In the corporate world of the 1970s and 1980s, when businesspeople were businessmen and lunches were liquid, the executive toy was one of the essential markers of bossdom. The executive desk might not yet have boasted any computing power but it surely would have sported a Ballrace (a chrome Newton’s cradle) or a sleek black Mercury Maze – a puzzle game whose goal was to coax a silver blob into the centre of its small labyrinth. It might also have featured an Aquabatics puzzle filled with the ingredients of said power lunch: champagne, caviar or Perrier.

These distracting office decorations and dozens more like them were dreamed up by impish English art-school pals Richard Loncraine and Peter Broxton, whose creations are now being celebrated in a new book named after their firm, Loncraine Broxton.

“I rather dislike puzzles,” says the somewhat mischievous-sounding Loncraine. “I had a background in making kinetic sculptures out of all of the postwar rubbish that was still lying around in the late 1960s. I wondered whether we couldn’t make these things smaller and shinier, and sell them as toys for adults.” Thanks to the burgeoning market for gifts bought on corporate expense accounts, Loncraine Broxton’s star rose, with a yearly turnover of about £8m (€9.5m) in the 1980s and a staff just shy of 100 people.

“It was great fun,” says Loncraine. “Research and development consisted of us having a drink at the end of the day and asking, ‘What shall we do tomorrow?’” The toys were all possessed of a wit that lightly mocked the go-getter culture while happily feeding on it: the Decision Maker allowed the busy yuppie to scribble, say, “buy”, “sell” or “golf” on a plinth beneath a swinging ball, which would randomly land on a word.

At this time, Loncraine was also directing television commercials and branching into feature films (including the 1982 adaptation of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, starring Denholm Elliott and Joan Plowright). He and Broxton bowed out of making executive toys in the late 1990s. As Loncraine puts it, “Secretaries were no longer wondering what they could buy their bosses for Christmas.” The book is a charming look at the ingenious minds that allowed entry to the yuppie club for less than the cost of pinstripes or a Porsche. 

‘Loncraine Broxton: Innovations & Executive Toys 1969-1997’ is published on 30 November by Four Corners Books.