Chad Valley Toy Company

Chad Valley Toy Company. National D-Day Memorial. Around 1820, Anthony Bunn Johnson established a printing and book-binding business at Birmingham, England. The firm prospered under Johnson and his heirs, relocating to Harborne in 1897 as Johnson Brothers Ltd. Sited near a small stream called Chad, the new factory soon became known as Chad Valley Works. The Johnsons registered "Chad Valley" as a trademark and added a new line of cardboard games and toys to complement their stationers products and writing sundries. That decision reshaped the balance of the company's history. , , In 1904, Joseph Johnson, the firm's chairman died and his eldest son Alfred succeeded him as chairman and managing director. A decade after Alfred had taken over the company, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria occurred and with it the onset of World War I. Up until then, England's merchants had imported toys and games with ease, but the practice ceased almost at once. Recognizing that void as the splendid opportunity it was, Chad Valley Works leapt upon it by further expanding its line. Within a year, a stream of plush, jointed Chad Valley Teddy Bears kept toy shops throughout Great Britain crowded with customers who bought them along with the firm's puzzles and books. , , Hostilities in "the war to end all wars" ceased in November of 1918, and for the next two decades the firm continued to prosper and grow as evidenced by its receiving the Royal Warrant of Appointment as "Toymakers to Her Majesty the Queen” in 1938. The queen was a visible patron of Chad Valley Toys, and both Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret grew up playing with them. As they did, the firm's jigsaw puzzles garnered international attention because each was cut by fret saw and no two were alike. The puzzles obvious educational value led to millions of domestic sales, and industries associated with travel and tourism wasted no time exploiting their marketing potential. Among others, Cunard, Dunlop, the English Tourist Board, and Great Western Railway (GWR) bought so many that Chad Valley Toys, at one point, employed fifty jigsaw cutters, indeed, between 1924 and 1939 the firm sold more than a million puzzles to GWR alone. , , The onset of the Second World War changed all that. If the absence of imported toys promoted the firm's expansion in the late teens, its size and capabilities in 1939 impelled it into the manufacture of military goods such as tent poles, wooden cases for gun barrels and precision instruments, electrical coils, charts, and, for the convalescing wounded, board games and jigsaw puzzles. Leading up to D-Day, Chad Valley Toys also produced an immense plywood map for assembly and use in the forward operations center at Southwick House, Hampshire. , , The floor-to-ceiling map of the European coastline from Norway to the Spanish border arrived in sections so as to preserve the secrecy of the D-Day landing sites. Two men from the firm delivered and assembled the map, which includes shipping routes, landing times, and other classified material necessitating their detention at Southwick House until the Normandy landing was well underway. Beyond his many public contributions to the Allied war effort, Alfred Johnson gave three sons, all of whom were mentioned in dispatches. Only one survived the war. , A mosaic adaption of the map appears on the ceiling of the folly to your rear. , The mosaic and this tablet are in tribute to Peter A. Thomas, who came in at Omaha Beach on D+1. He served with pride as a military policeman in the 1st Infantry Division (Big Red One) .