On the make

Rudolfo Paolozzi was a great maker. In the summer, he worked almost without stopping in the family’s ice-cream shop, making gallon after gallon of vanilla custard. In the slack winter months, when the shop made its money on cigarettes and sweets, he built radios from odds and sods. It was on one of these homemade radios that he heard Mussolini’s declaration, on 10 June 1940, that Italy, the country he had left for Scotland 20 years before, had entered the war. That night a mob attacked the ice-cream shop at 10 Albert Street, off Leith Walk in Edinburgh. The family lived above the shop and later, Rudolfo’s son Eduardo, then aged 16, would remember how it had been before and what the men had done.

‘The carefully arranged shop windows usually had been “dressed” by a visiting confectionary representative — with sundae dishes holding ice creams fixed in perpetuity on some composition material and chocolates made of composition materials in glass bowls filled with crêpe paper. In the shop itself on glass shelves backed by mirrors were glass jars containing the real things. In very little time this world which had existed for a decade and a half was reduced to splintered wood and small pieces of broken glass.’

Eduardo Paolozzi was on the side of the makers: the confectionary man who styled the windows with crêpe and cardboard, his father who had built radios and helped him with model airplanes. Together they had built Meccano and a Trix Twin Railway engine with a battery motor.

Aged 20, studying at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford during the war, he sketched heads after Dürer and Rembrandt in the Ashmolean Museum and African sculpture at the Pitt Rivers, but realised that what he wanted, all he wanted, was to ‘make things’.