British Toy Association

The British Toy Association (BTA) seems to have been founded in 1914, with Hobbies Weekly reporting in October 1914 that the first meeting had taken place, with its aims neatly summarised by the Hobbies headline "To Win the Toy Trade from Germany".

With WW1 having just broken out in July 1914, some figures in the British toymaking sector decided that this was an opportunity to emerge from the War with British industry able to take over manufacturing of some toy types in which Germany had been dominant.

The sector that the BTA focused on was wooden toys, as (along with soft toys and dolls, and doll clothing) these could be made by home-workers using comparatively simple tools. The BTA would be able to encourage training, to supply and distribute materials (especially industrial wooden and cloth offcuts that counted as waste, but were useful for toymaking), and to act as a marketing, promotional, and sales channel for the resulting toys. The business model would be based on other successful home-working industries, such as lace-making, and would provide additional emplyment for out-of-season agricultural workers, "peasants" and "the crippled", and the new industry sector would help to offset the increase in unemplyment expected after the War.

Promotion would be handled by Hobbies (who had a large readership of amateur wood-workers), and Hobbies Weekly then coincidentally started publishing simple dollhouse furniture designs, and promoting local technical colleges.

Succession

After meetings between the Board of Trade and a wider cross-section of the toy industry in early 1915, the BTA seems to have been superceded by the Incorporated Association of Toy Manufacturers and Wholesalers, whose wider scope included factory-based manufacturers. One of the more notable successes of the Board of Trade initative was the persuading of Frank Hprnby and his company, Meccano Ltd., to consider extending their range to include gauge 0 model railway equipment.

US response

The US government, recognising that Germany seemed to be aggressivelly trying to use under-pricing to export to markets and earn foreign currency, and that home manufacturers then had trouble competing with the resulting low-priced goods ... and that countries such as Britain were now responding with trade tarriffs and with other ways ot halp their own native toymaking businesses, decided to set up something similar themselves.

'XIV European Governments aid toy industry. The nations of Europe which formerly imported practically all of their toys from Germany recognized as soon as the war started the need to develop home toy industries of their own so that their children might never again have to play with German toys.

During the most critical periods of the war official aid was rendered to various toy industries with the purpose of establishing them on a firm basis so that they might survive after the war. The Board of Trade of England organized an official fair in the spring of 1915 for the sale of toys at wholesale. That fair was made an annual event and the Government used every means to induce merchants to patronize it. The growth of the English toy business in four years was from an estimated production of 2,000,000 worth of toys in 1913 to 10,000,000 worth in 1916. Later statistics are not available. It was a policy of the English Government to grant exemption from military service to proprietors of toy factories and retail toy stores on the ground that they were building up an industry which was formerly controlled by Germany. The Government also made very liberal grants of raw materials to toy factories after the same materials had been denied to other lines of trade.

— , House Committe on Ways and Means (US), , Schedule N, Sundries, , 8 February 1921