Imagine, you are a soldier in World War 2. You need to tell your fellow soldiers in the next trench that you are friendly, not an enemy soldier. But how? Mobile phones are a long way off, and you don't happen to have a bird available to deliver a letter! Luckily, when you were sent to the war you were given a little tin toy which makes a loud click. Most of the soldiers have one, and you can use it to signal your position. It always makes you laugh when you use it - it's just the sort of thing you got in cereal packets when you were a kid!
When I took this tin clicker to show the children, they were quick to catch on to how it worked. Most of them hadn't seen one of these before, though a few had been given them at birthday parties or played with them at their grandparents house. It is such a simple toy that it wasn't hard to work out though and soon the children were clicking away like mad. They were astonished at just how loud the click it made was - you could hear it all the way across the playground!
This sort of tin toy is actually very old, and its real name is not a 'clicker' at all, but a tin cricket. Very few were actually made in the shape of crickets, but the noise they make is a bit like an unbelievably loud cricket. They came in all different shapes, but this one, a frog, is one of the most common. This one was probably made in the 1950's or 60's, but tin crickets have made made for much longer, possibly since the late 1800's!If you would like to know more about the history of tin crickets, click here.
One of the questions which the children asked about the tin cricket was what it was used for. It's a very simple, very loud toy, and the children thought that there must be more to it than making noise. They were sort of correct. Some of the adults I know remember using tin crickets as part of other games which they made up as children. The most usual were various games of tag. Children can hide and move around while whoever is it tries to find and catch them using the sound of the tin cricket. The 'seeker' was often blind folded to make the game that much more difficult.
During the War tin crickets developed another use. They could be used by soldiers to signal their comrades, making it safer to move between trenches and houses because you knew whether the person inside was friendly or not. They were used most in France by the American infantry (foot soldiers). The Americans were trying to secure small French farms, and they couldn't see who was in the one next door. The farms were very difficult for tanks and machines to move around in, because they were often small areas of land, and they had fences around them made of cobblestones stacked on top of each other. At the top of the cobblestones there was often some sort of hedge. By clicking the tin cricket once the Americans could find out whether the people occupying the next farm were friendly or not. If they were they would click their own tin crickets twice. Of course the Germans figured out what the Americans were doing and started to pretend to be American by answering the tin crickets. If you would like to find out more about how tin crickets were used in the Second World War, click here.