Paddington creator Michael Bond dies, 91
Creator of Paddington, the bear from darkest Peru with a talent for troublesome good intentions
Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, has died at home at the age of 91, following a short illness.
Bond, who published his first book, A Bear Called Paddington, in 1958, went on to write more than 200 books for children. More than 35 million Paddington books have been sold around the world to date. Along with Paddington himself, Bond’s best-loved creations included Olga da Polga and A Mouse Called Thursday.
MICHAEL BOND, who has died aged 91, 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 (“Please look after this bear”). 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. This was a bear with the manners and values of its creator – only Paddington’s propensity for hard stares was at odds with Bond’s amiability.
The first book, A Bear Called Paddington, was published by William 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 rooted in the conventions of the age, and Bond made few concessions to changing times. 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, as he put it, without graffiti and vandalised telephone boxes. “Paddington is very polite in a world where people have become more selfish,” he said. “It’s very much every man for himself now. People don’t make eye contact in London.”
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. “I wrote the first book very quickly, in about 10 days. I didn’t know any children at the time but I think children like long words that they don’t necessarily understand.”
Bond was fortunate too in his collaborators. Peggy Fortnum’s line illustrations first fixed the image of Paddington 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.
An only child, Thomas Michael Bond was born at Newbury, Berkshire, on January 13 1926. His father was a Post Office clerk whose great passion was sport, particularly cricket. Once introduced to the Duke of Somerset, he responded instinctively to the greeting of “Hello, Somerset” with “I usually follow Middlesex myself ”.
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 as a trainee engineer.
While at work in 1943 a bomb hit the building in which he was working, 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 and for 10 years Bond worked in the unpredictable environment of live transmission, filming everything from Dixon of Dock Green to This Is Your Life.
“You had to pan the camera from side to side with the left hand, and focus with the right hand. Somebody else was ‘driving’ the motorised dolly,” recalled Bond. “If things hadn’t gone well on the Sunday Play, say, you dreaded when the play was going to be repeated – again, live – on Thursday. The other crew members used to watch the back of your neck, to see if it was going red.”
Bond was the cameraman when, to Eamonn Andrews’s “This is your life”, the footballer Danny Blanchflower replied, “Oh no it isn’t” and promptly absconded. He also witnessed the moment when Huw Weldon, leaning on a life-size model of a harpsichord made solely from matchsticks, inquired of the boy who had built it what his next project might be. After a nasty snapping sound came the mournful reply: “Another harpsichord.”
The advent of recording and editing techniques took much of the adventure out of his work, and the success of Paddington allowed Bond to devote himself to writing from 1966. The shape of some parsley blowing in a breeze reminded him of a lion’s mane. The idea coincided with a request from Watch With Mother for suggestions. The result was The Herbs, the adventures of Parsley the Lion, Sage the Owl, Sir Basil and Lady Rosemary.
With puppets by Ivor Wood they became a staple of BBC children’s television from 1968, surviving an unfortunate first episode intended to teach children about the danger of firearms. When Sir Basil accidentally shot off Parsley’s tail many viewers turned off in tears. The incident taught Bond not to burden his comedy with didactic intentions.
Gratifying as Paddington’s acceptance in the nursery was, Bond tried hard to escape being known only for his famous character. He wrote several other series of children’s books with animal protagonists. Thursday was a daring mouse; JD Polson, less successfully, was an armadillo, while his daughter’s guinea pig became the model for the most substantial of his later creations, Olga da Polga.
Bond concentrated in later years on a farcical series of novels for adults featuring the French food inspector Monsieur Pamplemousse and his priapic dog, Pommes Frites. Although Auberon Waugh wrote of the initial offering in 1983 that, “I cannot, off-hand, think of any book which has amused me less,” they proved sufficiently palatable to the public to allow Bond to write 10 more.
The research allowed him to indulge his love of France and his appreciation of its cuisine. He kept a flat in Paris and wrote a guidebook to the city. France and the French, he believed, retained standards that had been eroded in Britain. “The French have a different set of priorities, which I find very engaging.” he noted. “They still have many of the old-fashioned politenesses that we seem to have lost – when you go into a restaurant, no matter how small, there is always someone there to greet you and make you feel welcome.”
Bond wrote more than 80 books, including an amusing autobiography, Bears and Forebears (1996). Just ahead of the 2012 Olympics he published Paddington Races Ahead, a timely and sporty addition to his series. In it, Paddington is confronted with contemporary London and its frustrations and absurdities: told by a bus driver that he needs to buy an Oyster, he pads off to the local fishmonger to do just that.
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”.
His books sold more than 25 million copies in 22 languages. Bond also profited from the vast sales of Paddington merchandise. “I severed my connection with the merchandising side,” he said in 2012. “I don’t really want to know about it. Some things take me by surprise but I just look away.” But he vetoed a proposed bin with Paddington’s head as the lid.
Bond continued to write until the end of his life, publishing his last Paddington book, Paddington’s Finest Hour, in April this year. “When you’ve been a writer as long as I have, it’s impossible to stop,” he said, “I think people are envious of Paddington’s lifestyle because he does things in his own time. I used to think time would slow down as I got older and I’d spend my old age pasting photographs into albums, but they’re never going to get done now.”
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, Susan Johnson, in 1981, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage and a son from a separate relationship.
Michael Bond, born January 13 1926, died June 27 2017