Ron Fuller obituary

Ron Fuller, who has died aged 80, made toys, automata and other eccentricities that can be seen in permanent collections at the V&A, Crafts Council and Sudbury Museum of Childhood, as well as at Craftco in Southwold, Suffolk, on Royal Mail postage stamps, on tour with the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre and in galleries around the world.

Son of Purnell, a wheelwright, and Ada, a seamstress, Ron was born in Liskeard, Cornwall, scion of a long line of wood and metal workers. His father let Ron make models in his workshop as a youngster, and only in the last few weeks of his life, while being treated for liver cancer, did Ron leave his own workbench and stop making things.

As a boy during the second world war, Ron made toy guns for himself and friends out of anything that came to hand, moving on to taking old radio sets to bits to see how they worked. With his developing interest in mechanical things and in recycling (before the word was widely used), he studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, where he met his future wife, Moss Steed.

After national service as an army recruiting sergeant and a first job as a technician at the RCA, Ron married Moss in 1962 and moved to Bristol to teach at the art school, where the land artist Richard Long was among his students. From there he went to Sevenoaks school in Kent, where he began making toys in his spare time, setting up a workshop in the living room with a sheet pinned across to keep out the dust.

In 1972, a letter arrived from his RCA contemporary Gerald Nason, telling of an ancient house with outbuildings going cheap in his village of Laxfield, Suffolk. Thus was the big decision made, to go into toymaking full time and leave the salaried security of teaching. Ron began with his take on mass production, making dozens of one toy or another, especially wooden aeroplanes, and gradually expanding into a mind-boggling range of funny, surprising, odd, original items, such as chickens that lay five eggs, can-can dancers, a man who puts his head in the lion’s mouth, dolls’ houses, rocking horses, flipper dingers, whimmydiddles, sheep-shearing men, sand-powered trapeze artists, everlasting-sausage-makers, submarines and horse-racing games.

He was largely self-taught, but received great help from his mentor, Jack Gould, and influences from Sam Smith, Youtha Rose, other members of the Toymakers Guild and the old German tinplate toy manufacturers.

The family economy was boosted by regular commissions from the Crafts Council and the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, at first in their Covent Garden premises run by Sue Jackson, and some major one-offs such as animated forest animals for the Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock, and the model cooper on the roof of the Chandos pub, Trafalgar Square, who rolls his barrels on the hour.

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The ill-fated Ride of Life, which was to have been a massive automata exhibition cum theme park for the Meadowhall shopping centre, Sheffield, was suddenly axed. Pieces of it still emerge occasionally, including Ron’s life-size Adam and Eve pub, with the eponymous couple serving pints naked behind the bar while a businessman gets drunk and collapses.

There’s the nativity scene in the churchyard at Laxfield, and the circus at Marvin’s Mechanical Theatre in Farmington, Detroit. There are quite a few circuses in museums and galleries, operated by a coin in the slot to earn their keep. Each one tells a story, such as the automaton Ron made for the children’s ward in the Norfolk and Norwich hospital: you turn the handle and a tin moth takes off from the marigolds; a lion watches cross-eyed as the moth lands on his nose; he sneezes, and tries to catch the moth as it flits back to the flowers.

Christmas was always a hectic time. Ron could never say no and would never let anyone down, so the early hours of the 25 December would find him, Father Christmas-like, delivering toys around the village, his schedule having been delayed by painting the stage set he had designed for the village pantomime.

To quote his friend Michael Adams, his secret was that the childhood spring of curiosity in him never dried up. His friends at the Low House (aka the King’s Head in Laxfield), his favourite pub, will miss his quiet humour and mischievous eye. Of course, he couldn’t stay long in the pub. He had to get back to work – but it was the work itself that drove him. As he said, the money didn’t come into it at all.

Ron is survived by Moss and their three sons, Mark, Sam and Jake, and four foster daughters, Carolyn, Lorna, Fi and Michelle.