Tender care for cherished bears
Tucked up in their beds under the expert care of toy restorer Rikey Austin, cherished companions wait to be ‘made better’
Ted Wilson is very elderly. With a floppy, threadbare body, split seams and eyes askew, he has clearly been loved throughout generations. But while his body is ragged and his smile awry, he is still very much cherished. He has been sent by caring owners to a hospital for teddy bears and dolls, and he is in safe hands.
Here, surrounded by a legion of other stuffed toys, Ted lies on a bed of tissue, on a shelf labelled ‘Ward 2’. His companions are in various states of disorder, but not for much longer. On another shelf, labelled ‘ready to go home’, sit the restored and mended bears and dolls, waiting to return to their anxious families.
Tucked behind the main thoroughfare of Lyme Regis, Alice’s Bear Shop, Teddy Bear and Doll Hospital was opened 20 years ago by Rikey Austin. Rikey had worked for other bear shops and with teddy bear designers, but during a family holiday on the Dorset coast, she came across a vacant property that was available to rent. This was to become her own Alice’s Bear Shop; Alice being the name Rikey would have given to a daughter, had she not had three sons.
Since those early days, the business has expanded and now operates from the light and airy top floor of a converted Victorian schoolhouse.
“Initially, the teddy and doll hospital was a small part of our business, with only one or two patients a month, but, over the years, we’ve realised that repairing teddies is by far the most important part of the job,” she explains. “Today, we treat hundreds every year. On our busiest day, we received 11 patients, and we now have two full-time ‘doctors’ and three specialist ‘locums’.
“We get patients from the whole world over. In May one year, we had two from Australia, one from America, one from Budapest, and there was a man who couldn’t bear to post his teddy, so he flew over with him from Bulgaria.” He
stayed in Lyme Regis while his bear was being repaired.
The full team comprises 11 members of staff. ‘Doctors’ work on the day-to-day repair of bears and dolls, alongside ‘nurse’ assistants. The ‘locums’ are specialists in particular repairs and come to the hospital when needed. All repairs are carried out by hand.
There is also a hospital administrator, an IT specialist, who is involved with the online design of kits and patterns for rag dolls, and a young apprentice, who has developed a register of patients as well as learning repair work to support the ‘doctors’ and ‘nurses’. When a bear arrives, it is photographed and added to this register, with a hospital number, storing all the information gleaned from the owners.
“Our motto is: ‘People and Planet before Profit’, and the hospital is the heart and soul of what we do; teaching people to repair, rather than replace,” says Rikey. These green principles also extend to the repair of the bears.
“We buy mohair, then we have to age it; perhaps staining it to match the colour we need. We are starting a campaign asking bear-makers to send us their scraps. The tiny bits that they have left over are perfect for repairs. We’ll pay the postage and plant a tree to offset the carbon cost of the journey. We are also always looking to acquire old sheepskin coats and gloves.”
Lengthy process
There is currently a five-month waiting list for repairs to be completed. Some dolls and bears can take weeks to repair, as in the case of Ted Wilson.
“Looking at his eyes, he probably dates from the 1940s,” says Rikey. “He has had a lot of darning and other home-repairs over the years, and you can see where a plaster has been put on his paw: it looks like his paws have been repaired with curtain fabric. There is so much love in these old repairs. The dark stains on him are from damp, and that can be difficult to fix, as the fabric rots. If we try to stitch it, the fabric will break, so we will have to patch the whole area. The back of his head needs to be reinforced, too.
“The most important thing for us here is to find out what needs to stay. If an owner has, perhaps, lost their Mum,
“…her paint is all washed away, And her arm trodden off by the cows, dears, And her hair not the least bit curled: Yet for old sakes’ sake she is still, dears, The prettiest doll in the world” Charles Kingsley, ‘The Little Doll’
but she did some of the repair stitching, and that’s a reminder of her, then we need to go in behind the stitching to retain it. As well as assessing what repairs are required, we also need to work out what not to do.”
Some bears can be treated as day cases. Ted Gallop is one patient who can be mended swiftly.
“We can put his smile back on with a little bit of stitching,” reassures Rikey. “He has some damage on his paw pad, and the edge of his squeak has worn through his tummy fur, which is a really common problem.”
In a box nearby is adorable Toffee Fraser, safely wrapped in lilac fabric for his journey to the hospital. Round his wrist, a tag, neatly written by his owner, says that he is 66 years old. He is suffering, according to Rikey, from general wear and tear, the evidence of decades of love.
Loved to pieces
Toys come to the hospital with various types and degrees of damage. There is a doll which is missing an eye. One bear’s head hangs by a thread due to the unwelcome attention of a dog, and he has come into the hospital along with a ‘companion bear’. Others, says Rikey, are “simply loved to bits”. The oldest patient treated at the hospital was a wax doll dating from 1600. However, all the toys are restored, including one that was run over by a lawnmower.
“There are certain patterns of wear,” explains Rikey. “We see a lot of damage caused by dogs. They tend to go for the tummy or the face. You can also look at a bear and know whether it belongs to a boy or girl: girls’ bears are often bald on the tummy and the face from being cuddled and kissed; boys’ bears are worn on the ears and paws from being dragged around.
Treasured possessions
“When bears come in, it can be very emotional. Owners may be worried that we are going to change their bear. To get it right, we need to give them back their bear as it was 10 years ago. We don’t make it into a ‘new’ bear: the character is
still there. The joy of reuniting someone with a repaired teddy or doll is one of the best aspects of the job.”
Rikey explains that people’s expectations have to be managed. “We repaired a German-made Steiff teddy bear that had belonged to the present owner’s mother. She was surprised by the restored hump on his back, but this is part of the Steiff style. Some people are also surprised that their bear seems bigger once it has been re-stuffed.”
Some of the tales behind the toys that come into the hospital are heart-rending.
“The ones that really stick in my mind are the emotional ones,” says Rikey. “We had a lady who, with her older sister, was taken to a children’s home by her grandfather, as the family couldn’t care for them. Each girl had a doll; the only connection with their former family. One day, the girls witnessed a man falling into a river. The older sister, then in her early teens, tried to help and, appallingly, she herself drowned. The younger sister took on her sister’s doll, which later needed repairs. The responsibility of this repair was enormous, as was the stress of waiting for the doll to arrive. Luckily, in 20 years, we have never had a delivery go astray.”
Hidden surprises
On one occasion, a local woman’s mother had died, and the daughter had asked to keep the old bear that had lived on her mother’s bed. However, the only one that could be found was a newer-looking bear, so she took this one and brought it to the hospital for the seams to be repaired.
“When I saw the bear, I thought that it just didn’t feel right, so asked if I could do some exploratory ‘surgery’,” says Rikey. “We undid the stitching on its head, and we discovered the original old bear was underneath. The woman wept: she was so pleased to see the old bear she remembered. We repaired the original bear, then filled the covering to create another bear, so she ended up with two.”
Another touching story goes all the way back to the Second World War. “A lady brought in a bear which had originally belonged to her grandfather, passed down to her when her mother died,” says Rikey. “His growl had stopped working and needed to be fixed. When we investigated, we found letters inside the bear, wrapped around its growl. During the war, a man in a work camp in Poland had fallen in love with a local girl. The two of them had managed to smuggle messages to one another inside the bear. They later married, and the lady was their granddaughter.”
There are lessons to be learned here; not least that however battered a loved bear may be, he is still repairable. It is a lesson in never giving up; a lesson in hope.
“When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay To keep me happy all the day” Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Land of Counterpane’