THE ‘PLASTIC’ 1938

It's 1938. I am -10 and yet to be born. My mother Florence Annie Starkey and father Edward Aneurin Morgan were a naive couple, despite it being his second marriage. He was 36 and she was 24; insurance clerk and school teacher. On their marriage he bought 'Drikancot' a bungalow at 104 now 108 Burman Road, Shirley, a commuter suburb south of Birmingham; and my brothers David and Owen were born soon after in 1939 and 1941.

The bungalow was unusual - built from poured un-reinforced mass concrete immediately after WWI with a flat roof (there were shortages of conventional building materials). This was very early for such a use of poured concrete. To begin with, before my father had to take early retirement at 44, money was not short and they indulged in a number of improvements; one of which was universally known as 'The Plastic'. It was the latest thing in interior wall treatments.

One day Reg Turvey, the local handyman wide boy, had knocked on the back door with an 'offer they couldn't refuse' - he was taking part in a trial of a new domestic wall covering unlike any they had ever seen before - out with distemper; whitewash; wallpaper - this was going to sweep the country, and the makers he represented were seeking a very limited number of trial sites who were willing to pioneer the effect for a once-in-a-lifetime discount of 75% on the final price. Of all the houses in Shirley, theirs had been picked as ideally suitable . . . just sign here.

And they did. 'The Plastic' was certainly an unusual effect, I presume it went on as a liquid but viscous enough not to drip when applied in a thick layer, which Turvey then 'combed' into artistic (?) swirls and spirals with a special comb with sinusoidal teeth spaced about 3mm? apart, and dried to a gloss finish. There were a limited range of base colours, in our case cream and I think sea-green, but it must have been put on in two contrasting thin leyers, so that when it was 'combed' the darker base layer showed through in the valleys, with a lighter top colour on the ridges of, the swirls; which projected about 5mm (think a Van Gogh starry sky). As a final coup-de-grace silver or gold powder was sprinkled over the wet surface (perhaps he had some sort of 'puffer'). The result was somewhat spectacular and overpowering, and apart from anything else depended on the artistic talent (or lack of) Turvey! They had the sitting room, dining room, and the three bed room walls all done, in different pastel colour combinations, and paid up their (ahem!) 75% discount. I often wondered how many other households in Shirley he had done (pun intended).

Well, everything was initially fine. But if you rocked your kitchen chair backwards and the top bar of the back hit the wall, or you banged into it with a suitcase or a toy, or the vacuum cleaner, the ridges of the swirls turned out to be hollow; the whole thing was in efect a thin fragile wrinkled surface skin which you could press in the ridges of, like 'popping' bubble-wrap, leaving a powdery hole. Either accidentally, or if you were a small child deliberately for fun - and what fun it was! It quite rapidly began to look a mess. And then small patches began to fall off - perhaps the solid concrete walls were very slightly damp (I doubt there was a damp proof course). By the time I arrived in 1948 it had became a disaster - with a constant cry of "MIND THE PLASTIC!" burned into my childhood consciousness.

And then of course there was no money to strip all the rooms and revert to something more sensible. I always assumed as a child that 'The Plastic' was actually made out of plastic - the universal stuff consumer goods were made out of. As an adult reconsidering the matter I began to think it unlikely, it didn't behave like plastic when you popped it. I reasoned that if it really was a 1930's revolutionary interior decor product it would be well documented in the contemporary trade press, and so it turned out. But its full name was 'Plastic Paint', using 'plastic' in its alternative definition of 'malleable' - it was reasonably conventional paint that you could form into low relief shapes - perhaps just paint mixed with plaster? It was mainly used on the walls of Art Deco cinemas (where it could't be popped by toddlers!) and is still available today.

Back