Victory (1920-1988)

With Chad Valley and J. Salmon, Victory helped to make up a huge part of British wooden jigsaw production in the early to late 20th Century.

The "Victory" brand was created by Gerald Hayter c1920 and his company was the major UK manufacturer of wooden puzzles throughout most of the 20th century. In 1970 Hayter sold out to toy maker J.W. Spear & Sons. Production continued until the end of the 1980's by which time commercial cutting of puzzles using jig-saws had become uneconomic.

In researching Victory puzzles, huge praise and thanks must be awarded to Brian Price who has studied, researched and documented the history and production of this prolific family run business, which has probably become the name most synonymously associated with wooden jigsaw production, certainly in Great Britain, and possibly Worldwide.

Any attempt to try and group this vast range of puzzles into their various series seems destined to failure, as they produced so many differently coded labels, often not fully traceable to the series one would expect. As such, I have chosen only to group puzzles into series to which they are clearly marked as belonging to, all others being shown solely under the heading Victory.