The Rise and Fall of Swansea's Biggest Toy Factory 🚗

Good morning, Swansea!

In October 1965, a gold Aston Martin car small enough to fit in your hand went on sale in toy shops across Britain, complete with an ejector seat and machine guns that popped out of the front.

It went on to become one of the most successful toys of all time - and it was made right here in Swansea. Such was its popularity that the factory in Fforestfach that built it could barely keep up with demand.

This week, we look back at the Swansea factory that sold millions of toys, and how it all came to an end.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

P.S. Do you have a story you’d like to see in the Scoop? It could be from Swansea’s past or present - I’m always on the lookout for ideas, and I’d love to hear yours. Reply to this e-mail and let me know!

By the 1960s, Fforestfach was home to several toy factories, but none was as big or as famous as Mettoy - and its story begins in Nuremberg, which before World War 2 was the toymaking capital of the world.

Philip Ullmann ran one of its best-known firms, Tipp & Co, renowned for its brightly printed tin toy cars, until 1933, when Nazi persecution forced him, as a Jew, to leave Germany. He came to Britain with Arthur Katz, a young relative who had worked for him since leaving school, and the pair started again in Northampton under a new name, Mettoy, short for "metal toys".

During World War 2, the UK government built a string of so-called shadow factories away from the obvious bombing targets, paid for by the state but run by private firms to boost wartime production. One of them stood on the edge of Fforestfach, and from 1944 Mettoy used it to make pressed metal parts for the war effort. When peace came, the company stayed and business boomed. It built a second, much larger factory alongside in 1948, and by 1952 Swansea had become its headquarters.

By 1956, Mettoy had its sights set on toppling Dinky Toys, the die-cast cars made by Meccano in Liverpool, which had dominated the British toy car market for two decades. The new range needed a name, and from a shortlist of around 70 the company chose Corgi, after the short-legged Welsh breed whose name comes from the Welsh for "dwarf dog". It was a nod to the toys' Swansea home, and with the Queen's well-known fondness for corgis, the royal connection didn't hurt either.

Dinky's cars were solid metal, with empty holes where the windows should be, so when the first Corgis arrived in toyshops in July 1956 with clear plastic windows, they looked far more like the real thing. Corgi made sure everybody noticed, selling them as "the ones with windows". The range sold 2.75 million cars in its first year, and by the late 1960s around 3,500 people were employed at the Fforestfach site.

By the mid-1960s Corgi was already one of the biggest names in British toys, but the model that would make it famous around the world very nearly didn't happen. In September 1964, Goldfinger, the third James Bond film starring Sean Connery, was about to open in cinemas, with a gadget-packed Aston Martin DB5 among its stars.

According to Classic & Sports Car's history of the model, Mettoy only found out about the car three days before the premiere, when designer Marcel Van Cleemput left a newspaper cutting on his boss's desk with a note reading "Something we should get on to quickly." His boss, Howard Fairbairn, thought it would be too complicated to make, and only changed his mind once the film became one of the biggest hits of the year.

With no time to design a model from scratch, Corgi reworked an existing Aston Martin and squeezed in the gadgets, including an ejector seat that fired a tiny passenger through the roof, machine guns that slid out of the front bumper and a bulletproof shield that popped up behind the rear window. Bond's car was silver in the film, but Corgi's silver samples looked like unpainted metal, so it painted its version gold instead.

Each car was made up of 28 parts, assembled by hand on a production line staffed almost entirely by women, and the factory could turn out about 10,000 a day. Around 750,000 reached the shops in the weeks before Christmas 1965, priced at 9s 11d, or roughly £10 in today's money, and toyshops were selling out within minutes.

Mettoy's advertising manager, Bill Baxter, told the Daily Mirror that the company had never expected such phenomenal sales "in our wildest dreams", and warned that plenty of children would be going without that Christmas. In January 1966, it was named the first ever Toy of the Year.

Having struck gold with Bond, Corgi went looking for the next screen hit, and found it in Batman, the American TV series starring Adam West that became a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 1966. The Corgi Batmobile, which came with rockets that fired from the back, arrived that October and proved so popular that the factory switched to round-the-clock production to keep up. It went on to sell almost five million units.

Two years later came Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the 1968 musical starring Dick Van Dyke, based on a children's book by Bond author Ian Fleming and made by Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli. When the real car from the film was brought to Swansea, Jennifer Leigh, who worked on Mettoy's switchboard and reception from 1960 to 1970, was allowed to take it for a drive. Decades later, she shared the memory in a comment under a National Archives blog post about the company, adding: "I didn't tell them that I had failed my test that morning."

For thousands of Swansea women, Mettoy was simply where you worked, and in 2014 the Women's Archive of Wales recorded some of their memories for its Voices from the Factory Floor project.

One of them was Eira John, from Manselton, who had spent four years as a driver in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during the war. She started packing Corgi cars in the warehouse around 1960, when the family needed money for her daughter's school trip and some work on the house, and like a lot of women at the time, she never had an interview, because there was so much factory work around that nobody needed one. Mrs John earned £7 or £9 a week and started at 7am.

Mrs John worked at Mettoy for 14 years and only left when rumours began circling that the factory might close. She followed friends to the government's new driving licence centre at Morriston, now the DVLA, but as she told the interviewer, it was "not the same comradeship as Mettoys."

The Ullmann family's own memories are a little less dutiful. Philip Ullmann's grandson once recalled visiting Fforestfach as a boy with his brother, dressing up as cowboys and helping themselves to water pistols and rifles from the sample room, where Mettoy's engineers kept rivals' toys they had taken apart. The pair then charged into the typing pool, where rows of typists produced the company's letters, and ruined a morning's work. The telling-off they got from the factory director was, he admitted, well deserved.

By the end of the 1960s, the toy car market was changing. Mattel's Hot Wheels had arrived from America with their racing track sets, and Corgi's sales were already starting to slip when disaster struck.

At 1.30pm on Monday, March 10th 1969, fire broke out in the warehouse next to the factory. It destroyed goods worth £1.25 million, reckoned to be a whole year's stock of finished toys waiting to be sent out to shops, and many at the time doubted the company would survive. When Mettoy reported its results that October, The Scotsman noted that profits had more than halved, although the insurers had covered almost all of the loss.

Corgis were in short supply that Christmas, meaning retailers turned to Dinky instead, and some models lost in the blaze were never replaced. It took more than £1.3 million of repairs, and two years, to get the factory back to full production. According to one collector, much of the charred stock was simply bulldozed into holes dug around the edge of the site.

Mettoy never quite recovered. By the late 1970s, children were turning to computer games, and in 1982 the company tried to follow them with the Dragon 32, a home computer first made at Fforestfach and given a suitably Welsh name. It sold well at first, but with Mettoy losing millions, the computer business was sold off within months, and the receivers were called in before the end of 1983.

A management buyout kept Corgi going at Fforestfach until 1989, when the brand was sold to Mattel, the same American company whose Hot Wheels had done so much damage twenty years earlier. Mattel closed the Swansea factory early in 1991, and production moved to China.

Twenty years later, fire returned to the old toy factory. In June 2011, around 5,000 tonnes of shredded tyres being stored in one of the disused Mettoy buildings caught light, sending clouds of smoke across Fforestfach and causing days of traffic chaos. Fire chiefs called it one of the most complex and unusual fires they had ever faced, and it took 23 days to put out, with crews demolishing walls to reach the burning material and dousing it in temporary dams built on site. When it was finally over, the old Mettoy building was demolished.

Corgi is still going strong today, and this month, for the Batmobile's 60th anniversary, it's bringing back a version with red wheels which, so the story goes, only exists because of a mix-up on the production line in Fforestfach.

The original die-cast models now sell to collectors for hundreds of pounds, but none of them ever mentioned Swansea. Turn one over and the baseplate simply says they were designed or made in Britain. Somewhere, though, in lofts and display cabinets all over the world, there are millions of little pieces of Fforestfach.

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Sources: The National Archives blog, "Post-war playtime: Mettoy and Corgi Toys" (incl. reader comments); Classic & Sports Car, "When Corgi struck gold"; Lancaster Insurance, "The best of the Corgi 007 cars" (quoting the Daily Mirror, 1965); The Scotsman, 11 October 1969; contemporary press report on the Dunbee-Combex-Marx fire, 1969 (via the British Newspaper Archive); Women's Archive of Wales, Voices from the Factory Floor (Eira John and Joan Gibbon interviews, via People's Collection Wales); The Fforestfach History Website; Coflein (RCAHMW); Grace's Guide; Brighton Toy and Model Museum; Vectis, "Ullmann Family Corgi Collection"; hobbyDB, "The Great Fire of… Corgi"; Corgi Toys and Corgi Model Club; Science Museum Group; Wikipedia.