What Happened to Corgi Toys? How British Toy Icon Collapsed

If you grew up in Britain between 1956 and the 1980s there was a good chance your bedroom floor was covered in them. The die-cast cars with the windows. The James Bond Aston Martin with the ejector seat. The Eddie Stobart lorry your dad bought you at the motorway services. Corgi Toys — the little Welsh company that became one of the most beloved toy brands in British history. And the story of how it was nearly lost forever. It starts not in Wales but in Nuremberg in 1933. Philip Ullmann and Arthur Katz — both Jewish, both veterans of the German toy industry — boarded a train for England as Hitler came to power. Arriving with little more than experience and determination they found a corner of a workshop in Northampton. They called their new company Mettoy — Metal Toy. By 1939 it employed around 600 people. Then the war came and the factory shifted to shell carriers and munitions boxes for the Ministry of Supply. 1944 — Mettoy secured a lease on a newly built plant in Fforestfach, Swansea. After the war it became their permanent home. 1948 — Castoys launched, cast-aluminium clockwork cars made for Marks and Spencer. Then in January 1954 a young French-born designer named Marcel Van Cleemput arrived and changed everything. He sketched a model of a Ford Consul — and added something no die-cast car had before. Transparent plastic windows. A tiny dashboard. Seats. The ones with the windows. In July 1956 Corgi Toys launched officially. Within a year 2.75 million had been sold. Then 1964. The Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger. Pop-out machine guns, a bulletproof rear shield and the legendary ejector seat. By 1968 nearly four million DB5s had been sold worldwide — still the record for a die-cast car. The Batmobile followed in 1966 — almost five million leaving the Swansea factory. In 1966 Corgi won the Queen's Award to Industry. At peak the Swansea factory employed 3,500 people. An American export executive visiting called it — like General Motors but in miniature. Then the decline. Hot Wheels arriving from America. Cheaper imports from the Far East. Rising production costs. Then in 1982 the fatal decision — Mettoy poured its cash reserves into Dragon Data, a home computer venture. The Dragon 32 and Dragon 64 struggled against Sinclair and Commodore. Losses mounted. On 19 November 1983 the receiver's report spelled it out — liabilities of over five million pounds. The four production halls in Swansea fell silent. The company that began with two refugees and a borrowed workshop was undone by a single costly detour into home computers. 29 March 1984 — management buyout. December 1989 — sold to Mattel. 1995 — British consortium bought it back as Corgi Classics, moving to Leicester, focusing on collector models. The Eddie Stobart lorries. The vintage buses. The British trucks. Numbered limited editions for the generation who remembered the feel of die-cast metal in their hands. 1 May 2008 — Hornby bought Corgi for £8.3 million. Under Hornby's stewardship the collector spirit survives — the same roof as Airfix and Scalextric. The Swansea factory is gone. The 3,500 workers are history. But the die-cast metal is still being made. Two refugees built an icon. A computer venture nearly destroyed it. A Welsh factory made Britain's dreams in metal. Some stories are worth preserving. 🚛 Subscribe for more untold British history