Kate Riordan is inspired by High Life Shop's great gift ideas for children

As an only child in the 80s, I often had to rely on my large collection of soft toys for company, and some innate bossiness had me organise them into a small school.

When they had homework, I wrote it for them and then marked it too, leaving pompous and unintentionally hilarious comments such as, ‘This is careless work, Donkey. Please see me during break.’ My naughtiest pupils were also my oldest and best-loved toys: Morris the monkey and Little Ted, the latter named none too originally for the identical Merrythought-made bear that featured in every child’s favourite TV show – Playschool.

When I wasn’t taking the register at my rather Victorian school (toys were frequently ‘sent out’, if not actually caned), I played with Matchbox cars and my (male) best friend’s LEGO. Though the handles always fell off in combat, we usually made guns out of the brightly coloured interlocking bricks – which is ironic, given that LEGO’s Danish inventor, Ole Kirk Christiansen, stipulated that children’s play should never be mixed with war.

A Playful History

Toys of a kind go back to the very dawn of civilisation. Evidence of dolls has been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and as far back as 4,000 BC people were playing the board games that became chess and draughts. A primitive type of yo-yo was used in Greece in 1,000 BC, its casing made from stone – which presumably ruled out the ‘Around the World’ trick, for health and safety reasons.

Nearly 700 years later, Greek kids had moved onto hobbyhorses, complete with wheels, perhaps in homage to the Trojan Horse of myth. By the end of the 17th century, dolls had been given miniature houses of their own, with tiny porcelain tea sets and carved wooden furniture, and they proved as popular with well-to-do ladies as they did with little girls.

Indeed, the manufacture of toys has created many a fad, and an overnight millionaire to go with each. The impossibly pneumatic Barbie was invented in 1959 by Ruth Handler, who named the doll after her daughter, Barbara. Handler had noticed that Barbara and her friends wanted to play with adult dolls, as opposed to the baby dolls that were sold at the time.

Handler’s first Barbies, kitted out in hand-sewn outfits, met with a lukewarm response at the toy fair she first took them to, but once little girls got a look at them, they sold in huge numbers: 351,000 in the first year alone. To date, over a billion have been bought.

The original blonde bombshell (though, in fact, the first dolls were available as brunettes, too) has spawned scores of spin-off products, including numerous ‘occupation’ dolls (astronaut, presidential candidate, doctor); a huge fleet of vehicles; a menagerie of pets and siblings, cousins and friends – and, of course, Ken. A past Olympic champion and (less expectedly) hairdresser, Ken briefly split from Barbie in the 90s, but now they’re officially going steady again. Phew. 

Bear Necessities

Not nearly as old as the doll, but more universally popular, thanks to its gender non-specificity, is the teddy bear. Stuffed animals (not the taxidermist’s kind) had long had a place in the nursery, but bears as we now know them – upright on their hind legs, with moveable limbs and endearing expressions – didn’t appear until the first years of the 20th century.

Our all-time favourite toy originates in an apocryphal-sounding but true story about the 26th American president, Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1902 refused to shoot a bear cub while out on a hunt in Mississippi. A political cartoon in The Washington Post depicted Roosevelt with a benevolent arm around a cuddly-looking bear, and the craze for ‘Teddy’s Bears’ was born.

The German company Steiff was the first to capitalise on it: its original plush, jointed bear with a distinctive metal tag in its ear is now iconic. Serious collectors – known as arctophiles – will pay very grown-up money for the oldest and rarest bears: a 1904 mohair Steiff known as ‘Teddy Girl’ sold at auction in 1994 for £110,000.

A Digital toybox?

Despite the longevity of the teddy and the doll, as well as constructional toys like LEGO, Meccano and Scalextric, many assumed the proliferation of ‘digitalised’ gadgets in the last decade would prove their undoing. This has not been the case. According to Catherine Howell, collections officer at London’s Museum of Childhood, these types of toys will never go away, they’ll only be reinvented.

‘I wouldn’t say it’s a rejection of digitalised, computerised toys,’ she says, ‘just that a computer game is already written, and children like to be in control. It’s much more satisfying that way.’

Computer games are also a fantasy, but children seem to like their games rooted in reality, even the mundane. Mini-kitchens and train sets prepare children for the adult world of cooking and commuting. Hardly glamorous, but definitely useful.

But it’s not all about kids calling the shots – there’s a good helping of parental nostalgia at work here, too. ‘And it’s not just parents wanting their children to play with the sort of toys they did, either,’ says Catherine. ‘It’s the people working in the toy industry wanting to see their toys come back too.’ No wonder those hair-tearing classics Etch A Sketch and Spirograph are still available.

There’s no denying that digitalised toys are impressive – and extremely covetable. If I were 10, I’d probably be wheedling for one too. And yet, somehow, it seems right that the only possession to have accompanied me to university, on my travels and throughout my entire 20s, is the ever-faithful Little Ted.