The Merrythought Teddy Bear Factory at Ironbridge

Location: The Merrythought Company Limited, Dale End, The Wharfage,

Ironbridge, Shropshire, England, UK

Date of Photograph: am 16 November 2007

OS Grid Reference: SJ666037

Co-ordinates: 52:37:48N 2:29:38W

Elevation: 42.7 meters

 

Coalbrookdale is usually thought of as the Birthplace of Industry, but here it shows an industry habitually associated with the nonage of man.

 

The Ironbridge Gorge is crowded with industrial monuments that in the eighteenth century based themselves on the valley’s then seemingly infinite resources of coal, ironstone, fireclay and bitumen. It is a United Nations World Heritage Site.

 

In 1894 the German toymaker Sussenguth Brothers presented a stuffed toy bear in their catalog. Three years later, their competitor Steiff showed its “Roly-Poly” bear at a Leipzig trade fair, and by 1899 Margarete Steiff had patents for twenty-three of her soft toy designs including several ursine themes.

 

In 1902 American satirist Clifford Berryman published, in the Washington Post, a cartoon of noted huntsman Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a bear cub. The cartoon was syndicated worldwide and the US Commander-in-Chief was indelibly associated with a little bear. The “Teddy Bear” was born, and by November Morris Michtom had sold the first in his Brooklyn shop.

 

The next year Steiff exported three thousand 55PB bears to the USA, and they and their American competitors dominated the craze before The Great War.

 

In 1919, the Armistice brought slump to the enormous and workmanlike British textile industry. Notwithstanding, WG Holmes and GH Laxton opened a small mill in Yorkshire to spin imported mohair. They purchased Dyson Hall and Company Limited of Huddersfield and expanded vertically into weaving mohair plush.

 

To provide an outlet for their mohair plush they made a further vertical move into soft toy manufacture, and in September 1930 teddy bear maker Merrythought Limited was founded. Holmes and Laxton set it up in a temporary factory with a workforce of twenty, including managers enticed from Birmingham rival Chad Valley.

 

In February 1931 Merrythought leased an 1898 foundry complex from The Coalbrookdale Company. This premises was of course at Ironbridge, to which Merrythought moved.

 

Another key worker from Chad Valley was the deaf mute artist Florence Attwood who presented thirty-two toy designs for the 1930 season, and the first teddy in 1931. She prepared a range of soft toy designs for Merrythought until her death in 1949.

 

By 1932, over two hundred were employed at Dale End and the works was electrified. After three more years Merrythought was the largest soft toy maker in the United Kingdom.

 

In September 1939 the Merrythought factory was requisitioned by The Admiralty. Teddy production was banished to extempore works in nearby Wellington. The Dale End factory’s situation in a wooded defile made aerial bombing difficult. The Ironbridge complex was given over to secret map-making and plywood storage. Later, The Royal Navy used Dale End to make uniform badges, helmet linings, gas mask bags, specialist ammunition bags and a diversity of war goods made form gabardine and velour.

 

In March 1946, toy production resumed at the Dale End site. Nylon and Draylon entered the fabric and new machinery was installed. In 1955 a compressed-air actuated stuffing machine was imported from the US and worked in parallel with hand stuffing. During this era of post-war expansion the foundry buildings were renovated and design and commercial offices, as well as a showroom, erected on site. The next year Merrythought purchased the freehold from The Coalbrookdale Company.

 

Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, however, British consumer manufactures suffered a dramatic decline in the face of foreign competition. Many such industries were based upon a pre-scientific handicraft tradition and were aimed squarely at achieving a product life of decades, if not centuries, in a market where unit cost was no desideratum.

 

In its latter years, Merrythought boasted that it was the last British toymaker and that no two of its examples were identical. An American or Japanese maker would of course have regarded the latter diagnostic of process misconfiguration. In 1988 Merrythought opened a teddy bear retail outlet in an old shop premises beside the works gate.

 

On 27th November 2006 Merrythought should have been at its busiest point of the year. Fifty-six year old engineer Oliver Holmes, grandson of the founder, called his forty-eight remaining workers together. He thanked his staff for their talent and loyalty. He remarked that it was impossible for Merrythought to compete with foreign goods made at “significantly lower” manufacturing and overhead costs. The workers were told that they would not get their redundancy money until after Christmas.

 

The next day television news reported the closure and interviewed some of Merrythought’s tearful former employees before the factory gate. Later a journalist explained that it cost in one week to run the Telford workshops what it cost in one year to run a Chinese teddy bear factory. He added that Merrythought toys start at £40 whereas you could buy an imported teddy for a fiver.

 

On 14th December 2006 Merrythought Toys Limited was placed into Creditors’ Voluntary Liquidation. Some of its major creditors, the employees, were however in a difficult position because the principal saleable asset, the designs’ patents and copyrights, were the property of the holding company, Merrythought Limited, which was not in liquidation.

 

Collectors worldwide “ran on” toyshops and cleared the shelves of remaining Merrythought product.

 

On 24th January 2007 the Merrythought Toys Limited residual body, Smudged Limited, sold its stock, assets and work-in-progress to Merrythought Limited and within five months a 2007 Merrythought catalog was published. Limited production for the collectors’ market resumed at Dale End.

 

The British bear had been reprieved.

 

He would now set you back between £47 and £295.

 

 

Done