Benjamin Pollock

Pollock's.

(Again.)

"Who is Pollock?

Benjamin Pollock was probably the only a shop-keeper in Hoxton, once a down-trodden district of East London, to get a Times obituary. When he died in 1937, aged 80, he had kept alive the tradition of toy theatre publishing for sixty years, and was visited by famous people - actors, authors and celebrities, including Robert Louis Stevenson and Serge Diaghilev.

There are still people living who visited Benjamin Pollock's shop and remember his old-world courtesy and dogged persistence with his unusual trade. Pollock's Toy Museum is named after him, because after his death the stock of printing plates and printed sheets of characters and scenes was rescued and set up as a new business. In the 1950s, Marguerite Fawdry added a museum of Victorian toys to put the toy theatres in context, and Pollock's Toy Museum was born."

from Pollock's Toy Museum