Toytown
radio series for children
Toytown is the name given to a series of radio plays written by S.G. Hulme Beaman and broadcast by the BBC from 1929 to 1932, 28 of which regularly repeated on Children's Hour until 1964, by which point it had expanded into a media franchise.
Although he was not the main character of the original works, Larry the Lamb became the main character, together with his clever sidekick, Dennis the Dachshund. Each story involves Ernest the Policeman, the disgruntled Mr Growser and the Mayor. Toytown was perhaps the most famous broadcast children's series at its peak. It consistently headed the votes for Request Week on Children's Hour for thirty years, and was seen in over twenty-seven countries around the world.
History
Around 1928, S. G. Hulme Beaman, originally an actor, began to create wooden toys in light of Germany losing its grip on the industry. These became popular with the children of his local area of Golders Green, and in 1928 he published the book Tales of Toytown, based on them. May Jenkin, who was "Aunt Elizabeth" for Children's Hour, came across the book and arranged for its six stories to be adapted for radio. The plays were successful, with Jenkin writing to Hulme Beaman demanding more, who would formulate them using his original wooden toys.
Although Larry the Lamb did feature in the original stories, he was not the main character.
The public source identifies “Toytown” as radio series for children. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Toytown, radio and series.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7830961. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1932, 1964 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “Toytown” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.