TOYS & GAMES

The Entertainer

The Entertainer is a toy retailing business. It was founded in 1981 by the husband and wife Gary and Catherine Grant. It does not trade on Sundays because of the Grants Christian beliefs.

In 2024 there were 170 shops in the chain. It also sold toys through Tesco and Matalan. The company owned the Addo Play and Early Learning Centre toy brands.

Website: https://www.thetoyshop.com

Hamleys

Hamleys is a large, multi-storeyed toyshop on Regent Street. William Hamley, a Cornishman, opened his first shop in High Holborn in 1760.

Lines Brothers was a toy manufacturing business. In the 1930s it bought Hamleys. In 1971 the company went into receivership. Its assets, including Hamleys, were sold off.

Location: 188-196 Regent Street, W1B 5BT (orange, white)

Website: www.hamleys.com

Jigsaws

John Spilsbury earned his living as an engraver and mapmaker. In 1762 he started mounting county maps onto mahogany boards. These he cut up with a jig saw so that they could be reassembled by children. He termed his creations dissected maps .

See Also: LONDON Maps

Lines Bros.

For several decades Lines Bros. was a leading manufacturer of toys.

Location: 457 Caledonian Road, N7 9BJ

Pollock's Toy Museum

Publishers would cover new theatrical productions with printed sheets that portrayed members of the cast and the set. Plain ones were sold for 1d. and coloured ones for 2d.. They developed into becoming toy theatres, which were made from paper and card.

There developed a specialist trade of printing toy theatres. The final practitioner of this craft was Benjamin Pollock. His shop in Shoreditch was destroyed by an aerial bomb during the Second World War. Marguerite Fawdry bought an item that Pollock had printed for her son's toy theatre. This led her to buy all of his remaining stock and in 1956 to set up Pollock's Toy Museum.

In 1969 the Museum move to its present location, a building that had been constructed in 1760.

Location: 1 Scala Street, W1T 2HL (blue, pink)

See Also: PRINTING; THEATRE RELATED

Website: www.pollockstoymuseum.co.uk

Pollock's Toyshop

The actor Peter Baldwin worked in and owned Pollock's Toyshop. He was known nationally for playing the character Derek Wilton in the television soap opera Coronation Street.

Location: Pollock s Toyshop, 44 Covent Garden Piazza, WC2E 8RF (blue, turquoise)

Website: www.pollocks-coventgarden.co.uk

Rubik's Cube

Erno Rubik was an architecture lecturer in Hungary. He created the Rubik's Cube, a 3-D combination puzzle. It proved to be a modest success. The international rights were assumed by a state-owned company, however, it proved to be unable to interest any manufacturers in taking it on.

Tom Kremer (1930-2017) was a Transylvanian Jew who had survived the Belsen concentration camp and then settled in London. He worked as a teacher in a special needs school. This led to him setting up Seven Towns, a business that made educational games, in 1963. Fifteen years later, at the annual Nurnberg toy fair, he came across the puzzle. Drawing upon his childhood Hungarian, he proved able to build a good relationship with the delegates. He undertook to try to interest Western toy manufacturers in it. None of them were receptive; the product was regarded as being too complicated and its universal coupling made it expensive. Kremer persisted. He tested how engrossing it could be by allowing people in bus queues to try to solve it. Numerous individuals proved to be sufficiently engrossed that they would not board the bus they had been planning to catch. Finally, in 1979 the Idea Toy Company took in on. During the early 300 million were sold. The market became saturated and then collapsed. In 1986 Mr Kremer persuaded Ideal to sell him the rights. He then rebuilt the brand.

Location: Seven Towns, 7 Lambton Place, W11 2SH (purple, red)

Website: www.seventowns.com

Teddy Bears

English teddy bears tend to be slightly more expressive than their German counterparts; the formers eyes and ears tend to be marginally larger.

Website: www.merrythought.co.uk

Archibald Ormsby-Gore

The poet and heritage campaigner John Betjeman (1906-1984) named his teddy bear Archibald Ormsby-Gore. It became the inspiration for Lord Sebastian Flyte's Aloyius in the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945).

In the mid-1990s an eleven year-old girl became enthralled by A.O.G.. She wrote to Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green (n e Betjeman) (1942-2014) to ask if would be possible to be sent a photograph of the bear. The child received a reply that stated that there were no recent ones but hoped his autograph would suffice. It was rather shaky as he was very old.

Location: 43 Cloth Court, EC1A 7LS. Betjeman's London home. (purple, pink)

Toy Cars

Corgi

Marcel Van Cleemput (d.2013) was a designer with Mettoy (Metal Toy). He drew the first drawing for the first model, a Ford Consul. It was launched in 1954. Corgi's relationship with Ford became so close that the toy making was giving access to the drawings of vehicles while they were being designed.

Mettoy went into liquidation in 1983. In 2022 the brand was owned by Hornby.

Location: Ford, Kent Avenue, Dagenham, RM9 6PF

Website: https://uk.corgi.co.uk/catalogue/cars

Matchbox

Lesney Products was a die-casting business that was founded by the unrelated schoolfriends Leslie Smith and Rodney Smith. The firm acquired premises in what had been The Rifleman pub in Tottenham. In 1947 the mould maker (John) Jack Odell (1920-2007) joined the business, taking a stake in it. They planned to make components for the electrical and motor vehicle industries. Rodney Smith left Lesney.

In 1950 one of Odall's daughters told him that she could only take things to school that could fit in a matchbox. He used his skills as a die-caster to make her a small model of a car. This proved a sensation with her classmates. Leslie Smith and Odell appreciated that they could utilise the downtime of the Lesney machines to make toys. Odell supervised the design and manufacturing aspects of the company, while Smith oversaw the rest. The first product was a model of diesel road roller, which was launched in 1948. In 1951 Rodney Smith sold his shareholding to Odell and Leslie Smith. In 1952 they had bestseller with a 2s., 11d. model of the Coronation Coach.

Lesney launched the Matchbox range of toy vehicles in 1953. These were sold in matchbox-size boxes and were sold through tobacconists and sweet shops rather than toy shops. The price was half of that of the larger Dinky Toys model vehicles. Lesney grew into one of the largest employers in North-East London, having a workforce of over 6000 people at one point. A purpose-built factory was commissioned by Hackney Marches. In 1960 the company floated. In 1968 it achieved a market capitalisation of 168m.

By the start off the 1970s, Lesney was beginning to feel the effect of its international rivals, particularly Mattel of the United States. In 1973 Odell retired. In 1980 he was appointed joint chairman. However, two years later the company was declared insolvent. It was bought by Universal Toys, which transferred production to the Far East. (Odell went on to establish and then sell the Lledo brand.)

Website: https://shop.mattel.com/collections/matchbox

Toy Soldiers

Britain

The Britain family were Birmingham-based. In 1845 William Britain moved to London. He made collecting boxes. These were too expensive to have much popularity.

In the 1880s the business established an operation in Lampton Road, London.

In the 1890s the firm perfected hollow cast method for lead and then started making lead soldiers. These proved a success. Items were hand painted by home workers.

In the 1920s and 1930s war-related items performed less strongly. Therefore, made circus and farm things.

In 1984 the Britain family sold the business.

In 1992 the business moved from Walthamstow to Nottingham

Website: https://britainsfarmtoys.co.uk

War Gaming

The writer H.G. Wells sought to apply rules to battles that were fought by toy soldiers. As part of his effort, he wrote Floor Games (1911) and Little Wars (1913).

Young V.& A.

In 1866 a prefabricated building was transferred from the South Kensington Museum s site to Bethnal Green where it was re-erected. The Bethnal Green Museum's (1872) functions as an outpost of its mother institution were various.

Following the First World War, Arthur Sabin was appointed to be the satellite institution's Curator. In the 1920s he started to focus the museum upon artefacts that were related to children. In 1974 the establishment's parent body, the (by then) Victoria & Albert Museum, designated its offspring as being a museum of childhood.

Location: Cambridge Heath Road, E2 9PA (red, brown)

Website: www.vam.ac.uk/transforming-the-va-museum-of-childhood

David Backhouse 2024