Kenfig Industrial Estate, Margam, Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, SA 13
I decided to write about Dragon computers off the back of those hazy teenage memories of visiting my aunt and pretending to be impressed by a city bomber game at a time when I was dizzy with the wonder of Chequered Flag . I also desperately wanted to get this blog out of England and properly cover at least one other part of the United Kingdom because, perhaps unsurprisingly, a computer called the Dragon was made in Wales.
The Dragon computers were created by a company called Mettoy. They were founded in 1932 and originally made metal wind-up toys (METal TOY). Mettoy were behind the Corgi range, launched in 1956, but by the start of the 1980s they were looking to diversify as POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY explained:
The company has shown a financial deficit over the last two years totalling £5.6m, caused by the collapse of its traditional markets. Mettoy has always regarded the three to 14 age range as the purchasers of its toys. In the last couple of years that has changed. It now sells to three- to eight-year-olds. The over-nines now buy electronic goods — computers, video games, tape recorders and televisions.
"So an ex-employee of Mettoy — Gerry Quick (who did a PhD in computer science) and I, got together," says Tony [Clarke, a director of Mettoy]. And the result of those discussions formed the basis of what is now called the Dragon.
(18 November 1982, page 10)
Mettoy was better placed than most to manufacture a computer. It already had a huge factory in Forrestfach and, as Tony Clarke explained, that factory:
"...has enormous resources — machine tool making, plastic moulding, high-volume manufacturing capacity and marketing skills. All the things in fact that infant computer manufacturers lack."
"If you look at most of the British microcomputer manufacturers, they do not have the organisational and non-computing skills necessary for producing a high-volume product. They end up subcontracting much of that work out — leading to all sorts of problems."
"Mettoy has 200 plastic moulding machines of various sizes and over 1000 assembly workers used to working on small intricate assemblies."
Tony Clarke could have been talking about Sinclair's recent problems with subcontractors which were critically delaying the manufacture of the new ZX Spectrum. "Design flaw halts Spectrum delivery," was a 17 June 1982 PCW story that reported:
Production of the new Sinclair Spectrum has been halted... This follows the discovery of a fault in the first production models.
A further four-week delay is now expected. This is in addition to the two-week set-back to orders placed with the first week of the launch.
The market was wide open. The Dragon 32 was reviewed in the August 1982 issue of YOUR COMPUTER at a point when the UK hardware market was all over the place. Had my aunt wanted a computer in 1982, she could have chosen between the; ZX-81, VIC-20, Acorn Atom, Atari 400, ZX Spectrum, Dragon 32, Texas Instrument's T1-99/4A, or the Grundy Newbrain. And that, probably incomplete, list is just the sub-£200 computers. Mettoy were confident they could manufacture 30,000-35,000 computers by the end of 1982 and sell them through major high street stores. Mettoy had the means and the motivation to make the Dragon a success. There was one problem. They didn't have the money.
Mettoy was in severe financial difficulty. Losses in the first nine months of 1982 added up to £2.5 million. In November 1982, to raise money, Mettoy had to sell the Dragon to a consortium made up of Prutec, the Welsh Development Agency, Mettoy, National Water Council, Fountain Development Capital Fund and F &. C Enterprise Trust, and Dragon directors (2 percent). (PCW, 11 November 1982 page 5). The new company called Dragon Data would move to a different site owned by the Welsh Development Agency. Mettoy would continue to supply plastic mouldings for the Dragon but manufacture and testing would take place at the new factory; Mettoy had become a subcontractor on their own project.
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The building is so big it required two photos, like the old Commodore factory in Corby. In my naivety, I thought I would be okay to just turn up, park, and have a wander around; and maybe see if I could Saboteur my way round to building Q (without doing any saboteuring obviously, your honour). It wasn't okay to just turn up and park. I drove all the way along Queensway and every legal parking space was full. I did a U-turn and drove slowly back. It seemed like fairly standard practice to park on the double yellow lines so that's what I did. This left me a bit spooked and I was too worried about getting a ticket to roam too far and instead I got in and out of the area pretty quickly.
Kenfig Industrial Estate, Margam, Port Talbot, West Glamorgan, SA 13
The Dragon Data archive is full of lots of excellent information. Including snippets from the archive of the Welsh Development Agency. The information there is fascinating and well worth a look, and I don't want to crib their hard work
Mettoy was making funding enquiries to the WDA in April 1982 and nearly had to call in the receivers as early as October 1982. At this time Mettoy employed around 2000 workers and protecting those jobs would have been a priority for the WDA. It was in their interests to help Mettoy and make the Dragon computer a success. The WDA wanted to separate Dragon Data from Mettoy which they did by moving the new company east along the coast, about 10 miles, to Port Talbot. Tony Clarke, in his new role as managing director of Dragon Data, made the move to Port Talbort. The Dragon was his baby. He started the ball rolling in 1981 and now it was his job to footballing metaphor the computer all the way to the goal.
November 1982 looked like being a Dragon Christmas. A PCW editorial predicted:
Clive Sinclair is in grave danger of becoming The Yesterday Man. The ZX Spectrum, which was widely expected to become the market leader when it was first launched in April, is already being overtaken by the Dragon 32.
The Spectrum's eclipse is not due to any technical pre-eminence on the part of Dragon. Pound for pound the Spectrum still offers one of the best deals in the microcomputer market.
But, the Dragon 32 is available. It is possible to buy the Dragon 32 off the shelf in many high-street stores. There are no four- month waiting lists
(4 November 1982 page 3)
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| YOUR COMPUTER December 1982 page 20 |
So how did Dragon do? It's not easy to find actual sales figures but it can be inferred that Christmas 1982 was good. SINCLAIR USER, in a January 1983 editorial, referred to Dragon as an "established rival" to Sinclair, alongside Acorn and Commodore. Software support continued to grow and by April 1983 Cascade was selling a Dragon 32 version of their Cassette 50 tape and YOUR COMPUTER did their first round up of Dragon software. May 1983 saw the first issue of DRAGON USER magazine. It includes ongoing good news from Port Talbort. 50.000 Dragon 32 machines had been sold. The new factory was open and producing 5000 computers a week, this was expected to rise to 10,000. New hardware was on the way; disc drives; a Dragon 64; and on the horizon for 1984 two new computers:
The first will sell for around £400 and be a competitor for the BBC Model B. the second will be a full-blown business system aimed at the IBM PC/ Sirius market.
Abruptly, the price of the ZX Spectrum was cut. PCW reported (28 April-4 May 1983 page 1) how WH Smith had reduced the price of the 16k Spectrum to £99.95 and the 48k model to £129.95. The following week Sinclair applied WH Smith's price cuts to its own RRP as Commodore also revised the price of the VIC-20. SINCLAIR USER predicted:
A sharp increase in sales is now expected. Production of the Spectrum is now running at about 50,000 a month
And also noted in a longer article about the new price war:
The standard 32K Dragon costs £198.95. That is much more expensive than the 48K Spectrum, although the Dragon has a more extensive version of Basic and better graphics facilities.
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The Kenfig Dragon factory is a squat building, a lot easier to photograph than the Mettoy factory, and not massively changed from it's 1983 days. The Dragon archive has a selection of news videos and I've taken the liberty of lifting a still from one, showing how it looked in 1984. These days the building is home to a company called The Chocolate Factory (they make chocolate) and I think their sign is in more or less the same place as the Dragon sign in the picture below.
Parking on the Kenfig estate is considerably less hysterical than it at Queensway, so I went for a stroll. The building housed a company called Orion before The Chocolate Factory. About halfway down one wall you can see where a big Orion sign used to be fixed to the building and has weathered the name on to the side of the factory. No sign of any Dragon branding after all this time, sadly.
Calling the Dragon 32 home computer a ‘seasonal product’ sounds like a convincing explanation of why Dragon Data got into financial trouble.
The company has been given a £2.5 million rescue package, according to the trade paper, Computer Weekly , and former managing director Tony Clarke is to step down ‘for personal reasons’.
Probably the reasons for the sudden failure of Dragons to carry on selling the mad way they were selling before Christmas is more complex than ‘seasonal’ makes it sound. The fact of the matter is that the Dragon sold well over Christmas because you simply couldn’t buy anything else. The BBC Micro supply was still a fraction of the demand. The Sinclair Spectrum was in the same boat. Commodore VIC had been withdrawn, and had virtually sold out before the company noticed how popular it had been and reintroduced it. People were so desperate for home computers they were even buying the Texas Instruments 99/4A.
November 1983, that's the damning assessment of PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD in the wake of a new round of financial problems for Dragon Data.
It is easy for Dragon people to look back now and blame the price war, because the machine was made to look very expensive when the £200 VIC turned into a sub-£100 machine like the Spectrum. But the fact is: more expensive hardware (the BBC Micro) was still selling, despite all the many problems of which I have told you over the months—because it actually offered something for the money.
The article ended with a grim warning.
If you think the micro market is tough now, just wait till after Christmas this year.
Following the optimism of the start of 1983 and the price cuts made by Sinclair and Commodore, Dragon Data got into difficulty. The company seems to have continued producing Dragons at the rate of 5000 per week even as demand fell away. This resulted in the same sort of business conditions which later did for Commodore's Corby factory in 1984. Dragon Data also began to focus on the American market, via a deal with a US company called Tano. This deal was made just as the America market crashed on a massive slump in console sales but before the market pivoted and picked up on the back of home computers. Dragon Data was also spending money to develop the new Dragon 64.
They made 500 every day...
In November 1985 Eurohard shut his shops in Madrid and his shops in Barcelona shut last March , In 1986 you can buy Dragons and software but now , in Spain there is nothing that sells Dragon, nothing. His factory in Caceres shut last May,
Josep's letter is by far the most detailed information we have had about Eurohard's fate.
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