This project allows me to peek into other people’s obsessions and hobbies. Two weeks ago, I was pretty much oblivious to the existence of mechanical banks. I am sure I had vaguely registered their existence at some point in my life – the moving mechanism initiated by the coin is bound to stick in your head – but this week I have learnt a bit about this world, in which there are established societies dedicated to collecting and admiring them, and in which certain banks are sold for very steep prices indeed.

I was, in fact, looking for a skipping rope of a certain kind when I came across this girl, or rather when I was kindly pointed to her. This mechanical bank was made by J & E Stevens, a company based in Cromwell, Connecticut, and its patent was approved in 1890.

You can see one in action for a few seconds in this video. The company made different versions of it, in which the girl’s clothing varies in colour. This page about an auction held in 2021 contains a great deal of information on the design, its workings, and the rest. The model here is wearing a pinkish dress with different coloured accessories to the one I have portrayed and was sold for an impressive $73,800.

J & E Stevens was founded by two brothers in 1853, and although they started off intending to sell hammers, cast iron hardware and some toys, they ended up specialising in the latter. With the Second World War, there were severe iron shortages due to production needs, which led to the end of J & E Stevens, eventually being bought up by another company in 1950.

I thought of the idea of the ritual here, of a child taking a little coin they were treasuring, placing it between the squirrel’s paws (grey, see on the right side) and starting off the motion. It is interesting to think of being rewarded for saving money with a magical set of movements, only to stop until your next deposit. Of course, you could make it work without the coin, but I would think it didn’t feel quite so magical without that first step, almost like you were cheating.

I looked into the origin of money banks, and piggy banks. I learned that there were ‘still banks’ (which are exactly that, and do not move) and ‘mechanical banks.’ I investigated a little and came across this lovely 15th century piggy bank from East Java, exhibited in the Ashmolean.

But then my little ponderings rightfully took a different turn. I was looking for more information on this skipping girl, and got quite excited to find that there are records of the original patent drawings and description.

I noticed that the girl in the patent drawing did not match the bank that I was drawing – it seemed obvious that the drawing depicted a ‘picaninny’ girl, grinning grotesquely. A brief investigation of the banks made by J & E Stevens produced a wide variety of such figures: see here, or here, or here. Then I saw there was an academic paper entitled “Play Things: Children’s Racialized Mechanical Banks and Toys, 1880-1930” and the whole concept of mechanical banks took on a different, more complex meaning. The paper points to the existence of a ‘larger cultural structure that viewed race and class as inseparable’ and to toys serving as ‘symbolic mediators of culture’ at the time.   

Here we have a set of playthings used by middle class white children – many of them depicting Black people (and sometimes people of other races or origins) as grotesque caricature objects to be laughed at, and the frequent subject of mistreatment and accidents – to happily deposit their coins in their bank.

If you take a look at this little video of someone’s collection (39 banks), you can see how many of these mechanical banks fit this description (at least a third of this small collection):

There is one called “The Hometown Battery Bank” in the video, which avoids mention of the original name “Home Town Darkies”. It was reissued in the 1950s, creating a version where the players were meant to have Caucasian features (this is referred to on a site as the ‘politically correct’ version) but if you look closely, you can see the distorted features are still there under the enamel.

The Butting Buffalo Bank shows a buffalo butting a boy with jet-black skin up a tree. 

The Dentist Bank shows a white dentist extracting a huge tooth from a caricature Black man with a huge mouth – they end up falling over. 

The Kicking Cow Bank (self-explanatory) appears to show someone with Caucasian features, but as this article on the bank suggests, perhaps it was not that way originally. 

In the Organ Bank, we see that the distinction made between a monkey and a Black person is practically non-existent. 

In the ‘Always did ‘Spise a Mule’ bank yet another jet-black figure with exaggerated features is kicked by a mule, and there is a ‘Jockey’ version of this too, the rags for clothes even more evident, in which he gets knocked off.

The Uncle Remus Bank shows a Black ‘chicken thief’ being chased into a hut. In this version both the policeman and the boy are Black, but there are other versions where the policeman is white. 

I find the Bad Accident Bank possibly the most nauseating, and then there is the Stump Speaker and The Mason or Bricklayer.

Their caricaturised, dehumanising depictions were not only limited to Black people (though they accounted for most), but they also included Asians, Native Americans, and European immigrants such as the Irish.

I have been pondering about the purpose of collections of certain kinds; their aim, and the reasoning behind them. I have also been thinking about censorship and the recent uproar about certain Dr Seuss books. I wonder how much we value the past, and cling onto it, just because it is considered intrinsically valuable for being ‘the past’. I appreciate these are wonderful, delightful little mechanisms – and that is indeed how I came to them – but at what point is our luxury to simply delight in the workings of an object the sign of a deep, ingrained problem, and our insistence on blinkering our eyes and only seeing what makes us comfortable? 

How are objects such as these auctioned without any comment or any context added? How many problematic objects do we actually need to collect to remember the past and not erase it, if that is the purpose?

Most of my research into playthings tends to bring up either European toys from more recent times or ancient playthings. When I look at the latter, I am able to focus more on character and on the act of playing, because I readily accept that I cannot possibly know certain details about it.

This skipping girl was given a character because they chose to make her white. Let us look at her – piercing eyes, looking from side to side. She looks curious and methodical, and also the kind of girl who might be given an errand that leads her astray. I perceive a sort of 'Little Red Riding Hood' demeanour about her.

 Her Black counterpart, however, was a grinning, empty shell.