The Creator Of Paddington, The Bear From Darkest Peru

Michael Bond 1926-2017

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On Christmas Eve 1956, a BBC cameraman nipped to Oxford Street to buy some last-minute stocking fillers for his wife, Brenda. On a shelf in Selfridges, he spotted a bear glove puppet, left by itself. Struck with pity for the unwanted toy, he took it home. Months later, while looking for inspiration for a short story, Michael Bond, who has died aged 91, alighted on the toy, sitting on the mantelpiece of his small flat in Notting Hill, and began to imagine a bear from “darkest Africa”, who lands up, all alone, in west London. With his head still full of wartime images of refugees and evacuees, Bond gave the character a suitcase and a label reading, “Please look after this bear”, and named him after the railway station with which he was most familiar: Paddington. Michael Bond was born in Newbury, Berkshire, the only – and beloved – son of a Post Office sorting clerk and a housewife (who would partly inspire Paddington’s good-hearted adoptive parents). He had a happy childhood, but hated his Catholic school, and left aged 14 to work in a solicitor’s office before joining the BBC as a trainee. During the War, he served first in the RAF, and then in the Army, in Egypt. He was waiting to be demobbed when, in 1946, he s