Sir Torquil Norman graduated from Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge. He gained his pilot’s licence at eighteen and completed his National Service in the Fleet Air Arm. When he left the airforce he bought a Piper Comanche aircraft and took up skydiving. A hobby he shared with his late wife.
After working as an investment banker in America for eleven years, he returned to the UK in the 1960s and subsequently entered the toy making industry. He later founded Bluebird Toys and created some of the icon toys of the 1980’s, such as the Big Yellow Teapot House, the Big Red Fun Bus, and the very successful Polly Pocket.
He is a long term Camden resident. He famously bought what is known today as the Roundhouse,for £3 million in 1996 “as an impulse buy,” having read it was proposed to be turned into an architectural museum. He then raised £27 million from public and private sources, including almost £4 million more of his own personal funds, to restore the crumbling Victorian former railway repair shed into the Roundhouse.
Sir Torquil, who had previously received a CBE, stepped down as chairman of the Roundhouse Trust in 2007 and was knighted the same year for his “services to the arts and to disadvantaged young people”. In 2007 he won the Beacon Fellowship Prize for his work with young people through the Roundhouse Trust.
This film was made on a Roundhouse workshop in partnership with Chocolate films.
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