A BRITISH TOY TOWN

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 182, 28 April 1919, Page 7

A BRITISH TOY TOWN

■ — : — * '• DARTFORD AND ITS NEW INDUSTRY

The foundations of a considerable industry in the manufacture of British toys are being laid in the town of Dart™rd, and wo may eoon find this little Kentish town supplying to our children practically all .the. kinds of toys that the present generation got from Nuremberg, writes the- epeoial reporter of tho London "Daily News." This enterprise is due to Messrs. Vickera, Ltd., the great firm which at. Barrow-in-Purness, can.supply a battleship or a howitzer, and at Dartford can give you a shilling doll or a toy model of an aeroplane at Is. 3d. Messrs. Vickers looked ahead some months-ago, and rualised that the time would come, when our big firms would be required to provide ploughshares rather than swords, and they determined to bo early in the field with their peace products. During wartime the firm's two factories at Joyce Green and Powder Mill Lane, Dartford, kept 3000 workers busy in war work, such as shell-filling anil woodwork, for Government requirements. When the armistice came they set to work to expand the tiny nucleus of the toy-making business whioh had been established—by tho employment of some men of 50 years old and a handful of girls—in the last twelve months. Much of their machinery was easily adaptable for toy-making, their girl workers could easily be trained to the work, and so the toy-making soon expanded. Before long, it is the numbers employed in making toys and other peacetimo products wilj equal the numbers employed on munitions, and will, in fact, consist largely of the $ame people. About two-thirds of the workers will bo womon.

Mr. Webb, the superintendent, piloted ine through the works. When he is aide to got moro machinery, iio said, ho can expand the , work enormously. Tho armistice came too late to permit Messrs. Vickers to get their toys on to the Christmas mavket, but next year there should bo hardly a Christmas-tree iirlhe country without a Vickers , toy aeroplane or a Vickers' golliwog on it. Mr. Webb said that the frrm aro determined to beat the German toys as wo knew them in 1914. Tho prices aro to ho moderate and reasonable-and that is, belicvohlc, for the toys aro just a side lino arising out of a large echeme of woodwork at Dartford, which includes tho making of standard doors, standard window-frames, and domestic washing-machines. The wood used in the toys, in fact, will "be largely "eorar/J wood from the other jjoikshoßfl.