When our four children were tiny we could only find very cheap plastic or ornate pottery Nativity Sets in the shops, neither of which would convey to them (or indeed to ourselves) the wonder and magic of Christmas so my wife decided to make a set herself.

She experimented for three or four years making a different set each Christmas which the children and I increasingly loved, as did others who saw them. In 1976 I had a business that failed and we were desperately short of money. I suggested that she made some sets for sale and during November of that year she made a hundred of what we now think of as extremely crude scenes, using curtain linings and old sheets to clothe the figures. They were all sold by Christmas but it took over twenty years before the curtains were replaced!

Over the next ten or twelve years a stable and animals were added ....In the meantime all the figures were being refined and added detail given to them. Unbelievably long hours were spent agonising over design, colours, fabrics and woods and making hundreds of sets each year. The children grew up and were pressed into service but virtually no other outside help was used.

In 1998 we decided to increase production and rented the top floor of a small factory. Half a dozen workers (mostly art graduates) were employed and taught how to make some of the figures. Either we were very poor teachers or they were simply incapable of making them to the required standard. After a few months all but one had left or been dismissed and nearly everything they made was destroyed. We have now moved back into smaller premises and now only Joan and I make the sets and although we still work long hours, our output is of course extremely limited.

We have now been going for over thirty years and have sold many thousands of sets all over the world. They are bought by all types and classes, from farmhands to chief executives of multi-nationals, by the very rich and by the very poor, for christening and wedding presents, by families and by collectors. Some buy one or even several complete sets at a time and some collect it figure by figure for over as long as ten years. We have seen the faces of grumpy old men being dragged round a fair by their wives light up when they see the Crib; we saw some rough youths laughing at it once and told them to go away. "You don't understand", they said. "We are laughing because it reminds us of Christmas". We used always have a set displayed at about chair height for children and they knelt to bring it to eye level and almost universally sang "Away in a Manger" but they no longer do this. A child one year dragged her mother to see it, "Mummy, Mummy, look at yonder star".