susan wynter

Art, Design, Business

1923 - 2013

Suggested by Jeanie Sinclair*

Jeanie says, ‘Susan Lethbridge moved from London to St Ives after the Second World War. She worked on carving her wooden children’s toys in the coffin-maker’s workshop in The Digey, later opening a shop called The Toy Trumpet. Susan Wynter Toys, as the business was called after her marriage to painter Bryan Wynter, was a success, and she sold toys to London department stores such as Fortnum and Mason, Burlington Arcade, and other shops that were ‘much posher than Heal’s’. Her work is in the V&A's collection’.

As a small child, Susan pretended to be a boy to learn how to carve wood at a billiard table factory near her home in London. She was a flight mechanic during the Second World War, going on to engineering college, before moving to St Ives to fulfil her dream of making toys. When she later sold the factory to Galt Toys, they took on three men to do her job. Susan ignored conventional gender roles and used her unique skills and creativity to create a successful career and business in Cornwall.

Susan moved to St Ives after the Second World War and stayed there until she moved to Essex in the late 1960s”

*Dr Jeanie Sinclair has carried out extensive research into the unknown women of St Ives for her PhD.