In the late 1800s a man called John Waddington had just completed his apprenticeship as a printer and was full of aspirations and he decided that he would like to start his own business. John had a friend called Wilson Barrett who was an actor/manager at the Grand Theatre in Leeds and together they joined forces tom create a business called Waddingtons Ltd.
They produced colour posters and advertising material for theatres at their workshop in Camp Road close to where Leeds University now stands. However, there were difficulties and finally due to a clash of personalities Waddington and Barrett decided to go their separate ways. Waddington ended up going it alone but soon ran into financial difficulties.
Frederick Eley, the Manager of the local branch of the National Provincial Bank bailed Waddington out and suggested that he formed a Private Limited Company which he did in 1905. John Waddington persuaded his other shareholders that they needed to purchase lithographic equipment and they agreed to do this. In 1908 they hired one Victor Watson (1878-1943) as a Lithographic Foreman. Victor was born in London and started work as a butcher’s boy but later trained as a Lithographer. In 1913 Waddington was once again having money problems and this caused him to resign from the Company.
On his resignation the shareholders wanted to wind up the company but Victor Watson convinced them to carry on the business with himself as manager. Watson managed to make a success of the company and the following year saw them move to bigger premises in Elland Road, close to the football ground.
However, once again bad luck was to strike. On Good Friday in 1915 the factory burnt down, but an undeterred Watson on the following day bought another printing firm which was going out of business.
In 1919 the Company joined the Master Printers Federation and two years later it became a Public Company and in the same year Victor Watson became Joint Managing Director while Eley, the Bank Manager, became the Chairman when the firm moved to a new site in Hunslet.
The Company was by now well known nationally and in 1922 they started producing games, as well as playing cards brought on by the demand from the First World War. Waddingtons subsequently sold both original games as well as games licensed from other publishers.
Their new techniques in photographic printing enabled them to produce first rate playing cards. Their first cards incorporated advertising on the back and this included their Beautiful Britain series of cards subsidised by the Great Western Railway. All this began to cement a good international reputation.
During the 1920s the demand for playing cards was incredible high and the business was doing so well they built a factory at Keighley and produced 30,000 packs of cards with single colour backs. In 1924 they produced the largest poster ever created, this was a 10 foot by 40 foot advertisement for the British Empire Exhibition.
During the 1930s Watson invested his own money in Satona Ltd, a company involved in the manufacture of cartons treated with paraffin wax. Waddingtons decided to buy the company and together they started to produce orange juice cartons to sell in cinemas.
Without a doubt its most famous board game was ‘Monopoly’. In February 1935 Parker Brothers, a games manufacturer in the USA began selling a new board game. In December of that year they sent a copy to Waddingtons. Norman, Victor Watson’s son, played it over the weekend continuously and this resulted in a transatlantic phone call.
This led to a licence being issued for them to produce the game in Britain for sale. Watson and his Secretary Marjory Phillips went to London to scout out new locations, Atlantic City, New Jersey streets were replaced by Old Kent Road, Mayfair, etc, and the game went on to become a huge success.
At the outbreak of the Second World War Waddingtons were asked to produce low denomination banknotes to replace metal coins in the values of 2s 6d and 5 shillings, this turned out to be a very secret operation but the notes never entered circulation and all were destroyed at the end of the war. The business did however produce foreign banknotes under an agreement with De La Rue in London whose factory was bombed out.
In 1941 under the direction of the British Secret Service Waddingtons were asked to produce a version of Monopoly for use by Prisoners of War the ingenious ideas came from Clayton Hutton, a technical officer of the MI9 section dedicated to escape and evasion. If the names Old Kent Road and Mayfair were peeled off they revealed maps, compasses, and real money hidden there.
Victor Watson was not only a successful Managing Director but he also showed an interest in the welfare of his employees. He was also Director of several companies and President of the Leeds Master Printers Association. He was a keen sportsman and President of the Horsforth Golf Club and Captain of the Headingley Old Clarendon Cricket Club. He died at his Horsforth home on 18 December 1943.
That year, 1943, a new factory was opened in Gateshead where they began to produce plastic backed playing cards include on these was a design by Picasso and by the end of the war the Company was also working with Cadburys producing Easter Egg cartons for them.
The 1950s saw the setting up of a subsidiary company created simply to sell board games and Waddingtons also formed a joint venture with an American company forming Eureka Waddingtons. The primary aim of this seems to have been to produce trading stamps and as a result of this Waddingtons began printing their famous Green Shield Stamps.
In 1951 the Company passed into the third generation. On completion of his National Service in the Royal Engineers in 1951 Victor Watson’s Grandson, also Victor, joined the business and remained until he retired in 1993.
Waddingtons produced many board games that were played all over the world. One of these games was ‘Cluedo’ based on a game developed during the war years by a man called Anthony E Pratt and in 1949 the first UK edition was launched. Since then it has become a board game classic and it even began a TV series.
By 1977 the business began to change. Victor was made Chairman of the Company and he famously became known in business circles as the man who managed to fend off Robert Maxwell’s hostile takeover in 1983. During the 1980s TV game shows were becoming very popular and this led Waddingtons to produce board game spin offs like Blockbuster (1986) and Wheel of Fortune (1988).
Sadly in February 2015 Victor Watson died aged 86, he was the last remaining connection to this very famous Yorkshire firm.
In 1994 Waddingtons was bought by Hasbro and at this point they had produced many games that had become household names that were both original and those under licence.
Currently Waddingtons are continuing to produce new games under the famous Hasbro name and more recently they have brought their games onto the online platform while at the same time they continue to create their traditional board game format.
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