Boxed battery-operated toy traffic lights, S.E.L. Ltd. (J&L Randall), mid-1950s

Battery-powered model traffic lights made from painted steel. The lights are operated by a black plastic knob mounted on the base. The lights have six glass bulbs, coloured in inks to be red, amber and green. On the underside of the base is an open compartment to fit two U11-type batteries.

With the lights is a printed paper instruction sheet for Models 720 and 725. There is also the original box, of plain card, with a printed paper sheet stuck to the lid detailing the product information.

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.

Signalling Equipment Ltd (SEL) was a trademark of J&L Randall, who were known widely for their Merit trademark. The SEL name was used by the company for their military and engineering-inspired toys.

B.5:1 to 4-2019