Paddington Bear creator dies at 91
Michael Bond, the British writer whose ursine creation, Paddington Bear, became one of the most beloved characters in the animal kingdom of children’s literature, died June 27 at his home in London. He was 91.
His publisher, HarperCollins UK, announced his death but did not disclose a cause.
It was on Christmas Eve in 1956 that Bond met the bear who would inspire Paddington. He was shopping for his wife at Selfridges department store and grabbed, as a stocking stuffer, a teddy bear that sat lonesomely on a shelf. They named it Paddington, after the London train station Bond used for his workday commute.
Bond was a BBC cameraman at the time but satisfied his literary bent by writing on the side. Looking at the teddy bear, and summoning his memories of the child refugees he had seen in British train stations during World War II, he wrote a story about a bear from “darkest Peru” who is sent to England alone when his aunt enters a nursing home. A family called the Browns finds him at Paddington station bearing a sign that reads: “Please look after this bear. Thank you.”
So began the book A Bear Called Paddington, published in 1958 with illustrations by Peggy Fortnum. That volume was the first in a shelfful of books about Paddington’s adventures and misadventures that sold tens of millions of copies and were translated into dozens of languages.
By the time of Bond’s death, Paddington Bear — with his immediately recognizable duffel coat, floppy hat and Wellington boots — had joined Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit and A.A. Milne’s Winnie-thePooh among celebrity literary animals.
Bond said that, throughout his life, he received letters from readers — the young and the no longer young.
“Most of them are from adults rather than children,” he told the Sunday Telegraph in 2007. “Quite often they’ll say, ‘I’ve never told anyone this before, but I still carry my bear wherever I go and talk to it when I get low.’ ”