The Little World

The pictures you see today, Walter, are of a Dinky Toy Bedford dust cart…the British word for garbage truck. The model is one I picked up in England on a holiday in 1995. I’m the sort of person who shops on my holidays and not for tourist souvenirs, either. No postcards or tea towels for me, though I once bought a teapot in the shape of the Duke of Wellington.

Back to the garbage truck. The reason I bought this rather beaten up toy from a secondhand dealer was that it was the first Dinky Toy I ever owned. Dinky Toys were common in Canada in the 50’s and 60’s – being sold at every toy store, hardware store and drug store. The department stores like Eatons and the Hudson’s bay Company had whole sections of their toy department with shelves of them, and it got more intense at Christmas.

The cheap ones could be as little as 50¢ Canadian in 1961, but the big sets and the articulated toys were anywhere from $ 5.00 to $ 25.00. Remember that 50¢ could also buy you an Airfix model airplane kit in a bag.

Well, I played with my garbage truck for years – loading it up from the side with scraps of paper and wood and then turning the handle to raise the container and dump it out the rear door. Eventually I outgrew it ( or thought I did…) and it was given away to the Salvation Army or some charity. And eventually it’s relative was bought back in Bournemouth.

I was always a little puzzled at the small dimensions of the truck and the domed shape of the rear container – this didn’t look anything like the garbage trucks I saw on Calgary streets. Even in those days they were huge things with hydraulic lifts at the back to heave the trash into the back. Then eventually one day I went to England and saw the narrow streets of residential London and realised that there just would not have been room for a bigger truck. And the domed shape is the shape that trash takes when you heave it in from the side by hand – no sense in making the back bit bigger if you couldn’t get the trash cans any higher than a man could lift. And no use putting trash doors on the right hand side of the truck – the left side is closest to the kerb in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Also in Japan, but I’ll bet they had better garbage trucks.