Crescent Toys

The Crescent Toy Company was founded in July 1922 by Henry G. Eagles and Arthur A. Schneider in a workshop 30 feet square at the rear of a private house at 67 De Beauvoir Crescent, Kingsland Road, London N1.

They manufactured model soldiers, cowboys, kitchen sets, etc. from lead alloy. These were hollow castings, hand painted, packed one dozen to a box, and sold to wholesalers at six shillings per dozen boxes. The small firm prospered and eventually opened up a factory in Tottenham. With the Second World War came a ban on metal toys and production was changed to munitions. After the War the firm resumed making metal hollowcast toys and in addition marketed the diecast products of a firm called DCMT (Die Casting Machine Tools Ltd).

As a consequence early post-war models had ‘DCMT’ cast into the underside of the body. In 1948 the firm opened a modern factory on a four-acre site at Cymcarn, a Welsh mining village near

Newport, Monmouth (now Gwent) and two years later transferred all production there, maintaining only an office in London. From this time Crescent toys made its own diecast products without ‘DCMT’ on them. Hence it is possible to find the same models with or without ‘DCMT’ cast in. Die Casting Machine Tools went its own way and from 1950 produced models under the name of ‘Lone Star’.

Crescent Toys will be best remembered for its excellent ranges of military models and farm equipment but probably most of all for its superb reproductions of the racing cars of the 1950s.

The post-war model listings printed here were extracted from a unique collection of original trade catalogues (1947-80) most kindly provided by Mr. J. D. Schneider, the former Managing Director of Crescent Toys Ltd. All of the original research and compilation of these lists was initially undertaken by Ray Strutt, with additions by Mike Ennis, Les Perry and Leigh Gotch.