Galt Toys

The Galt Toys company dates back to 1836 when James Galt set up an education supply business based in Manchester. At this time it largely centred on the supply of items of furniture such as desks and blackboards. Towards the end of the 1800’s the business expanded into printing and publishing with toys being added during the 1950’s, and the move into the domestic toy market later still in the 1960’s.

For ease of navigation, there are several sections under the Galt Toys header, in addition to the Early Stages section, other divisions within the Galt Toys section are ‘Galt Toys 1’, consisting of Tray Puzzles , ‘Galt Toys 2’ – jigsaw puzzles and boxed games. Starting with the oldest of the puzzles – under the ‘Galt Early Stages’. These puzzles date to around the mid ‘50’s when Galt developed their ‘Galts Early Stages’ range aimed at the educational market. In the very earliest of these the logo is seen written in a script font, later added to with a product code and then later changed again (most likely at the time that Ken Garland arrived in 1961) from Galts Early Stages to ‘Galt Early Stages, bringing it more in line with Galt Toys, which had at the same time been derived from the original name of ‘James Galt & Co Ltd’.  Examples of this shift in the marketing of the puzzles alongside redesigns of the puzzles to update them can be seen in the transport puzzle section where we have placed early designs alongside later remakes of the same puzzle. 

Aside from the logo changes there are a couple of other things to look for in the following chapter, the addition beneath the Galt Toys logo of the words ‘Made In England’ being one. These earlier puzzles are of significantly better quality than the later puzzles, likely due to changes in the manufacturing processes and the paints used following the introduction of Toy Safety Regulations (1974). Some of the later versions were at times identified with ‘Made in Malta’ however, at some stage they stopped declaring where the puzzles were manufactured reverting back full circle (as per the late 50’s/early 60’s puzzles) to simply putting the ‘Galt Toys’ logo printed on the front of each puzzle.

In terms of the artists and designers who contributed to the Galt Toys archive, initially the designers were not credited in public for their work, however, after Ken Garland joined the company (1961) this shifted somewhat and designers were sometimes credited within the catalogues, it is for this reason many of the early puzzles are unattributed. We continue to develop our knowledge of Galt Toys however, and will update any design authorship as soon as we can offer verification.  

And finally, in every collection, there are those few items that are for various reasons harder to find than others. In this section, the discontinuation of some of the puzzle lines in 1968 has made it difficult to find some puzzles, notably the horse, cows & squirrel (designed by Beryl Coles & JM Miles), ‘At Home’ designed by Catherine Denny and the Four-Way Seaside Puzzle designed by Fredun Shapur. We are delighted to have been able to include all of these within the collection and hope that those who seek them out for their own collections have fun in finding them too.