the use of the street as a play space. The growth in the number of cars effectively closed this previously open domain, through fears of accidental injury and damage to expensive property. In Britain, this concern manifested itself through road safety awareness marketed directly to children, through schemes such as the Tufty Club and the Green Cross Code.

Children are typically quick to embrace new technologies, and technological advances have thus provided rich inspiration for toy manufacturers. Toy cars became a classic of childhood play and were consistently popular with children for most of the twentieth-century. After the Second World War, mass production of toy cars by several manufacturers created a huge variety of collectible vehicles, often these were accurate copies of real-life cars.

Victory Industries Ltd was founded in Guildford in 1945 by William Warren and Gerald Burgoyne. The two took advantage of newly-refined plastics technologies to produce, from 1950, accurately-detailed toy cars. Victory were originally commissioned to produce scale models of the Morris Minor to be sent to car dealerships as a promotional display model. The curved bodies of these cars inspired them to invest in an injection-moulding machine to rapidly produce the models with a plastic upper shell, which was the same method used for their later toy cars.

The Austin A40, the real-life car that the toy was based on, was a popular family vehicle in Britain in the post-war years. It also served as the basis for the design for a pedal car in the MoC collection which was made through a government work scheme for disabled Welsh miners (see MISC.22-1977).

B.4:1 to 3-2019