‘Please don’t touch, I shake so much!’

So sang Motorhead and Girlschool on their St Valentine’s Day Massacre EP, which reached number 5 in the British pop charts in February 1981. The track in question was a cover of a song first made popular by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates in 1959, but the message still applies to model engineering exhibitions today.

Trains, aircraft and other structures that took painstaking hours to build can be destroyed in seconds by little probing fingers – and, even more tragically, bigger fingers too.

And there lies the problem. ‘Tucking Foddlers’, as the Spoonerists call them, brought up on Fisher Price cannot think and reason or read and heed warnings and the model exhibitor is thus reliant on physical barriers and parental control to avoid damage. If neither of these are effective, then there is the conditioned reflex utterance ‘ DON’T TOUCH THAT’ in as stentorian voice as possible. Unfortunately this often has the by-product of setting the time to BST, or Bloody Screaming Toddler, and creating a stand off with unenlightened parents.

A similar occupational hazard are the tweenage boys trying to look hard, but exhibiting behind a pay wall at model show or steam fair usually keeps the worst of the chavs at bay.

More fundamentally though, no sensible modeller likes confrontation, which is what a plain “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH” sign comes close to.

In an attempt to deter manual contact in a more friendly way, my display of Lockheed aircraft at the October 2005 Cheltenham GWR Modellers Exhibition featured a graphic of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, who not only designed the P-80D Shooting Star, T-33 trainer, U2 and SR71 spyplanes in the main Airfield Embankment diorama and Hudson and P-38 Lightning in the Control Tower Box but also made hundreds of other aeronautical innovations in a long and productive life.

The ruse seemed to work, and in the Spring of 2006 I took the Gloucester RCW private owner coal wagon diorama that is now in the Dean Forest Railway Museum at Norchard to St Margaret’s Hall. As this was themed on the 1930s, I used a picture of George Formby and the slogan “Please don’t touch, Ta very much”.

These friendly warnings that also included the subject of the display seemed to be so popular that I applied the principle to my Bristol Aircraft collection in Autumn 2006.

Spring 2007 saw me use my wagon repairs diorama to show off my collection of 00 Gauge Lima Class 47 locomotives. The theme that brought them together – in my imagination – was that in 1990 they had all brought special trains to the Cheltenham Gold Cup horse racing festival. 1990 was chosen as it was the one year in which all the varied liveries would have coexisted, but for a warning poster I only reached back two years to the third series of the Channel 4’s pioneering reality series Celebrity Big Brother. The show featured both racing pundit John McCririck and the very lovely Caprice Bourret, and the poster created quite a lot of interest.

In turn, pop culture informed my choice of warning notice for October 2007. The display was entitled ‘Kaiser Bill’s Air Force’ and combined First World War German aircraft with a mixed goods and passenger train and a rail mounted gun, similar to the one that shelled Paris at the end of the conflict. Rather than use such an authoritarian figure as Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, I opted for Mata Hari.