21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (9 page)

For a bicycle that was only manufactured for seven years (1976–1983) the Raleigh Grifter has left a remarkable impression and is fondly remembered by people (OK, mostly men) of a certain age.

Pitched as the younger brother to the Chopper, it was a far more practical bike, even if it was very chunky and heavy. The stand-out feature was that the gears, all three of the blighters, were controlled from the handlebar grip, as close to a motorbike throttle as a 12-year-old was likely to get in the days before joyriding and petty vehicle theft.

Looking back, the Grifter was really a simplistic hybrid of a BMX and a mountain bike, and may have played a small part in the success of the latter in the years that followed. After riding a Grifter, the move up to a racer was not quite as satisfying.

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Roller Skates

Everyone had roller skates when I was growing up. Learning to skate was a rite of passage similar to learning to ride a bike. Kids would start early with a pair of Fisher Price plastic jobs that could be adjusted as your feet grew. You then graduated to a rickety metal pair that, likewise, could increase in size as you went up the scale of that foot measurement thing in your local shoe shop.

Such childish toys were mere piffle, however, when compared to your first pair of roller boots. Fashionable (then, at any rate), sporty boots with integrated rubber wheels and a front stopper were
the
skates to have.

Any summer weekend in the suburbs you would see kids star-fishing their way down the pavement as they desperately tried to stay upright, two purple patches on their knees where grazes had scabbed over.

But more serious skaters wouldn’t be seen dead on an actual pavement; oh no, they could instead be found spinning, pirouetting, and gliding backwards effortlessly in the local park, along the seaside esplanade (the wearing of a Walkman playing disco music was compulsory), or, of an evening, at the roller disco, many of which had sprung up in out-of-town shopping centres.

Then, along came Rollerblades, the grey squirrel to the roller skates’ red, and almost overnight it became dreadfully uncool to be seen with four wheels, one at each corner of your foot. A strip of wheels down the middle of a sturdy plastic boot was the only acceptable formation.

The roller skate was consigned to the dustbin of time, making only occasional appearances since. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s dreadful musical
Starlight Express
, originally conceived as a roller
skate theatrical extravaganza, converted to Rollerblades, and that, as they say, was that.

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Ring Pulls

For decades, the holy trinity of pavement litter was cigarette butts, blackened wads of chewing gum, and drink can ring pulls. Since 1989, these have been reduced to a double act only.

Younger readers, by which I mean anyone under the age of about 30 (most of whom won’t be reading this book anyway), may be unaware that the ring pulls on beverage cans – Coke, Fanta, whatever – used to come right off the can.

That’s right, clean off.

They were usually thrown away, often in complete disregard of the little stick man next to a wire bin who wanted us to Keep Britain Tidy, and were a common sight on pavements and kerbsides everywhere.

This removable ring pull, or pull tab, was invented in 1963 by a man with the wonderful name of Ermal Cleon Fraze. Prior to that time, cans had a variety of opening mechanisms; the most common of which was just to punch two holes in the top. Ermal’s idea quickly caught on and became the standard for many years.

It was not without its problems, however. The edge of the tab, the bit that looked like a tongue, could be quite sharp and often resulted in cut fingers. This was before the days when everybody sued everybody else for the slightest injury, no matter how bloody stupid the injured party may have been, so that alone did not warrant sufficient reason for change.

Having been removed, it wasn’t that difficult to pop the ring pull back into the can. Which was a good way to avoid littering the streets but not so great if you forgot it was there and swallowed the blighter.

And then there was that litter issue. Millions upon millions of ring pulls covered our streets. You couldn’t walk down any
suburban road without spotting them. They were the postman’s red elastic bands of their day.

So in many respects, it was a good thing that the stay-on-tab was invented. Actually, the technology existed as early as 1975 (it was designed by a chap with another splendid name, Daniel F. Cudzik) but it wasn’t adopted as standard in the UK until 1989. By the time the ’90s hit, the road sweepers of Britain had disposed of nearly all the remains, any new sighting causing great excitement, as if it were a historic fossil find.

But progress does have a way of running roughshod over traditions of cultural importance, and the death of the ring pull is not without its cost.

We have lost, for example, the ability to disconnect the ring from the tab, slot one into a notch in the other and create a flying saucer/discus/ninja throwing star that zooms across the room. It was a special skill that took, ooh, minutes to learn but years to perfect. I will never be able to pass on this considerable talent to my own children.

And then there is the small matter of love. Yes, love, I tell you.

Numerous pretend playground weddings took place between junior school boys and girls, and were marked by the placing of a ring pull on the finger. It was a moment of romantic innocence and we shall not see the likes of it again.

I think you’ll find that it is a statistical fact that divorce rates have gone up since the ring pull became extinct.

Coincidence? I think not.

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Cap Guns

Before it became frowned upon for small children to walk around pretending to shoot each other with realistic guns that created loud explosions, cap guns were as common as, well, bows and arrows with suction cups on the end.

For those unfamiliar with the concept (the girls, mainly – sorry, but it’s true), these were toy guns made to look like classic Western revolvers (and sometimes other models) into which you loaded a strip or ring of caps which, when struck by the gun hammer, made a satisfying snappy bang and emitted a puff of smoke, similar to the bang of a Christmas cracker, but with more menace.

Ring caps were little plastic capsules containing a tiny amount of explosive (so small as to be completely safe) that were pressed into the revolver cylinder and set off one by one when you pressed the trigger. The process of loading them was more like loading a real gun but they only gave you six shots.

More progressive junior gunslingers used strip caps, a thin paper ribbon punctuated every third of an inch or so with a full stop of explosive. When the hammer hit one of these, the strip advanced along one step ready for the next shot. A strip could hold hundreds of caps, which allowed for lots of rapid-fire action, but did mean your gun always looked a bit odd with what appeared to be a paper streamer flying around behind it.

Personally, I preferred the strip caps, but only because you could unravel them, spread them across the floor and run a stone along them to let off a whole volley of bangs in one go.

Whatever your chosen ammunition, it didn’t really matter. Whoever you shot would claim that you missed them anyway.

Tragically, the kids of today have graduated to real guns, and with those you cannot pretend the bullet missed you.

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Routemaster Buses

Although ostensibly a London bus, the Routemaster with its driver/conductor team, hand-rolled route number indicator, and hop-on-hop-off doorway, has become an icon, instantly recognisable across the globe. It is the bus that all toy buses are based on, the bus that children draw with crayons, the bus that is emblazoned across souvenirs and which appears in countless film scenes where the director requires a shot that instantly says ‘London’.

Remarkably, despite the fact that Routemasters regularly drove up and down London streets until the end of 2005, the last one was manufactured as long ago as 1968. Launched in the late ’50s, they were made for just over ten years; 2,876 rolling off the production line in that time. It is a testament to their robust design and popularity that they hung around for so long.

Originally, the Routemaster was intended as a replacement for an ageing and expensive fleet of trolley buses and trams. It could hold 64 passengers, which was more than its predecessor, and weighed less, so was much cheaper to run. It was also remarkably light on its feet, making it an easier vehicle to drive. The driver was cut off from the passengers in his own cab at the front, and a separate conductor at the back sold tickets, helped old ladies with their shopping, and gave young scallywags a clip round the ear.

The most notable feature of the Routemaster was the open platform which allowed passengers to jump on and off, even if the bus wasn’t at a designated stop. This was back in the days when running for a bus was actually quite a good idea because, providing the traffic was slow and you had a reasonable turn of foot, you actually stood a chance of catching up with it and jumping on.

Of course, the open platform also meant it was a lot easier to fall off, and most Londoners have stories of poor unfortunate travellers who came a cropper. And then there were the cheeky oiks who
would jump on for a free ride until the conductor noticed them and shooed them off.

London Transport started to introduce one-person operated buses in the 1970s, with many single-deckers being put into operation, but the Routemaster still hung on to many routes, especially in the centre of London. Even privatisation in 1984 didn’t kill them off, with many of the new companies refurbishing these buses from the ’60s and giving them a fresh lease of life.

In fact, these legendary vehicles survived well into the 21st century, when the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, ordered their decommissioning. This coming from a man who, just a few years before, had said that ‘only some sort of ghastly dehumanised moron would want to get rid of Routemasters’. To be fair, the main reason for the move was the need for disabled access to buses – the one thing the Routemaster could not offer.