Toye the Medal Maker Hidden Histories: Britain's Oldest Family Businesses

This is a series about the hidden histories

of Britain's oldest family businesses.

Few businesses last beyond two generations.

Against the odds, these families have

survived in their trades for more than three centuries.

This is the 188,933rd day of Balsons at work.

They've come through 50 recessions,

the Industrial Revolution,

two World Wars and the rise of internet shopping.

Really, things were very sad after the war. There was no money,

there was no money anywhere.

We'll meet the present-day head of each family

as they face a crossroads in their working life

and we'll follow them as they go on a journey

into the past of their business.

"Jonah Toye." Fantastic! I was very worried about Jonah.

This time, we tell a tale from the world of regalia.

Toye & Co make medals, uniforms and ceremonial clothing.

Today, the company is run by Fiona Toye.

Everything you can see on this trolley has been made here.

The Orient Express, West Yorkshire Police, Salvation Army.

People have worn regalia for centuries

as a symbol of their standing in the world.

But it can be an unpredictable market.

Fiona is about to see how her family business

has survived for generations.

I just want to know what happens, what happens next?

It's as good as Downton.

This is a story of identity and status,

and how it's been displayed through the ages.

All told through one unique family business.

In 1980, Fiona met Bryan Toye,

the head of one of Britain's oldest family businesses.

They married and had four children.

But in 2006, their lives were turned upside down

when Bryan had a near fatal heart attack

and Fiona was called in to help run the company.

Hi, Kush.

Now she is the Chief Executive of Toye & Co.

Morning, Gary. Morning, Chris.

And is responsible for the firm's showroom, two factories

and 132 staff.

'It is an immense responsibility to take on a family firm like this.'

Hi, Karl.

We've got all the component bits - the pink and grey ribbon.

Something he made earlier.

I think it's very akin actually to a stately home,

a stately factory even.

Today, Fiona is at one of the company's factories in the Midlands.

Here, Toye & Co use traditional techniques

to make thousands of items

for the military, exclusive societies and foreign leaders.

They even recently helped to revamp the Kremlin.

Back at home, they make honours and regalia for the Queen.

-Hello, Mick.

-Hello.

They go on the centre of the CBEs.

This is an OBE, which is something

I think we're very well known for doing.

Toye also weave the ribbon the medals hang from.

It's funny the amount of times when you have people saying,

"Well, what do you do?" And I go, "Well, we make insignia and regalia,"

and even then they go, "OK, so what do you do?"

We show people's status.

This centuries-old business is one of only a handful

of regalia-making companies left in Britain today.

Now, Fiona has to shape it for the future.

I'm not a blood Toye. Obviously, I've married into the family

and so I don't have the same knowledge of where we come from,

where it all began.

From this journey, I'm hoping to find what the heritage is,

what the real thread is that has been unravelling through all these years,

what the business was like, how it's evolved and I hope that

having discovered all these things, that may, in some ways,

help influence the decisions

that we will make for the future of the business too.

Fiona has been told that the Toyes have been involved in business

since the late 17th century.

But she's never seen documentary evidence

about the early years of her family business.

All she knows is that its origins are in silk weaving.

The British silk weaving industry originated in London's East End,

so Fiona has come here to see

if she can find any information about early Toyes.

At St Leonard's Church in the heart of the East End,

Fiona is meeting Reverend Paul Turp.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Fiona.

-Hi. Fiona Toye.

-Hello.

We have something intriguing for you. Come in.

Through public records, the Toye family has been traced back

to William Toye, who lived in this area in the mid-1700s.

Paul has unearthed a crucial document

which tells us about his life.

Someone with the name that you'll recognise walked on these stones

and they were going to get married.

-Oh, wow!

-Right here.

This is a photocopy of a page out of an old register,

so you have a look and you see what you can find.

Keep going.

Oh, William Toye!

And Ann Lebay, married in this church by banns,

the second day of October in the year 1768.

But you see, they can't write their own name.

This is just saying his mark and her mark. They couldn't write.

-They can't write.

-They can't write.

As far as we can make out, Ann is 15 years old.

The other thing which we have sussed out,

-Ann was seven months pregnant.

-Ah. Oh, dear. Yes.

Oh, dear. So, if...if Ann had a child out of wedlock,

a bastard child, the implications are massively serious.

What does she end up with? What happens to her?

She'd try and get a job, maybe doing sort of scullery work, as it were,

like the poorest of the poor,

and she would have been dead by she's 25 years old.

-So, at least William was good in that he stood by her?

-He married her, yes.

What is interesting, this is where we start doing the detective bit.

All of these are on the Sunday afternoon.

The fact that it's a Sunday afternoon means

that these are very poor people.

Sunday afternoon is the only time you got off work.

At the time of William and Ann's marriage,

most of the working poor in Georgian Shoreditch were silk weavers

and it's almost certain that William and Ann were too.

The weavers here were artisans and many of them came from families

that had been in the trade for at least a century.

It hasn't been proved who William Toye's father was,

but it's very likely that, by 1768,

the Toye family had been weaving silk for generations.

The discovery of William and Ann is, for me, really, really exciting

and to actually now imagine this real couple,

this young girl expecting a baby, I just hope it was a happy story

after this, but it is terribly exciting. Really, really exciting.

Now Fiona wants to know more about what it was like

for William and Ann to live and work in this area in the 1760s.

So she has come to a preserved silk weaver's house,

round the corner from St Leonard's Church,

to meet historian Kathy Chater.

So, William and Ann, what kind of people were they?

How did they live? What was this area like?

Well, actually their entire married life was spent

within about 200 yards of here, the whole area here, Norton Folgate.

-Oh, good gracious.

-It wasn't a slum, right at the bottom,

and it wasn't right at the top.

They were what was known as the middling sort.

They were the working poor and they got by.

So, if they did not work...

They did not eat.

I've just seen the church where they were married,

a bit of a shotgun wedding.

Well, actually Ann brought a bit more than just her fertility

and her youth to the marriage. She brought special skills.

We know about Ann because later in life,

she applied to enter the French Hospital.

Ann's application to the French Hospital states that she was 80,

nearly blind and a silk weaver. Run by a charity,

the hospital offered care to the French working poor of the East End.

But it was exclusively for a particular kind of French immigrant,

those with Huguenot heritage.

The Huguenots were Protestant refugees

who had fled persecution in France in 1685.

Ann could only have applied to the hospital if she had Huguenot origins.

What the Huguenots brought from France

was their skills, in silk weaving particularly.

France was the centre of fashion at that time.

Everybody wanted to dress like the French - their clothes,

their ribbons, their decorations, the whole lot.

So she was bringing quite an important amount of kudos really

to the marriage and so, by marrying her,

William acquired contacts and the same kudos as she had.

This is absolutely fascinating

because you can see, obviously, you were saying about the cache

of the Huguenot heritage of skill and expertise in weaving,

and how that was obviously a very, very important marketing tool

even in those days, and so what does interest me is not only, obviously,

that William got a lovely bride in Ann, but he was as interested

in her heritage and the cache of her family skills that came with it.

You can see they're a very, very good influence, the French Huguenots,

and how attractive that would have been to William,

so, yes, I just want to know what happens? What happens next?

It's as good as Downton.

William and Ann Toye were most probably self-employed artisans.

There's no record of precisely what the silk they wove was used for.

But because it's an expensive material to produce,

silk has always denoted status and power,

so it's been used for regalia for centuries.

As early as the 1300s,

Edward III set up the exclusive Order of the Garter

and silk was often used to make the regalia worn by members.

Even today, Huguenot heritage is important to Toyes' business.

The family has always thought it came through the male line.

But the only documentary evidence Kathy has been able to find

is that Ann Debay had Huguenot origins.

Fiona is at home in the Cotswolds catching up with her daughter, Lily,

who used to work for the company.

It is interesting, the Toyes do still, obviously,

very strongly have Huguenot ancestry,

but it comes in through the female line

when William marries Ann Debay.

-Oh, my word!

-So, Ann brings Huguenot blood

and Huguenot weaving skills into the family.

Ah. Glad to know that the females started playing

-such an important part that early on.

-Yes.

-Good to know.

Just as significant, the female line is as significant as the male line.

Would the Huguenot strand actually at that point,

obviously with William already being a weaver, would it have actually

been a sort of profitable marriage for him in the sense of he gets the Huguenot strand?

Oh, yes. If you think, I am sure marrying

the 15-year-old pregnant girl, I am sure he was taking a step up.

I am a hopeless romantic,

so we'll call it a love and strategy marriage.

Yes, a strategic love match.

It is amazing to think that there's this incredible woman

who actually is a relation in distant past

that I've never heard of before.

It's believed that William Toye was in his late 40s

when he died in 1796.

Ann died 37 years later, aged 80, in 1833.

The family trade was continued by their son, Jonah,

who was also a weaver.

The Victorian age was about to begin

and the Industrial Revolution was in full flow.

But the once thriving silk industry was in peril.

The craftsmanship of East End silk weavers like Jonah

was threatened by wage cuts and new automated looms

pioneered by a French weaver called Jean Marie Jacquard.

Within a generation, the silk weaving area of London's East End

had become one of Britain's most notorious slums

and many weavers were destitute.

Fiona wants to find out how the Toyes survived these difficult times.

So she's meeting historian Hilda Kean

in the East End of London, near Brick Lane.

In the mid-19th century,

times were very difficult for the trade.

General silk weaving

certainly is in massive decline.

What happened in 1860, there is a commercial treaty

which essentially allows cheap imports of silk from France.

And it's almost overnight that the general silk weavers

-just lose their jobs. The market just crashes.

-Yes.

Around this time, Jonah Toye disappeared from public records.

But Jonah had a son, William Henry.

And according to census records, William Henry had been living

at the heart of the silk weaving industry as a teenage apprentice.

Now, we do have information about William on the 1851 census.

Fantastic. Thank goodness!

So, let's have a look at this.

So, over here we've got William.

-Oh, he's the head of the family. 26 years old.

-Yeah.

And a handloom weaver.

Now, all around, people are giving up weaving

and going into other areas,

and, logically, that is what you would do,

and this is a man who doesn't do that.

It's interesting that he specifies that he's a hand loom weaver.

I think you're absolutely right,

because what he's referring to as a handloom weaver is tradition

and he's saying, "I have a skilled job.

"I am linked in to the earliest Spitalfields weavers,"

who were seen as THE specialists,

the ones in silk, you know, the expelled Huguenots, et cetera.

"I am linked in with this tradition."

This is very interesting to me.

We have this young man and he is weaving,

keeping to the family trade and is obviously determined to succeed.

Yes. What starts then to happen is that the ones who survive

tend to be the specialists, making things such as trimmings.

-So, it's silk trimmings that they can...

-Laces and ribbons.

Absolutely, and laces and ribbons and trimmings,

and things that can be used at the high end of the market.

Silk trimmings are intricate ribbons or decorative bands

used to enhance clothes and regalia.

And because trimmings are specialist by their very nature,

very few people are doing this

and that seems to be where William is going.

That is why I think he probably survives.

-A canny young man...

-Very much so.

..because he must have seen that, you know, the trade was changing

and he would have learned to be a very, very tough character

when you think where he began his life in such penury.

In 1851, the Toye family silk weaving business seems

to have been surviving by specialising.

In the mid-19th century, the demand for specialist trimmings

and regalia was growing.

Up until the early 1800s, it was predominantly

the upper echelons of society who wore regalia.

But by the 1850s, Britain was becoming a great industrial power

and some working men found there was more money in their pocket

than they'd ever had before.

They subscribed to clubs and societies.

When they met together in this way,

they tried to show a sense of communal identity

and they often did this by wearing silk regalia.

Fiona wants to find out

if William Henry tried to cash in on this new trend.

So she has come to the National Archives

to meet textile archivist Julie Hall.

Hi, Fiona. Welcome to the National Archives. I'm Julie. Come this way.

This is a register of designs for copyright.

As you can see, the date at the top of the page is 1861

and if you look down the page, you might find a name that's familiar.

Oh, yes, indeed. William Toye.

There he is and he has applied to copyright two designs

by the looks of it.

From what I know of the family, they were jobbing weavers.

This is obviously beneficial to him, is it, once you're setting up

in business? To make sure people...

Absolutely. It's interesting to speculate why he decided

to register these designs

and as we'll see, they're quite linked in theme

and so it may be that he was trying to enter a new market,

and he was quite keen not to have his designs copied by anybody else.

So if we just turn the pages carefully...

..these were the designs

that William Toye was registering for copyright.

Heavens! They are extraordinary, aren't they?

Good gracious me!

Heavens! That's absolutely amazing. What's the story behind those?

Well, the AOF on this design stands for the Ancient Order of Foresters

and they were a friendly society who are still

actually in existence today.

They were set up prior to the welfare state system

and members would contribute into a central fund

and then, in times of hardship, they would be helped out.

And this, similarly, we think it's the symbol of the Oddfellows,

which was another friendly society.

So, possibly he was making the designs speculatively

in the hope of getting a contract, but we can't really be sure.

I'm just absolutely thrilled. This is quite fantastic.

It's such a direct link with what we do today.

-I think we actually make for both of these organisations.

-Gosh, really?

-I have a feeling we make for both of these.

-Right.

Also another thing that intrigues me

is exactly what were they making out of this?

What was that going to be?

Well, we can't be sure, but possibly they could have been related to

personal regalia, which the friendly societies were very keen on.

And this one in particular looks as though

it may have been part of a sash.

They did have sashes which were blue with white stripes along the edges.

This is rather nice because I'm trying to get an idea of William

and he's coming across as rather entrepreneurial.

Yes, he seemed to be trying to make a go of things

-in difficult times for the industry.

-Yes.

This has certainly given me a very clear idea of William

operating on a very small scale,

perhaps quite literally a family affair,

and he has looked at opportunities

and thought this will be good business, and so has taken a risk.

So I'm liking William, though,

he's looking at what's happening in the market place,

what is happening socially and trying to make some money from it,

which is what you need to do, isn't it?

According to census returns, in 1871 William Henry was still

in the East End, a stone's throw from the streets he grew up in.

But now the business was growing and he was living and working

out of at least two properties in Bethnal Green.

Fiona wants to find out what kind of character William Henry needed to be

to prosper after such difficult beginnings.

So she has come to Mile End in East London

to meet historian Peter Higginbotham.

-Fiona, lovely to meet you.

-Hello, Peter.

-Hello.

So 1871, we've got William Toye doing quite well -

he's got two properties on Collins Place,

and 1871 census, another member of the Toye family pops up.

Ooh, Toye! Toye...

Jonah Toye!

William Henry's father was called Jonah.

He had disappeared from public records in 1851.

This is almost certainly the same Jonah reappearing in 1871.

Well, he's here amongst a long list of people.

-It doesn't actually have an obvious address.

-Yes.

We can tell you where this large group of people lived,

if I pull out the...

Don't know if you can read that centre line there.

-City of London... Oh, in the workhouse.

-Hm.

While William Henry was prospering, his father Jonah had fallen victim

to the most dreaded fate of the Victorian poor.

Now, the workhouse in question was actually up in Homerton,

and the building no longer survives.

But we've got what you might call its sister institution

not very far away and we can go and have a look

and just get an impression of what kind of place it was.

It's really a very good example of a Victorian workhouse -

-high walls, grim...

-Well, it looks a little like a prison,

so I mean, how did you get in there?

Had Jonah done anything wrong or...?

The only thing he'd done wrong was be poor.

Well, he was poor, yes. You didn't get put in a workhouse,

you resorted to the workhouse, you know,

when you'd run out of other options, if you were destitute.

Jonah died in the workhouse in 1876.

It's not known if William Henry ever heard about his father's fate,

although the workhouse was just half a mile away from where he lived.

In this new free-trade capitalist society,

you had the winners and you had the losers,

and here in one family you've got a fantastic illustration of it.

You've got Jonah. I mean, he was just boom - hit from the start,

he just never seemed to be able to get a chance.

Certainly he ended up breeding a tough nut in his son William.

William was born into the utmost poverty

and he decided he was going to be a winner, by hook or by crook.

William Henry died in 1886, ten years after his father, Jonah.

He left an estate worth £350 as well as several properties.

He had done well.

Today, William Henry's face greets Fiona

every time she arrives at Toye & Co's London office.

He is the first Toye to have a portrait on the wall.

And at the top of the stairs

is a portrait of his great-great-grandson,

Bryan Toye, Fiona's husband.

Having recovered from a heart attack in 2006, Bryan returned to work.

Bryan and Fiona found themselves working together.

Without doubt, the sort of...the unique thing about a family business,

or the good and bad side is, yes, you're all involved in

this common cause, but of course that can cause a problem in its own way.

So it's very, very difficult if you're, you know,

totally absorbed in the business, at the office and at home.

There's really, really...

it's very important that there is some separation between the two.

So, I would have said that would be the biggest challenge

for any couple in a family business, any family in a family business,

to make sure that you leave the disagreements or the, er,

you know, the commercial challenges, at the front door.

In 2009, Fiona became Chief Executive of Toye & Co

while Bryan remained Chairman.

I realised very early on,

you have to try and make a very clear delineation

between what is family life and what is company life.

Bryan has enormous experience and he's highly respected,

and he's highly respected by me

for all the knowledge he has of the business and things.

You want to be totally loyal, but you don't always agree,

certainly in terms of how the business should go.

So, certainly it has not been good for the marriage.

We are not living in the same house any more.

It makes me feel very sad indeed.

You know, I feel incredibly sad about that.

For now, Fiona is putting aside present day concerns

to return to the past.

In the 1870s, the mid-Victorian age,

William Henry was followed into the business

by his son, William Henry Junior.

He too was in the East End,

in the same street where his father lived and worked.

But William Henry Junior seemed to be taking the business

in a new direction.

And a clue can be found in an 1879 trade directory,

which states that he was making

various kinds of trimmings for the military.

Fiona wants to know why he got into this unpredictable market.

So she's come to the National Army Museum

to meet museum spokesman, Julian Farrance.

-Hello, Fiona.

-Hello, Julian.

Please do come and have a look.

Now, I understand your family's been in the business of making

insignia for uniforms for quite a long time.

For a very long time and there's clear evidence

that William Toye Junior was proudly making

and supplying military accoutrements -

you know, wires and braids and laces. So...

Well, that's some of the things we've got for you to look at here.

If you have a look at some of these

-and you might want to pick them up, put those on.

-Ooh.

A-ha! Tools of the trade.

Now, this is a late 1850s uniform, just post-Crimean War.

This is a combat uniform - you would be wearing this on the battlefield.

Lace on the collar at the facing and down here at the cuff.

But also these enormous epaulettes, fit to the shoulders here.

-And all worn into battle.

-Yes, this is absolutely battlefield uniform.

People look at these uniforms

and go, "Isn't it crackers to be on a battlefield

"in a scarlet coat covered in bling, shining away like a peacock?

"Aren't you just asking to get shot?"

Well, in early battlefields, gunpowder muskets and rifles

use black powder which creates an enormous amount of smoke.

So wearing bright colours is actually a very useful thing

for your officers to be able to say, "Red over there,

"they're my blokes, blue over there, that's the enemy."

So the technology demands this level of display.

Oh, that's interesting, yes, I hadn't quite thought about it that way.

In the 1850s, 98,000 resplendent British soldiers

and sailors fought in the Crimean War.

And in the following years, as the British Empire expanded

across the globe, the British Redcoat had become a national icon.

Focusing on this massive market must have seemed a canny business move

to William Henry Junior.

But by the 1880s, when he is known

to have been selling military regalia,

the army was starting to change its tactics.

When we get into the 1880s and 1890s,

gunpowder is no longer a factor on the battlefields,

it's been replaced by smokeless powders like cordite.

And you've got magazine-fed, bolt-action rifles

that have got extremely long range, they're very accurate.

It's getting really, really dangerous on the battlefield.

So, by that point, you don't want to be standing out in a red coat.

So as soon as all this technology is available,

very rapidly the British Army will redeploy into khaki colours,

the German army will redeploy into field grey colours

and the French army will stay in bright blue with scarlet trousers,

because of the elan of the soldier, because they view it to be dishonourable

to hide on a battlefield, that's not for a French soldier.

But the tragedy of that is that by the first Christmas

of the First World War they've lost almost a million soldiers

and rapidly go into horizon blue.

A very clear demonstration of the necessity for the camouflage.

-Which is good for the soldiers, but not so good for your business.

-No, it is not.

I think William Toye will have been extremely disappointed

about this turn of events, yes.

It's a real window onto the strategy of William at that point.

because he was concentrating on this very, very core British market,

the resplendent military uniforms.

Just a shame that he was grasping the coat-tails of the fashion,

rather than, you know, a little earlier when it was in full fig.

And made it very, very clear that he will have to be looking

to new markets if the company is going to prosper.

With the military market in decline,

William Henry Junior had to find another customer for Toyes' wares.

He would have asked himself a simple question - who else wears regalia?

A growing social trend close to home

seems to have provided him with an answer.

Fiona has arrived at the Museum of Freemasonry in Central London

to meet Curator, Mark Dennis.

-Fiona, how do you do, I'm Mark.

-Hello, Mark.

-Good to meet you. Would you like to come this way?

-Thank you very much indeed.

Records show that in 1886, William Henry Junior joined the Freemasons.

Freemasonry was a society open to men of any social class.

All they needed was to be recommended by other members.

And by the mid-19th century it was booming.

Britain was undergoing huge social and economic change.

To get on, people had to move to new areas for work

and when they got there they wanted new social networks and structures.

And for some, Freemasonry fitted the bill.

This period is deliciously formal.

Everybody wants to show where they've got to in society.

And being in a masonic lodge, with its ceremonies,

with its ritual dramas, it was rather like being at court,

or being the mayor of a small town.

They had sashes, had collars, had aprons.

So there is this massive expanding world

where regalia and uniform is now becoming popular. It's everywhere.

Obviously this requires all this beautiful regalia.

So you can see where William Henry saw his opportunities as well.

It's not known exactly when William Henry Junior first offered

to supply his fellow Freemasons with regalia.

But Mark knows how he tried to break into

this potentially lucrative market,

which was then dominated

by two larger rival regalia makers, Kenning and Spencer.

-Under the flap you see this was made by Kenning.

-Yes.

And Toye, William Toye,

was supplying a lot of the ribbons for these aprons.

-And then Kenning are essentially assembling.

-Yes.

And then this is his other major competitor, a firm called Spencer.

William Henry Junior started out

supplying trimmings to Kenning and Spencer.

But by the end of the 1880s,

within four years of joining the Masons, he had set himself up

in direct competition to these much larger businesses.

This is the earliest one we've got, where Toye's actually making

the complete product as opposed to supplying the firms that do.

This is fantastic.

You've got so many of the different materials that he's making.

You've got the bullion fringe,

you've got the gold and silk embroideries, all this braid.

I mean this is a splendid thing, isn't it?

Also too, just in manufacturing and business terms,

he's gone a little bit further.

He's making the larger products. This is a lovely thing.

But William Henry Junior had bigger ambitions.

Kenning and Spencer had set up shops to sell their products.

Kenning's shop was in a street known as Little Britain.

Under the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral, in Victorian London,

the area around Little Britain was packed

with clothing shops of all kinds.

And we've got a map,

and there's Little Britain.

And running half of the block,

-of course, is Kenning.

-Yes.

In a massive factory.

And William follows suit.

-Right in the corner in the tiny little shop is William Toye.

-Oh!

This, believe me, is an enormous leap for the Toye family,

because before this, they were over in the East End.

William Henry Junior established the first Toye shop in 1888.

It was a crucial development for the family business.

They'd branched out of the East End.

And not only were they selling regalia to the Freemasons

and friendly societies,

but Toye now had a direct way to reach the general public.

Fiona wants to know what William Henry Junior was selling.

The larger your markets, the more opportunities for business,

which leads us to the last document,

from a trade directory of 1891.

"Toye, William Henry & Co.

"Manufacturers of wedding, ball and other favours,

"military and theatrical laces, mohair, braids,

"masonic and all societies' banners and regalia, spangles,

"ornaments, gilt threads, bullions and embroidery."

-"Anything you want, I can make it."

-Even spangles.

-Even spangles.

-Even spangles.

This is a man who wants to be in every single world,

from the theatre to the imperial army,

livery companies, friendly societies,

everywhere you go, there he is.

I found this so intriguing because we had change in every way here.

They're moving socially and they're moving geographically.

And they're also moving in terms of their manufacture.

The things that's pushing him along is the very close family memory

of penury and hard times,

and I think this is really pushing him to succeed

in any way he can, and so he's hedging his bets.

He's trying for all markets.

So that if one goes down,

my word, hopefully he would find success in another.

And strangely enough, I think that's been the story of the business,

and the family, all along, because we're still always looking

for new markets, so nothing changes in that way either.

By the end of the Victorian age, William Henry Junior had made

a strategic change in the way the family business operated.

His ancestors were self-employed artisans

who wove silk and trimmings

for other, often much larger businesses to make into regalia.

By 1898, Toye had become one of those larger firms

with a new factory in Central London.

Just like Toyes' factories today,

here, there were all kinds of craftsmen -

lace-makers, gold braid-makers and embroiderers.

There were now also metalworkers.

They stamped out pendants, medals and buttons.

Following the model set by William Henry Junior,

Toye & Co still design and make complete items in-house.

Everything you can see on this trolley has been made here.

This is for the Orient Express, West Yorkshire Police, Salvation Army.

We've got, you know, gold wires and things on your peak.

This has all been made downstairs.

And then you've got a badge, a London Ambulance badge.

Just making a simple peaked cap is actually quite a complicated thing.

And it's about 20 or more processes

before you end up with your finished product.

But Toye & Co is having to change the do-it-all-in-house approach

that was pioneered by William Henry Junior at the end of the 1800s.

In 21st-century Britain, there isn't the demand

for traditional regalia that there once was.

It also costs Toye & Co a lot more to manufacture here in Britain

than it does for competitors overseas.

The main thing for the company is to get to a situation

where we do preserve as many of the key skills as we can

and we return to profitability.

Certainly the UK and European markets are not doing so well

at the moment, and so we've got to look to increasing our export work,

which we're doing, but we're also having to reduce our production.

The company has fought hard to keep its manufacturing skills in Britain.

But Fiona may now need to move

mass production of some lower-value items overseas

and reduce the size of Toye's costly factories.

I actually find it truly upsetting because we've got

these amazingly talented people, but there is no other way.

We've tried to do the math.

We've tried to work out how we could do it,

but it becomes so uncompetitive.

I think we will have seen that throughout this programme,

that hard times come, good times come and you adjust and change.

It's happened before so it will happen again.

I'm very determined that we will be on the rise now.

For now, Fiona leaves her own business dilemmas

to turn back to the past.

Enterprising William Henry Junior

was followed into the company

by his three sons -

William, Frederick and Herbert.

The three brothers took the business

into the 20th century,

the Edwardian age.

It was the era of pomp and circumstance

and wearing regalia was on the up once again.

Everyone from a railway guard

to a postman had a uniform.

Fiona wants to find out how the three brothers tried

to take advantage of this booming demand for regalia.

So she's come to the Museum of London

to meet Curator, Beverly Cook.

Hello, I'm Beverly, welcome. Would you like to follow me?

Thank you.

You may not be aware, but we have examples in our collection here

of items that were actually manufactured by Toye.

The first thing I want to show you is actually a one-off piece.

So this, this was...

This was the National Women's Social and Political Union.

The members of the NWSPU were better known as the Suffragettes.

This was made for a leading suffragette called Flora Drummond.

This is absolutely fantastic.

We have the shoulder piece here.

It says General because that was

the name that was given to Flora Drummond.

-She was the General.

-So she was General Drummond.

She was General Drummond and she was at the head of the processions.

Here we have, beautifully embroidered in the purple,

"Votes for Women".

And if we can turn this over very carefully...

we see a beautiful piece there.

And you will see that you have Toye & Co.

Theobald's Road, that's absolutely fantastic.

57 Theobald's Road.

And there was one final piece of this regalia

which was the shoulder epaulette, beautifully made,

and would have been attached over her shoulder.

She had the sash going over like this with something on that shoulder?

-Fortunately we have images of her wearing...

-Oh!

-..wearing the material.

-Oh, she looks quite formidable, doesn't she?

Yes, she is, yes.

Information about General Drummond's Toye regalia can be found

in an edition of the Votes For Women newspaper, dated the 11th June 1908.

"General Flora Drummond has been the recipient of a handsome gift

"from an enterprising firm who had heard of her new official title.

"The whole regalia is lined with white satin and is altogether

"a specimen of first-class workmanship

"and will make Mrs Drummond a more than usually conspicuous figure

"on the day of the demonstration."

It's quite interesting that they refer to an "enterprising" company,

because it suggests that Toye actually were proactive

in approaching the Women's Social And Political Union.

So it must have been that they realised,

even at this really early stage of the suffragette campaign,

that here was a campaign group that was growing, that was thriving,

that could possibly offer them a lot of business in the future.

-That would be a new market.

-A new market.

Yes, women as the new market in their own right!

It was a gamble that would pay off.

Within months, Toye & Co were making other items for the movement.

By 1910, hundreds of women had actually served

terms of imprisonment for suffragette militancy.

They would go to prison, they would immediately go on hunger strike,

and one of the ways that they were rewarded by the movement for this,

they would have been issued with a hunger strike medal.

-Which then they would proudly wear to show that they had suffered for the cause.

-Exactly, yes.

These medals were sold by Toye

to the Women's Social And Political Union for £1 each.

Over a thousand women served terms of imprisonment

and many of those were given hunger strike medals.

So this was a lucrative commission for them.

It interests me here, because there they are,

their business so focused on the male bastions

of the military and freemasonry.

Have you got any thoughts on why they supported this cause?

Well, obviously, it's possible that someone within the company

was hugely sympathetic to the suffrage argument.

But in many ways I think Toye probably wouldn't have

got so involved unless they felt it really

-made good business sense for them.

-Yeah.

So here we are, this is the 20th century.

This is the modern Toye & Company

when we're getting into modern Britain as well.

The boys have identified the social change,

the most...the biggest wave of change of all, which is

the vote for the common man and the vote for women.

Even as the Toyes sold medals to suffragettes,

they continued to make regalia for the all-male Freemasons.

Somehow, the three brothers - William, Frederick and Herbert,

served a range of diverse communities

in early 20th-century Britain.

They even produced banners

for various trade unions.

By the 1930s, two of the three brothers - William and Herbert -

had left the family business,

leaving Frederick in sole charge.

By the 1950s, much of the day-to-day running of the company

had been passed on to Frederick's son,

Herbert, known as Bert.

Bert was Fiona's father-in-law.

He died before she had the chance to meet him.

Fiona understands that Bert cemented the company's place

at the heart of the British establishment.

To find out how he did this, she's come to Westminster Abbey.

This is absolutely marvellous.

It is awe-inspiring. I think that's a word that's overused now.

You know, I'm overwhelmed, I'm thrilled to be here

and it's just amazing to be in this spot.

Hello, it's Fiona Toye, come to see some documents.

Away from the public areas,

Fiona's been invited to the Abbey's ancient library to meet

Matthew Payne, who has discovered rare documents in his archives.

Welcome to the Abbey Library.

Thank you. What a thrill to come here, this is fantastic.

If you'd like to come round this side,

I have one or two things that I think might be of interest to you.

So here we have a file relating to the 1953 coronation

of Queen Elizabeth, a file from the Ministry of Works.

For months before the coronation of Elizabeth II,

Westminster Abbey was taken over

by a government department called the Ministry of Works.

The Ministry ran the conversion of the Abbey into a theatre

for over 8,000 guests.

It was also in charge of ordering decorations

and regalia for the event.

This included a last-minute commission

for four royal banners to be hung next to the throne in the Abbey.

Matthew wants to show Fiona an internal Ministry of Works memo

concerning who might make these banners.

There are only three organisations which we could approach -

The Royal School of Needlework, Messrs Hobson & Co and Messrs Toye.

"The Royal School of Needlework is working to capacity.

"Messrs Hobson cannot accept an order of this size."

So it's rather lovely and good for Toyes.

Matthew also has some correspondence from Bert Toye to the Ministry.

-3rd of March 1953.

-So it's worth flagging up that's three months

before the coronation itself almost exactly.

"Dear Sir, we have pleasure in confirming your verbal instructions

"to carry out the embroidery of the four banners

"to be used at Westminster Abbey

"at the time of the coronation for Her Majesty the Queen.

"We need hardly say that there is little time in which to do this work,

"but we will undertake them and we will complete them by 22 May.

"Although it will doubtless mean working longer hours

"and possibly some weekends.

"We do thank you for giving us this opportunity,

"and you can rely on us to cooperate in every way.

"Yours faithfully, HGD Toye."

-That is amazing! Simply fantastic.

-There you are.

They've got a commission with not much time to spare.

Incredibly exciting.

There is one follow-up.

"These banners will be finished on Thursday evening.

"And the writer had in mind taking them

"down to you in his car after lunch on Friday."

We wouldn't want to miss lunch, would we?

"He feels however that these banners should be kept perfectly flat

"and in the circumstances, we wonder

"whether it will be possible for you to send your light van

"to collect them since we've really not got any suitable transport here."

-That's quite strange, isn't it?

-Quite strange to know.

"In conclusion, may we say how much we have enjoyed embroidering

"these banners on your behalf and we are very proud of the result.

"We hope it will give satisfaction to everybody.

"Signed Herbert Toye."

-This is just lovely, isn't it?

-Yes.

You can just imagine, actually, they must be rather sad

-that all the bustle of making it is over.

-That it's over.

You know, you can just imagine the electricity in the firm

as the girls are embroidering and putting everything together

-Working all hours.

-All hours, everybody would have been there,

probably Herbert pacing and going, "How are you doing, girls?"

And I'd think they were so thrilled to be part of this amazing occasion,

to have this opportunity to demonstrate what they could do.

Matthew has one last surprise for Fiona.

And if I can ask you to give me a hand with this...

This is just absolutely fab.

It's so fresh and crisp and beautiful.

So there is the Royal Arms,

as used by Queen Elizabeth.

So this is the Queen's banner?

This is the Queen's banner that was used, yes.

I would say this is the ultimate example of the family's skills.

This is a long way from the jobbing weavers

who were in some horrible slum

and a long, long way from the pageantry of a royal coronation.

Absolutely magical.

What's also rather sweet,

we can now see why Herbert couldn't get them in his saloon car!

Millions watched the Coronation...

..and admired Toye & Co's work.

A few years later, the business was granted a prestigious Royal Warrant.

After the success of the coronation,

Bert Toye started a strategy of acquiring other businesses.

He also moved the Toye manufacturing centre up to the Midlands.

When Bert died suddenly in 1969, his son Bryan, Fiona's husband,

had to take over at the age of 31.

-MAN:

-Coming past the portraits is a reminder of the history,

what you've got to live up to.

Most of their eyes are painted so they follow you all the way,

whichever way you stand, they look at you.

That's my father in the robes and so on.

Great-Grandfather and Great-Great Grandfather round the corner.

That one, quite obvious, so I won't say any more about that one.

Bryan was running a much larger business than any of his predecessors.

Toye & Co had by now purchased the two businesses that had once

been its much larger rivals - Kenning and Spencer.

After the coronation and grant of the Royal Warrant,

my father acquired George Kenning & Spencer Ltd.

In later years, when I was chairman,

I handed over the chief executive's role to David Kenning,

and so Bryan Toye and David Kenning, at one time great antagonists

in terms of the historic family hierarchy,

became the best of friends

and worked very well together,

and built quite a successful business during that period,

so it was a bit of a golden era.

In our case, it's a family business.

The family get on really very well together.

Of course, we do have differences of opinion and views

on the company's direction and some of them are held very strongly.

But basically the same principle goes all the way through,

that we all want the best for the business and the people in it.

Fiona and Bryan's oldest son Charles,

and daughter Lily, have already worked for the company.

Today, their middle son Fred is joining the family firm.

All very exciting, awaiting Fred.

I think the important thing is, of course, that I don't get

too involved and that he is very much working for, you know, my colleague.

Hello. Morning, Kathy.

Morning, Freds. Yeah, very, very good to see you here!

Okey-dokey.

Over the years he has come in and helped out at times.

This time there's an enormous difference because

he's actually been working, doing real hard selling for an IT company.

This here, for example, is a livery jewel.

-It's this kind of product you'll be selling.

-Yeah.

So, like your dad, who was there in the '50s, you're going to be

going to Birmingham and Bedworth

and you're going to be learning about how things are manufactured.

Once you understand all that, then we'll put you in front of customers.

When I was younger, you know, looking at my father and my family

and seeing the world they're involved in, it's not

necessarily a glamorous world but it's a very interesting world.

And so I think there was always sort of a deep-down desire

to get into the family company as well

With Fiona's middle son Fred on board,

her oldest son Charles is about to return to the business too.

It's very exciting to be working with my sons,

being chief executive with those responsibilities.

I feel very much that I'm the Prince Regent, I suppose.

I'm the caretaker.

I've been looking after it for the next generation,

for the children of Bryan and I, for our children.

With the younger Toyes entering the company,

Fiona and Bryan have begun to make steps towards

handing over the family firm to the next generation.

Throughout this filming, following this story, for me

the strongest message that's come through

is the hard work of the family.

There's a very indomitable spirit there as well in how they cope

with the ups and downs of life through the generations.

But there's a real entrepreneurial spirit

and that has been, even in these very basic artisans, or whatever,

they've been striving all the time, not only to survive

but to get a little further on. And so hard work,

coupled with the entrepreneurial spirit and imagination

and also I think that idea of the family

has been very important as well.

And that has been one of the reasons why we're still here.

Next time, we meet the Durtnells,

who've been builders for over 400 years.

That could have been cut by a Durtnell.

At a difficult time for the construction industry,

can Durtnell's past help shape their future?

They learned nothing from the Fire of London.

HE LAUGHS

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