Lesney and Matchbox Cars
The East End is, sadly, as famous for its disappeared industries as its existing ones. The dockyards are gone and the shipbuilders of Blackwall are a distant memory.
And of course Tower Hamlets once boasted the biggest ‘manufactory’ in Europe – Bryant and May’s colossal Fairfield Works, now transformed into luxury flats as the Bow Quarter.
But it is matchboxes of a quite different kind that provided one of the East End’s greatest manufacturing success stories – a name that will bring back happy memories to generations of kids but, sadly, lasted less than half this century.
Take a walk north along the River Lea and, just before you hit Hackney Wick, you will see the name ‘Lesney’ emblazoned on the wall of a decaying blue building. Now the Lesney factory is just another industrial relic, but once it produced the Matchbox cars, trucks, buses and more which enchanted post-War British schoolchildren. And it all happened by accident.
Leslie and Rodney Smith were unrelated schoolchums who, in one of those quirks of fate which often spark great events, were reunited during their WW2 service in the Royal Navy. Both were engineers and both dreamed of running their own companies once the fighting was over – so they decided they would go into business together.
On 19 June 1947 they sealed their partnership, taking an amalgam of Leslie and Rodney to form Lesney Products – the vague word product was chosen because, for all their ambitions, the pair had yet to decide what they would be making!
With £600 of combined funds, the two bought an old pub, The Rifleman, further up-river at Edmonton, and kitted it out with Government surplus die-casting machinery. And, joined by expert die-caster Jack Odell, the company joined the scores of other post-War start-ups, as Britain rebuilt its economy and industry for peacetime.
The company would take on any and every job, subcontracting their skills to the major engineering firms who needed precision die-cast pieces. But, as the Christmas of 1948 approached, orders dropped off, and the Smiths decided to cast around for a way to keep the machines busy and the revenue rolling in.
And so the firm decided to produce miniatures of the vehicles Britons saw around them everyday, on the thousands of building sites which were reconstructing the country. A traction engine, cement mixer, tractor and bulldozer were the first off the production line, and Lesney set about selling them to local shops.
Fired by their success, the Smiths decided to pitch the bigger toy stores. They weren’t enthusiastic. The tiny cars were described as “Christmas cracker trash” by one buyer. But children loved them. Lesney, in fact, had difficulty meeting demand and soon 13 Woolworths stores placed orders.
Manufacturing was still tough in the austerity of post-War Britain. From 1950 to 1952, during the Korean War, the Government limited the use of zinc to essential purposes, and Lesney made only the tin Jumbo the Elephant toy.
But as the ’50s wore on, business took off. The company dumped the bigger toys it had experimented with and concentrated all its manufacturing on miniatures. Rather than an offshoot of the business it became the core, and Lesney went into business with an East End firm called Moko. The two firms registered the name Matchbox, and concentrated on building the range.
The idea of a matchbox to put toys in didn’t start with Lesney. Moko’s boss Moses Kohnstam had moved to Britain in 1900 from Germany, where the idea had long been popular. It proved a popular gimmick in Britain, with the first cars in plain boxes with tuck-in ends, with simple printing on the cover. And generations of kids will also remember playing with the firm’s Dinky toys.
Through the ’60s and ’70s, exports grew to the United States and the Far East, and Matchbox became a worldwide name. But the recession of the early ’70s, plus a rash of unsuccessful ventures into dolls and Far East production, took their toll.
After huge losses, Lesney was declared bankrupt on 11 June 1992. The brand names were bought and distribution switched to companies in the US, Macau, anywhere but the East End in fact. The irony today is that the ‘Christmas cracker trash’ is hugely collectable – toys bought 40 years ago with pocket money pennies now change hands for hundreds of pounds.