Mechanical toy figure with butterfly net

This tinplate penny toy was purchased for one penny (1d) from a London street trader on 24th December 1908. It forms part of a large collection of over 1500 penny toys and novelties purchased by the City Director Ernest King between 1893 and 1918.
King purchased his collection from the men, women and children who lined the gutters from St Paul's Cathedral down to Ludgate Hill selling a range of penny toys and novelties from trays hanging from their necks. This item was purchased in December, the most lucrative month for the traders, their cheap goods attracting vast crowds of Christmas shoppers causing disruption to the flow of traffic and people through the financial City. Regular traders were joined, at this time, by seasonal traders causing additional congestion.
In his 1897 survey of London’s poor Charles Booth’s identified street sellers, often known as gutter merchants, as being amongst the poorest of the capital’s workers. Classed alongside loafers, criminals and semi-criminals the occasional street sellers lived the ‘life of savages, with vicissitudes of extreme hardship and their only luxury is drink.’ Experiencing ‘an appalling amount of poverty and discomfort’ they were often found to be living in licensed common lodging houses and casual wards.
The toy was manufactured by Johann Distler who also worked with another tinplate manufacturer Georg Fischer. Both had factories in Nuremberg, Bavaria this area of Germany specialising in the manufacture of tinplate penny toys.
London was a major market for Nuremberg tinplate penny toys and many were designed specifically for the British market. The main distribution point for imported German toys arriving at London's docks was the Houndstitch area on the edge of the City. Here wholesale warehouses were often established by Bavarian agents working on behalf of companies such as Distler.
Tinplate penny toys were particularly popular between the late 1890s and 1914 but with the advent of the First World War trading with Germany largely ceased due to the Enemy Amendment Act of 27 November 1914.