Category:Chad Valley

Toy Brands and Manufacturers

Chad Valley

1897 -

Chad Valley roulette sets, 1939 advert [image info]

Chad Valley moulded building blocks [image info]

Metal World Globe, 1920s/1930s, Chad Valley [image info]

The Chad Valley company produced a wide range of boardgames and toys, including teddybears and kindergarten toys.

Chad Valley started out as a Birmingham printing company set up by Joseph and Alfred Johnson in 1860. In 1897, they opened a factory in nearby Harwell, though which ran the river Chad (actually more of a stream). The region was known as Chad Valley, and the factory became known as the Chad Valley Works.

The company continually expanded its range of manufacturing options by acquiring other companies with different manufacturing focii, such as Isaacs and Co.. for their soft toys, and Skaymo Ltd. for their wooden blocks.

Postwar

Immediately after World War Two, Chad Valley hooked up with Metal Box (who had now absorbed Barringer, Wallis and Manners) to sell Chad-Valley-branded versions of some of the metal toy designs that BW&M had acquired from Burnett, including the Ubilda range and Burnett's range of tinplate buses and cars.

Where many of the larger players in the UK toy industry had had a background in metal toys and struggled to reinvent themselves to be able to cope with plastics production, Chad Valley had a good plastics manufacturing base but was missing the capability to produce "old-fashioned" metal toys, which made them an ideal business partner for Metal Box, who had the production capacity and designs for metal toys, but no distribution path into the toy market.

The association with Metal Box became so successful, and produced so many products, that Chad Valley soon started to consider getting their own manufacturing capability for these sorts of tinplate and tinplate-and-clockwork toys themselves, buying Winfield Ltd. for the company's ability to make clockwork motors, and Hall and Lane Ltd. for their expertise in metal boxmaking. They also acquired A.S Cartwright who made toy kitchen sets and teasets, and Glevum Toys.

In the 1970s, Chad Valley was bought by Palitoy, via Barclay Toy Group, and the name eventually ended up being sold to Woolworths in the late 1980s