March 5, 2024
10° C / 50° F
Clouded skies
A Quartet of Minibrix Fans
Build an Exceptional Website
or
(The Guardians of the History of a
famous construction set company - Minibrix)
I would like to thank Mr. Martin James, who has been a member of this most-exceptional website. I has asked him (as usual) to proof-read this post before I published it. I had made a few errors in misreading what was written on his website, and he helped me several times to write the introduction below,Most of the narrative was written by Martin, and I am very grateful for his patience and my many e-mails to him.
The story begins with my having discovered a fantastic Meccano website. You can visit that post on my blog. It's the one before today's post. Once I had found the Meccano website, I had another great idea. As a child, my parents always bought me toys, and another great set of toys was Minibrix. I decided to search for a Minibrix website, and lo and behold, I found one. I couldn't believe that I was able to discover 2 such great sites of toys that were invented so long ago (1900's).
As I usually do, after I finished this post, I asked the person whom I had contacted (Martin James) to proofread what I had wrote. He helped me a lot, as I had incorrectly written some of this great story and erred. He wrote back to me, and gave me the superlatively-written material below.
At this point, I decided to ask Martin if I might scuttle my writing, and use his excellent narrative.
The screen-captures below are just a few of the many images on this exceptional website. The website is not just for Minibrix hobbyists, but for anyone who wants to read about these great erector sets and what a "very-exceptional website" is!
"The History of the Minibrix Website - Martin James, March 2024"
The People
There are 4 people who have collectively captured, preserved, and publicised (British spelling) the history of the Minibrix company. Malcolm Hanson was the centre of the Minibrix universe, and the other three of us were independent friend of Malcolm at different points in time, many years apart. It was Malcolm who initially captured and wrote up the history.
Richard Smallbone was a Minibrix collector living in Canada, and had read the history Malcolm had published. He gave Malcolm the idea of transferring the information to a web site that Richard had access to.
Back in 1984, Malcolm founded, then ran for many years, the South West Meccano Club in Bristol, England. Although Meccano was his. biggest passion, Minibrix ran a close second. Another long-standing member of that club, Tony Parmee, was also a big collector of Minibrix as a side-line. Malcolm and Tony probably owned the two largest collections of surviving Minibrix in the world, and Malcolm asked Tony to write something to add to the new website.
I (Martin James) only got involved when the original website died in 2012, and I tracked Malcolm down to see if. anybody objected to my mounting the rescue mission, and as a spin-off, attaching my own independent web resource for Virtual Minibrix.
So in summary, Malcolm. wrote the history, Richard published it, Tony reminisced about it, and I rescued it.
The Website
The story starts in the summer of 1990, when Malcolm Hanson caught a small news item that the ITS Rubber company were about to close down and demolish their Petersfield factory. ITS was the parent company for the Premo Rubber Company, maker of Minibrix, who had dissolved in 1976, returning the factory to making rubber footwear for ITS. Malcolm rushed over to Petersfield (on his motorbike!) to see if there were any mementos, documents, or memories from the Minibrix years that could be salvaged before everything was finally lost. The skeleton staff left there to supervise the death throes welcolmed welcomed him with open arms, and set him up with an old lady who had been the company secretary almost since its beginning. For most of the day, she reminisced, and Malcolm filled a notebook with everything he could capture. A couple of years later (1992), Malcolm self-published the contents of that notebook as a slim volume that was distributed through various clubs and societies with an interest in construction toys. (Still available by mail-order from Meccano World: https://www.hsomerville.com/mworder/ DF1 Minibrix - The Rubber Building Toy £8.30)
In 2003, Malcolm was approached by a fellow Minibrix enthusiast in Canada, Fred Smallbone, who had seen the booklet, and wondered if Malcolm would like it being putting up as a web site to reach a more global audience. Fred has a small free web space allocation that came with his Internet service (with Sympatico.ca, now Bell canada) and wanted an excuse to use it for something. So between the two of them - Fred doing the coding and Malcolm providing the content - the Minibrix web site was born. Fred bought the domain name minibrix.com to use as a landing address, with the site itself all being hosted at
minibrix.sympatico.ca.
Meanwhile, I had my own Minibrix-themed web site for Virtual Minibrix, so I added a link to the physical Minibrix site from my main page (since Google at least knew that one was there) and also got some old links adjusted from places like Wikipedia. At least it was semi-visible again.
I has a strong hunch that the site hosted by sympatico.ca was now living on borrowed time. Recognizing that this was an important and unique resource, I grabbed a copy of the site contents, ready for the inevitable. In 2010, two thing happened. First the name minibrix-com
went off the air, meaning that whomever it was had finally stopped renewing it. Then, a little later in the year, the physical site was finally taken down. As a temporary measure, I put up th epreserved site as a sub-site on mine, so it still had a presence. I then set a calendar reminder for two years and a day after the minibrix.com domain had been deleted, and waited out the 2 years it takes for a deleted domain name to become publically available for sale again.
In 2012, on the day the domain name was released, I bought it, bought some hosting space, and put the Minibrix site back on a real home with its real name. I turned Minibrix on the relationship with Virtual Minibrix around, and added the Virtual site as a child to Minibrix on the same server. The next step was to track down Malcolm, let him know what I had done, make sure I hadn't trodden on anybody's toes during the rescue mission, and generally decide whether there were any next steps. Malcolm was delighted, as at last, it was possible to make some updates. The first thing we did was set up an associated photo gallery, to house the many photos he had of his collection and of exhibitions.
In the summer of 2017, Malcolm started to make some updates to the sight, and incorporate some of his original notes that had not yet been used. We had a quick look at what was involved, then Malcolm went away to put together the material. we had arranged to have a catch-up call in a couple of weeks, but just 4 days later, he rang again with some devastating news. He had been been in for a routine hospital check-up and had just got the results. It appeared he had developed a particularly aggressive cancer, and the doctors gave him just 2 months to live. The site updates never happened, and now probably never will. Much of the timeframe of two months (which turned out to be a vert accurate prediction) was devoted to making arrangements to dismantle, package, and ultimately dispose of his vast collection of Minibrix, and his even vaster collection of Meccano.
Sadly, Malcolm died late that summer. Since then, the only thing that has happened to minibrix-com is that I have rewritten the underlying code to use much more up-to-date technology - things like supporting lots of different device types and screen shapes, and beefing up security. But the content remains as it always was: Malcolm's hastily-captured notes from that long summer of 1990.
Regards,
Martin
As you can see, this exceptional group of men worked very hard to keep the Minibrix company and its history "alive" and inform readers about one of the great toy consgtruction companies that once existed.
I'm very fortunate to have found Martin and learned about Minibrix
Whoa! What a story.
I'm most-certainly elated that Martin accepted my request to write the
narrative and history of for this blog post.
Below: The standard yellow box that
Most of the Minibrix kits came with
Below: 3 kits showing different buildings to be erected
As time moved on, the number of kits was reduced to three. The content of the boxes (total number of parts) was reduced, and consequently, the size and complexity of the buildings from before, were not able to be put together. People were not buying Minibrix as before, and so production dropped, and eventually production stopped in 1976.
Tube sets were also produced.
Sadly, this once great construction building company eventually closed down.
What once was was, and now, people my age (75) can only remember the pleasure that we got from building things. Of course, in my house, I wasn't allowed to just leave finished Minibrix buildings lay around the house, and so I had to dismantle the bricks after a few days of the finished construction lay around.
I haven't found anything about a trick that I learned from a friend back in the 1950's. The bricks were hard to attach together. However, my friend had been told by his father how to make the bricks attach together in a very simple way.
The "trick" was to wet the rubber bricks with water, so that the projected parts of the brick could easily slip into the holes of the other brick. Boy, did that save me a lot of struggling and
work to put the bricks together. And the funny thing, was that there was never any instructions to suggest using water to assemble the bricks more easily!
I still have fond memories of making my own small buildings with Minibrix.
The toys may be gone, but the memories remain. You can still buy Minibrix kits on ebay,
and I'm sure at flea markets in your local area.
I'm tempted to buy a kit or two, but our dog Percy would be eating the bricks,
and of course, my wife would "make me clean up" after I just spent hours building
a model.
Some things never change!
