70-year-old Thomas the Tank Engine still a kids' favourite in iPad age
For his owners, Thomas has been a 'really useful engine' for 70 years. Paul Kendall finds out why such an old-fashioned character continues to thrive in the online age.
On December 25, 1942, a two-year-old boy named Christopher received a model steam locomotive for Christmas. Handmade by his father, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, the blue-painted train incorporated a sawn-off broomstick for the boiler, a tube of metal for the chimney and flattened-out carpet pins for wheels. On its side, Awdry had inscribed a gold number 1 and the letters NW, a little joke to himself (the engine was not part of any railway company and the letters stood for "nowhere").
"I played with it for a while," Christopher Awdry, now 74, says, "and at some point, apparently, I said, 'Can you tell me a story about my engine?'" His father, who had been inventing stories about steam engines to keep him amused during a recent bout of measles, said, "Yes, I can make up a story, but before I do, it has to have a name. Why don't we call it Thomas the Tank Engine?"
Two and a half years later, the opening instalment in a collection of children's books called The Railway Series made its first appearance on British high streets. And, 70 years after that, versions of that same train, now manufactured in China on behalf of Mattel, the world's second-largest toy company, sell in their millions everywhere from Tokyo to Mexico City. In Britain alone, where Awdry wrote 26 Railway Series books before retiring in 1972, there are now about 1,600 Thomas & Friends products - from lunchboxes and yogurts to puzzles, duvet covers, walkie-talkies, potties and iPad apps.
A toy engine of some description - whether it's Thomas or one of his many "friends", puffed-up Gordon, say, or the "dockside diesel" Salty - is sold every two seconds somewhere in the world, and the television series is currently broadcast to more than a billion households in 300 territories each week. When Mattel bought British company Hit Entertainment, which owned Thomas, in 2011, annual global sales stood at an astonishing £615 million (HK$7.4 billion). But such was the devotion of successive generations of children to the character, the company told the following year, it was possible this figure could be doubled with the right stewardship.
