Michael Bond
The creator of Paddington Bear, who continued to write tales of his antics to the end
MICHAEL BOND, who died aged 91 last Tuesday, was a prolific author of children’s stories and the creator of Paddington Bear.
Darkest Peru’s most celebrated emigrant began life as a mental exercise. In 1956, Bond had written a few short stories and some radio plays but was working as a BBC cameraman.
On Christmas Eve, he bought his wife a bear from Selfridges because he thought it looked lonely on the shelf. It was christened Paddington because they lived nearby and it was the station he had travelled up to as a boy when visiting London.
One morning, looking for inspiration, he began to compose a story around the bear and the railway terminus. Images of wartime evacuees sprung to mind, each with a small suitcase and a label round the neck. Bond wrote eight stories about the Peruvian bear in just over a week. Paddington quickly acquired his duffel coat and old floppy hat, along with a preference for marmalade over honey sandwiches.
The first book, A Bear Called Paddington, was published by Williams Collins in 1958 and was listed as the best children’s novel of the year by the book trade journal, Books and Bookmen. Over the following half a century, Bond wrote dozens more Paddington Bear books.
Paddington’s escapades were inevitably rooted in the conventions of the age and Bond made few concessions to changing times over the next 30 years.
The bear’s hosts, the Browns, still retained a housekeeper, with Mrs Brown busying herself in the kitchen while her husband worked in the City.
This reflected Bond’s nostalgia for an era. “Paddington is very polite in a world where people have become more selfish,” said Bond.
Yet Paddington’s childlike seriousness and capacity for troublesome good intentions gave him an appeal that endured and overcame the boundaries of time and culture. “I never think of children when I’m writing something; I write it to please myself,” said Bond.
Bond was fortunate too in his collaborators. Peggy Fortnum’s line illustrations first fixed the image of Pad- dington in 1958. Eighteen years later they were given new life by Ivor Wood’s animation and Michael Hordern’s warm, absent-minded voice in a long-running BBC series that confirmed Paddington’s place in the pantheon of childhood.
Thomas Michael Bond was born in Newbury, Berkshire, on January 13, 1926.
Young Michael was educated at Presentation College, Reading, a Catholic school chosen by his mother based on the colour of the boys’ blazers. The school was run by monks, whose brutal methods of discipline encouraged Bond to leave at 14. He worked as an office boy for a solicitor before joining the BBC transmission centre in Reading as a trainee engineer.
While at work in 1943, a bomb hit the building, destroying all but the room he happened to be in. Bond then joined the RAF, but his ambition to be a fighter pilot was thwarted by chronic airsickness. Training in Canada gave him a liking for travel and, having transferred to the army, he served briefly in Egypt after the war ended. From there he sold his first short story to the magazine London Opinion.
He returned to the BBC Monitoring Service, where he met his first wife, Brenda. A cut in funding allowed him to transfer to the new Lime Grove studios as a cameraman in 1956. Television was beginning to expand after the successful coverage of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and for 10 years, Bond worked in the unpredictable environment of live transmission. The success of Paddington allowed Bond to devote himself to writing from 1966.
Bond wrote more than 80 books, including an amusing autobiography, Bears and Forebears (1996). Bond continued to write until the end of his life, publishing his last Paddington book, Paddington’s Finest Hour in April this year.
At Christmas 2014, a feature-length film Paddington was released — with a cast including Nicole Kidman and Hugh Bonneville, and with Ben Whishaw as the voice of a CGI-created Paddington. Bond himself had a credited cameo as “the Kindly Gentleman”.
He was appointed OBE in 1997 for services to children’s literature and CBE in 2015.
Bond married Brenda Johnson in 1950 (later dissolved). He married secondly, in 1981, Susan Johnson, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage and a son from a separate relationship.