Toye & Co honoured to be fulfilling latest order
BIRMINGHAM’S oldest manufacturer has once again been selected to make all the CBEs, MBEs and OBEs being presented in the New Year’s Honours list.
The medals will be awarded in the spring but are now being crafted at Toye & Co’s Bedworth and Birmingham factories. The honours will be completed and delivered in early April.
Frederick Toye, of Toye & Co, said the firm itself was honoured to be producing the medals.
“Our craftsmen and women know how much the recipients of these medals prize the honour and so take great care in their manufacture. We make sure the medals are beautiful and can be treasured forever by the recipient,” he said.
Each honour comprises both a medal and a ribbon woven to a specified colour scheme. Toye & Co’s master weaver is producing the ribbons now at its Bedworth textile factory, while the medals are being hand crafted and enamelled at the firm’s traditional home in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter.
The business is one of only a handful of regalia-making companies left in Britain today. It uses traditional techniques to make thousands of items for the military, exclusive societies, foreign leaders and the Royal Household, including The Queen.
The business, which employs 132 people, has been handed down from father to son for hundreds of years.
It can trace its roots back to 1685. The Toye family were weavers, part of the community of Huguenot silk weavers who lived and worked in Spitalfields, East London.
