Tony O'Hagan - Leisure pages

The Brickplayer website

Brickplayer Marketing


Spears advertising

Over the years, Spears advertised Brickplayer widely. I have several copies of such adverts, and at any time many more examples can be found for sale on Ebay.

The first of these is from 1952 and features Standard Brickplayer. The second, from 1959, features the newly-launched Contemporary Brickplayer. The third example is for American Brickplayer.

In the 1952 advert, you can see that Spears held a competition for which people could enter their own Brickplayer models. This competition ran for many years and cleverly allowed Spears to show off the power of Brickplayer to create impressive buildings. The feature below (appearing like the first two above in the very popular Meccano Magazine) shows the winner in the 1954 competition. You can also see that in the intervening year or two the prize values had doubled. Mr Springett's "Omnibus Station" won him enough to buy several more kits! Or he could buy some of the many accessory packs.

Third party advertising

Leading retailers also featured Brickplayer in their own advertising.

Gamages was a huge and successful department store in Holborn, London, for almost a hundred years until 1972. For many of those years it produced catalogues in the months before Christmas, which sold for 1/- (one shilling, or 5p in modern currency). I have two toy catalogues, both missing covers and a good many pages, but still substantial. Both feature Brickplayer. A major part of the catalogue in each case concerns model railways, and the Brickplayer kits were placed in the section dealing with lineside landscaping and buildings. Click on the title below each pair of images to view in full screen.

From a Gamages catalogue in the Standard Brickplayer era

From a Gamages catalogue in the Contemporary Brickplayer era

Hamleys was a rival toyshop in Regent Street, London, that is still a big attraction for kids and parents alike today. I have an interesting 6-page brochure that was apparently produced to be given out at the Schoolboys' Own Exhibition in 1950. (I remember going to that exhibition on at least one year!). The image below is of the front page - click on the title below it to download the full brochure.

Brochure from 1949-50

Links

The Brickplayer home page has links to other pages in this Brickplayer website.

More links: This Brickplayer website sits within my personal website tonyohagan.co.uk. The links below provide access to the other parts of my website.


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Updated: 26 February 2024
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