Thomas De La Rue - A British Playing Card Pioneer

In 1818, a young printer from Guernsey arrived in London with ambitions considerably larger than his resources. He had apprenticed under a master printer as a boy of ten, launched a newspaper in his home island, and now intended to make his mark in the most competitive city in the world. He started, with magnificent impracticality, by manufacturing straw hats.

Within fifteen years, Thomas De La Rue would be recognised as the inventor of the modern English playing card. Within thirty, his firm would be producing stamps for the British Empire, banknotes for governments across the world, and some of the most beautiful playing cards ever made. The straw hats are not much remembered. Everything else changed the world.

From Guernsey To London

Thomas De La Rue was born on 24 March 1793 in Forest, Guernsey, the seventh of nine children. At the age of ten he was apprenticed to his brother-in-law Joseph Antoine Chevalier, a master printer in Saint Peter Port, where he gained the thorough technical grounding in printing that would define his career. By 1813 he had launched his own newspaper in Guernsey, Le Miroir Politique, before making the decision that would determine everything: in 1818 he moved to London.

The straw hat venture did not last. But the instincts that produced it - a restless search for the next commercial opportunity, an eye for materials and process, an appetite for what printing could become - drove everything that followed. By 1828, De La Rue had turned his full attention to playing cards. In 1830 he formed a partnership with Samuel Cornish and William Rock as cardmakers, hot pressers and enamellers. And in December 1831 he was granted a Royal Letters Patent from King William IV for a transformative innovation in playing card manufacture: letterpress printing.

The implications were enormous. Hand-stencilled playing cards were slow to produce, variable in quality, and limited in what could be achieved in terms of detail and consistency. Letterpress printing - with its precise inking, mechanical repeatability, and capacity for fine registration - transformed what a playing card could be. The surface of De La Rue's early cards was slightly grooved by being rolled on prepared plates, creating a texture that improved handling (a forerunner of the ever popular linen finish still used on premium playing cards today). He also introduced sulphate of barytes as a pigment, producing enhanced whiteness and durability in the card stock itself. Every technical improvement pointed in the same direction: a more beautiful, more consistent, more desirable object.

Owen Jones & The Golden Years

From 1840 until 1856, playing cards were De La Rue's chief money maker - the financial engine that funded everything else the firm wanted to become. But Thomas De La Rue was not content to be simply a playing card manufacturer. In 1853 the firm produced its first postage stamps, beginning a relationship with government security printing that would eventually eclipse playing cards entirely. Railway tickets, banknotes, government stationery: De La Rue's reputation for precision and security made them the natural choice for any document that needed to be both beautiful and unforgeable.

The playing card work continued alongside this expansion, and it was during this period that De La Rue produced some of the most distinguished decks in British playing card history. In 1844, Thomas De La Rue employed the graphic designer Owen Jones - one of the most significant decorative artists of the Victorian era, responsible for the interior of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the foundational design reference work Grammar of Ornament. Over the following twenty years, Jones produced 173 playing card back designs for De La Rue, ranging from Moorish geometry to classical florals to Chinese-inspired patterns. Four designs were commissioned specifically for members of the royal family to mark the Great Exhibition. The design made for Prince Albert was, by accounts of the period, among Jones's most elaborate work.

The firm also produced special packs during this period for royal occasions and commemorative events - luxury editions with gilt edges, elaborate tuck cases, and the kind of meticulous finish that made a De La Rue deck the most prestigious playing cards money could buy. They were selling not simply cards but a statement of taste - and in the Victorian era, taste was something people were willing to pay considerably for.

110 Bunhill Row

In 1833, Thomas De La Rue rented premises at 110 Bunhill Row, Finsbury - a Nonconformist district just north of the City of London, long associated with printing and publishing. It would remain the business home of De La Rue for over a century. The Star Works, the Crown Works and the George Works all grew up around that original Bunhill Row address, expanding as the firm's ambitions expanded.

Thomas retired in 1858 and handed the business to his sons. He died in Kensington in June 1866, by which point De La Rue was an institution: one of the most respected names in British commercial printing, recognised with a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur, his playing card innovations known across the trade. Guernsey later commemorated him on two sets of postage stamps - in 1971 and 1993 - and his portrait appeared on the island's five pound note. A printer's life, acknowledged at last in print.

The firm continued without him in increasingly ambitious directions. By 1860 they were printing banknotes. By 1876 their playing card trademarks were formally registered. The Onoto pen - the world's first plunger-filling pen, used by Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Haig - came in 1905. De La Rue kept expanding, kept acquiring, kept diversifying.

September 11th 1940

On the night of 11 September 1940, the Blitz came to Bunhill Row. The De La Rue printing works - the Star Works, the Crown Works, the George Works, the buildings that Thomas had rented in 1833 and that his sons and grandsons had expanded across a century - were destroyed in an air raid. A hundred years of playing card production, of back design archives, of printing machinery and accumulated craft knowledge, burned in a single night.

De La Rue were not defeated by it. They quickly made arrangements to resume printing elsewhere, and for the duration of the war their playing card production was undertaken by Waddington's in Leeds. The two firms' products became intertwined during this period - De La Rue brand packs might contain Waddington courts, Waddington packs might carry De La Rue aces. In 1969 De La Rue sold their playing card business to Waddington's entirely, ending a chapter that had begun in 1832 with Thomas and his letterpress patent and the first pack of cards rolled off a machine in Finsbury.

What De La Rue became after that is a different story: today the firm is the world's largest commercial security printer, producing banknotes for over 140 countries. Playing cards are a footnote in that history. But they were the foundation of it - the product that gave Thomas De La Rue his first commercial success, funded his firm's first decades, and gave British playing card design the standard it has never really abandoned.

The Playing Card Tradition We Carry Forward

At A. Haines Playing Cards, giants like De La Rue are a constant reference point. Not in the sense of reproducing their designs - everything we make is original, hand-drawn from scratch in Manchester - but in the sense of working within the visual tradition they did more than anyone to establish. The ornate Ace of Spades as a maker's statement: the decorated back as a considered design rather than a functional necessity: the court card as a figure worthy of serious artistic attention. The idea that a playing card can be an object of genuine beauty and functionality - and be just as collectable as it is intended for everyday use.

Our first ever entirely designed & made in England pack of cards: Plaid no. 162

Thomas De La Rue made his first playing cards in 1832. The principles he established - precision, craft, the belief that a playing card deserves serious design attention - are the same ones we work with today, by hand, here in Manchester. Some traditions are worth carrying forward.

Read more about the broader golden age of British playing card heritage here, and browse the full A. Haines collection here.