Year: Day to Day Men: March 18

A Reflection on Life

The eighteenth of March in 1899 marks the birth date of Majorie Abbatt, an English toy maker and businesswoman. Abbatt Toys was founded on the philosophy that children’s toys should be functional in design and educational in play. 

Born Norah Majorie Cobb to a wealthy and educated family in Surbiton, a neighborhood of South West London, Majorie Abbat received her initial education at Roedean School, an independent boarding and day school on the outskirts of Brighton, East Sussex. She continued her studies at Oxford’s Somerville College and earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1923. Majorie gave up her postgraduate work in psychoanalysis at London’s University College with her marriage to Cyril Paul Abbatt in December of 1930. 

Paul Abbatt, born into a Quaker family in 1899, was a graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a teacher at the private Quaker-owned boarding and day Sidcot School near Winscombe, Somerset. Influenced by Woodcraft Chivalry, a scouting and woodcraft movement in the United Kingdom, Paul Abbat and Majorie Cobb met at a 1926 gathering of the organization at Godshill, Hampshire. With the intent to establish a progressive kindergarten, they travelled to Vienna for research on its educational facilities. 

Majorie and Paul Abbatt met painter and art education reformer Franz Cižek at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. Cižek had founded Vienna’s Child Art Movement and was the director of the Vienna School’s Department of Experimentation and Research. The Abbatts attended his classes as well as classes at the city’s Montessori kindergartens. They also became acquainted with psychoanalyst Milan Morgenster and developmental educator Helena Löw-Beer, both of whom were working in the field of special education for severely handicapped children.

In 1932, Majorie and Paul Abbatt founded Abbatt Toys, a manufacturer for functional and educational toys. Part of a pioneering generation, they designed toys to stimulate the imagination of children as well as their physical skills. Working within their Bloomsbury, London apartment, they made a small exhibition space and developed a mail-order business from an illustrated catalogue created by painter and designer John Skeaping. By 1934, Abbatt Toys was progressing well and a new catalogue was published with photographs by Bauhaus-trained Edith Tudor-Hart who had previously been a Montessori teacher.

In 1934, Hungarian-born architect and designer Ernö Goldfinger moved to London and met Majorie and Paul Abbatt; this meeting led to a collaboration with Abbatt Toys throughout the company’s early years. In 1934, Goldfinger designed Abbatt Toys’s first showroom on central London’s Endsleigh Street, a place that encouraged children to touch and play with the displayed toys. In 1935, Goldfinger created a logo for Abbatt Toys as well as a children’s alphabet. The next year, he designed a second store on Wimpole Street and redesigned the couple’s apartment. In 1937, the now established Abbatt Toys had an exhibition space, designed by Goldfinger and the Abbatts, at the International Exposition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life held at Paris.

In 1951, Majorie and Paul Abbatt founded Children’s Play Activities Limited, a research organization with the aim of understanding play as an element of mental and social education. A report that criticized the practices of the British industry’s toy manufacturing sector was produced by the CPA, Limited in 1957. The Abbatts founded the International Play Association in 1961 to protect and advance the role of play in children’s lives. 

Majorie Abbatt was a member from an early age of the West London Ethical Society, one of the founding groups of the Union of Ethical Societies, now the Humanists UK. After the death of Paul Abbatt in 1971, she sold Abbatt Toys and remained active in all the organizations she had supported. Honored in 1981 by a Master of Arts from University of Nottingham, Majorie Abbatt died at her home at Oxford ten years later in November of 1991 at the age of ninety-two.