Forty Years of Airfix Toys

CHAPTER ONE

A Brief History of Airfix

In 1938, a Hungarian Jew by the name of Miklos Klein arrived in Britain, whereupon he changed his name to Nicolas Kove. He had led an interesting life, having been sent to Siberia in World War I before apparently walking back home! Between the wars he moved with his family to Spain, where he set up a company employing cellulose-based plastics and patented a process for stiffening collars called 'Interfix'. With the threat of civil war in Spain looming, he moved to Italy, but found that Mussolini's strong connections to Hitler made Italy an unsafe base for a Jewish-run company. So he took his family and set off for a safer home.

The story of Airfix starts with his arrival in England. Shortly after arriving, he set up a new company, probably in 1939, in the Edgware Road in London. He called his new company 'Airfix', which had nothing to do with aircraft models; the famous kits would not appear for another fourteen or so years. He chose the name 'Airfix' because he strongly believed that a successful company should appear at the front of an alphabetical trade directory and he also had liked trademarks ending in 'ix', like he had used for his collar-stiffening process in Spain. Since one of his earliest products was to be air-filled toys, he felt 'Airfix' was appropriate since his product could be said to be 'fixed with air'.

The war then intervened and, despite his being a Jewish businessman, effectively a refugee, Kove is believed to have been interned on the Isle of Man for a short while. During the war he benefited from several contracts associated with the war effort, but after the war, like many others, he found materials were in very short supply and so he had to resort to finding materials wherever he could, even grinding down old fountain pens to produce plastic for his injection-moulding machines. He had been manufacturing utility lighters designed by his son-in-law during the war, but was always on the lookout for new markets and ways to keep his hungry machines busy. By now the company logo read 'Airfix Products in Plastic', to reflect his growing dependence on plastic toys and articles.

The head office of Airfix was at 24-26 Hampstead Road, London NW1 and the factory was at 8-9 Spring Place, Kentish Town, London NW5.

The Airfix factory in the 1940s. JOHN DOLAN

Around 1947, he happened upon a new market. Windsor's had just produced the first plastic injection-moulding machine in the UK and were looking for someone to operate it. Islyn Thomas of Newark, USA, who ran Hoffman Tools and would supply Kove with his first mould for combs, was to introduce him to Windsor's. This fusion of needs resulted in Airfix operating the first plastic injection-moulding machine in the country and would, consequently, make Airfix the most important plastic moulding company in Britain in the late 1940s.

At that time combs were made of acetate and the teeth were cut using saws. Utilizing the moulds supplied by Hoffman Tools, Kove could provide combs made out of plastic, which were much stronger and cheaper than the old acetate ones. The managing director at Airfix before 1950 was John Dolan. He said that Airfix was producing combs at a rate of forty-two gross (144) a shift and was selling them for £5 per gross, which made for an income of £210 per shift with a selling price of 8d (3p) a comb. Kove ran three shifts a day, and he told Dolan that, 'In Hungary we drive them with whips!' Within a short while, Airfix was the largest manufacturer of combs in the UK and controlled and dominated the market. So keen was Woolworths, its principal customer, to get their combs that they frequently picked them up from Airfix rather than wait to have them delivered! According to Dolan, Airfix was literally making money hand over fist and was able to buy the Kentish Town factory for £12,000. Eighteen months later, Airfix was still making combs and now had six 3oz injection-moulding machines. They had a 25-second cycle time on them; combs came out of the machine limp and dropped onto a steel slab to make them set solid. 'The spivs were lining up on the pavement; you couldn't buy a comb in the shops', commented Dolan.

By the early 1950s, however, Airfix was facing increasing competition from other comb-making manufacturers, with the likes of Aberdeen Combs and Halex, part of British Xylonite (BX Ltd), entering the market. Interestingly, British Xylonite had another subsidiary, Cascelloid, which made toys and was located at Coalville, Leicester, where it would later trade as Palitoy. In 1968, Palitoy was bought by General Mills, which later bought Airfix from the receivers in 1981! So around 1951 or 1952, Airfix withdrew from the comb-making business and concentrated on its growing toy range and, of course, the exciting new kit range.

The early days at Airfix were always somewhat chaotic and it was very much a hand-to-mouth existence. John Dolan gave a very interesting and illuminating interview to the Plastic Historical Society in the late 1990s, shortly before his death, in which he describes many of the goings-on at Airfix whilst Nicolas Kove was running it. He tells of Kove's attempts to track down and acquire raw materials for production and of having to cut a hole in the first floor of the factory so that the injection-moulding machine could be lowered in!

Dolan claims to have invented the kitbag and header for the Ferguson tractor and later kits, although he left Airfix in 1949, around the time that the tractor was first being produced. Whilst there is cause to doubt the veracity of some of his reminiscences, he does paint an interesting picture of a typical post-war small company, struggling to survive.

Dolan joined Airfix in 1945; he then left in 1947 and rejoined, briefly, in 1949. He described Kove as a very volatile man but extremely cultured, who insisted that his family only spoke English in Dolan's presence. When asked on tape what Kove looked like, Dolan likened Kove's appearance to that of Napoleon in the famous painting of the retreat from Moscow.

Kove's wife worked in the office and Dolan tells of occasions when she disagreed with Kove and he would cross the room and slap her! Despite this and Kove's apparently fiery temper, Dolan liked him immensely. Towards the end of his life, Kove put his affairs in his wife's name, but she predeceased him by a few weeks.

Kove reputedly had a fiery temper but could also be very generous. His health was not too good and much of the day-today running of the company was put into John Dolan's hands, then, from March 1950, in Ralph Ehrmann's. Airfix's bankers, Warburg's, had become worried about Kove's ill-health and had arranged for a young member of their staff, Ralph Ehrmann, to join Airfix and help Kove run it. Regarding Kove's illness, John Dolan said on his tape:

One day he phoned me up and asked me to go up to head office and he was sitting there looking really despondent; and, knowing him as I did, I thought, 'Oh my god, what has happened now?' So I sat down. He said, 'Mr Dolan, I have something to tell you. I have seen the king's surgeon, Mr Levy, and I have a cancer in the bladder. Mr Levy said that I have eighteen months to live at the most if it goes on as it is. I could have five to ten years if I have it out and an artificial bladder put in. What would you do?' So I said, 'There is no question about what I would do. If you die, you die under controlled conditions. I would have it out and the artificial bladder in. No question.' And he picked up the phone and dialled Levy at the London Clinic and made the appointment there and then. He was a great gambler, by the way, and he said to me, 'I will have a bet with you. You will bet me that I will not survive.'

'Ok, if you want it like that, I bet you half a crown (12.5p) that you die under the operation.'

'Good. Give me the half a crown, because I am going to win.'

And he had that half-a-crown taped into his hand. He lived about ten years after that. He put all the money into his wife's name and she died before him. Three months later he died.

The operation was in May 1948 and Islyn Thomas and his wife came over to London and visited Kove in hospital.

John Dolan had apparently left in 1949 and Ralph Ehrmann, the young man from Warburg's, was quite surprised at what he found. Fortunately, three months earlier, Kove had employed one John Gray as chief buyer. Gray had come from Lines Brothers (Tri-ang) so had a good understanding of Airfix's markets. Together Ralph Ehrmann and John Gray turned Airfix around and made it into the modern company that would become a world leader in industrial packaging and, of course, toys. Nicolas Kove died in 1958 and initially his daughter, Margaret, hoped to run the company. Fortunately for Airfix, however, she was persuaded to sell her interest in the company and retired to the south of France where she became a well-known socialite. In that year Airfix became a limited company with Ralph Ehrmann at its head.

Nicolas and Clothilde Kove. JO MAY-PRUSSAK

Nicolas Kove's grandson, Jo May- Prussak, contacted Plastic Warrior magazine in the early 2000s with information about the early days at Airfix. He had also provided me with information for Constant Scale, the journal of the Airfix Collectors' Club. I am reproducing his email here as it gives us a better look at Airfix in the years following the war:

Regarding the Plastic Warrior publication on the 'Early Days of Airfix', I read it with interest as my grandfather was Nicolas Kove.

One must take what Mr Dolan says with a pinch of salt. There are...