Childhood
The Kapiti Coast Museum offers a fun, hands on experience for children. Explore a child’s life at home, school and play. Amongst the displays you will find toys, games, clothes, books, dolls and more relating to hobbies and pastimes. School also features, with a wee school room set up in the museum.
See interesting objects as well as toys you may recognise from your own childhood. Favourite toys which last the test of time are on display including the Buzzy Bee, Viewfinder, spinning top, Fun Ho trucks and the yoyo.
Toy Tractor
Date c1900
Title: Toy Tractor with Blade
Description: Metal toy tractor, painted red with black rubber tyres.
Of all the farm toys, from barns, animals and machinery, it's the old toy tractors that are among the most popular collectibles. Whether you grew up on a farm or not, toy tractors are a great representation of rural life. It wasn't long after the invention of a full-size tractor that companies saw the value in offering farm related toys. Cast iron toys were formed in carefully carved master molds, so cast iron tractors have lots of detail as well as some hand finishing. Cheap reproductions lack the fine details and are rarely hand painted. Die cast items are generally lighter than cast iron, and once you see an early cast iron piece next to an early alloy tractor, the differences are obvious. Here at Kapiti Coast Museum we have several metal toys which are available for the kids to explore.
School Desk
Date: Unknown
Title: Desk, School
Description: Metal school desk with wooden top surface, wrought iron legs and feet. Hole for ink well and groove for pen. Gap under top for storage.
Students spend an average of six hours a day at school, with most of those hours spent behind a school desk. By design, most school desks encourage students to sit still, and as a classroom staple, desks tend to become a home away from home for students.
Almost everyone has faced the school desk throughout their childhood. As we grow in knowledge through school, the desk has grown as well, with each passing decade displaying innovations in comfort and education. The school desk’s humble beginnings as a wooden bench to today’s school desks demonstrate a journey that reflects society’s changing relationship to the value of education.
Wander down memory lane, and take a look at this old school desk, representative of the schooling of the era. It is part of the school room display we have here at Kapiti Museum which is both interactive and hands on.
School Suitcase
Date: c 1960s
Title: School Suitcase
Description: Child's school suitcase, gray with brown handle. Engraved on the metal latch it has "Cheney England". A lot of you will remember the school suitcase, above. In the 1900s, the dictionary gave the following definition of the word school bag: "leather bag for school children". Initially made of wood, it was used to transport school materials and children's meals to school. It usually has several compartments to organize textbooks, notebooks, pens, pencils, and other supplies. The schoolbag has been accompanying schoolchildren around the world for more than a century. Thanks to its rigid structure, the briefcase can also act as a desk. The interwar period saw the development of the boiled cardboard schoolbag. A durable and inexpensive bag that waxes and cleans easily.
Baby Doll
Date: circa1970s
Title: Baby Doll
Description: Doll made from a hard plastic, with light blond hair and blue eyes. She is wearing a red knitted hat and matching long dress with white plastic shoes. Underneath the main garment are long blue pants, a petticoat and a blue and white cotton checkered top. This particular doll was used by children who attended the Waikanae Montessori Preschool.
Not long after World War II ended, new development in plastic material was introduced by doll makers as a replacement to dolls made from materials like porcelain and cloth dolls. The new material was durable and could be moulded and cleaned easily. Ideal was one of the first companies to produce dolls of plastic material beginning in 1946. Kapiti Coast Museum has several dolls from various eras and made from differing compositions.
Train Set
Date: Unknown
Title: Child’s Toy Train Set
Description: Child's train toy set consisting of 1 Hornby train locomotive, 1 Pullman Aurelia carriage, 1 Pullman Marjorie carriage, 1 coal car, tender 3435, 6 pieces of track, 7 track connectors and 1 key.
Hornby Hobbies Limited is a British-owned scale model manufacturing company whose focus is on model railways. Its roots date back to early 1900 when Frank Hornby received a patent for his Meccano construction toy and the first clockwork train was produced in 1920. Hornby was a trade name for the railway productions of Meccano Ltd. After the success of its first train in 1920, an electric train followed but was under-designed and fell flat. In 1925, a much more successful electric model was introduced, operating on the high voltage of 110 volts AC power.
Safety concerns saw low voltage 4V and then 6V motors introduced, followed by a reliable 20V AC system, which was developed in the early 1930s. However, clockwork remained the mainstay of the Hornby 0 gauge trains until 1937.
Doll’s Pram
Date:1923
Title: Doll’s Pram
Description: Woven white cane doll's pram with steel axle, four wheels and wooden base.
The Woven Baby Dolls Prams, presented in white or cream hue, embody the charm of traditional artistry. Handwoven with precision, each pram is a masterpiece, adding authenticity to playtime. Prams or perambulators date back to around 1733 when the Duke of Devonshire asked English architect and furniture designer William Kent to make a carriage for his children. Equipped with a harness for a goat or small pony, Kent’s shell-shaped basket-on-wheels even had springs so that children could ride in comfort. Starting out as three-wheeled versions that were typically pulled along by a Nanny, a later innovation allowed prams to be pushed, making it easier to keep an eye on the baby.