The Life and Times of the Real Winnie-the-Pooh

by Shirley Harrison

  By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Farnell had become Britain’s leading manufacturer and exporter, first of soft toys and then, importantly, of teddy bears.

  Joseph Kirby Farnell died in 1891, leaving the business, most unusually for the times, to his three daughters, Agnes, Eleanor and Martha, and their brother Henry.

  The company’s claim for first prize in the race to make soft, child-friendly toys is supported by an article in the February 1922 issue of Games and Toys, which says that Farnell ‘has been established for over 50 years’. However, an advertisement which appeared later, in 1965, put the date even earlier and, according to Kathy Martin, ‘this strong evidence would seem to suggest that some time between 1863 and 1868 Farnell had begun manufacturing the first soft, squashy, comforting, animal-inspired decorative items’. This would have placed it just ahead of the, now famous, Margarete Steiff company in Germany.

  Margarete Steiff had been paralysed since the age of one. Always a courageous and cheerful fighter, she was seventeen years-old when her father transformed a study in their house into a dressmaker’s workshop where, with her two sisters, she made children’s clothes.

  She produced her first stuffed toy – a little elephant called ‘Elefante’ – in 1879. The elephant was so popular with children and adults that she progressed to other animals and went on to launch the enterprise which grew to become today’s internationally celebrated company.

  Also in Germany, in 1894 the company of Gebruder Sussenguth had produced the first catalogue showing a stuffed toy bear based on Robert Southey’s 1834 fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears .

  Around 1898, the entire Farnell family moved upmarket into The Elms on Acton Hill. The house was described in the sale details as ‘a very substantial and excellent eighteenth century mansion’. It boasted greenhouses and a boating lake, set in a thirty four acre park. The property was big enough for the building of a new factory in the grounds to the north east which eventually became the headquarters of the expanding Farnell enterprise.

  It was here in Acton in 1921 that the ‘best bear in the world’ would eventually be born.

  After the death of the reclusive Queen Victoria in 1901, there had been a lightening of mood throughout Europe, which heralded a new delight in childhood and, in its turn, opened the way for the emerging toy industry.

  A year later, in America, President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt travelled to Mississippi to help settle a border dispute with Louisiana. His hosts famously took him bear-hunting but when no bears appeared the President was invited to shoot a cub that had been previously captured. He refused to fire at such a helpless target – an act which inspired the famous cartoon by Richard Berryman Drawing the Line, which appeared in the Washington Post on 16 November 1902.

  It was this cartoon which encouraged Maurice and Rose Michtom of Brooklyn, New York, to make a toy bear in honour of the President’s actions. They wrote to ask for his permission to call it Teddy’s Bear. He replied: ‘I don’t think my name is likely to be worth much in the toy business but you are welcome to use it’. To the delight of everyone it was not a moose, as expected, but a bear, which he decided to use as his mascot in the next Presidential election.

  The Michtom’s bear looked sweet and innocent, which is probably why he was an overnight success with the public. In fact, demand was so strong that the Michtoms, with the help of a wholesale firm called Butler Brothers, formed the first-ever teddy bear manufacturing company in America. It was called the Ideal Novelty and Toy Company.

  Margarete Steiff’s nephew, Richard, was in America that year and attended a circus performance by dancing bears. They gave him an idea. He returned home and took out patents for a toy dancing bear which he called ‘Friend Petz’ and also a brown bear with his handler. The bears were shown at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903 but the dancing bear did not sell at all well until, just as the Fair was closing, New York toy importer, Hermann Borgford, ordered four thousand.

  People in Europe and America were beginning to get teddy bear fever and the Steiffs and the Farnells were leading the way. The toy bear – known originally in trade magazines as a ‘Bruin’ – had arrived.

  In 1908, the American composer, J.K Bratton, wrote The Teddy Bear Two Step, which soon became popularised as the toe-tapping Teddy Bears’ Picnic and was used in Roosevelt’s next election campaign.

  By this time, the Farnells had begun exporting bears to countries such as South Africa and Egypt and, of course, America. Originally made from animal skins, teddy bears were now made in a new fabric. Yorkshire mohair was long-haired, silky and very tactile, woven from the hair of the Angora goat. Mohair is the most durable, soft fabric, with none of the harshness of man-made materials.

  Then, in 1908, Farnell produced what is generally believed to be the first British teddies. Farnell bears had long tapering limbs, with webbed stitching on their paws and rather pronounced muzzles. Their ears were quite large and round and their eyes in various shades of clear glass with dark pupils but most importantly they GROWLED. Christopher Milne recalled, as a grown-up, that Pooh’s growl didn’t last long!

  The new bears were cuddly and looked more like furry people than the four-legged wild animals on which they were based.

  Dolls were for girls. But, being genderless and classless and selling in a wide range of prices, teddy bears could be equally well-loved and hugged without shame by boys as well as girls and, before long, by grown-up men and women too, from all sections of the community.

  An article by F.R.B. Whitehouse appeared in the 1954 July issue of the magazine Toys and Games in which he describes the enduring magic of the time when the bedroom light is turned off and all is dark in bed, secrets can be imparted between the child and the teddy and an affection is created which lasts long after childhood has passed.

  The Harrods catalogue of 1910 shows a photograph of Teddy Bear TY 365. By the 1912 catalogue this superior bear is proudly identified as from Farnell.

  During World War I, toy imports from Germany stopped, leaving the way clear for a boom in British bears. However, after the Armistice in 1918, a very worrying increase of imports of ‘cheap foreign muck’ was reported in the trade press.

  Despite all the setbacks, Farnell was flourishing, with fifty outworkers and one hundred and eighty nine factory girls in the care of Sybil Kempe, daughter of a local Professor of Music.

  Factory conditions were excellent. Wages were above average. There was plenty of space and the girls worked in teams at long tables on the various stages of the teddy bears’ creation. The fabric was first cut to shape ready for the machinist to assemble and put in baskets. Others then turned the parts inside out ready to be stuffed with wood shavings and more solid wood wool for the head. Limbs had to be jointed and eyes inserted. Most important of all was the stitching of the nose, as it was this which gave each bear his individual character.

  In 1920, Rupert Bear appeared as a picture story Little Lost Bear, in the Daily Express. He was introduced as competition for the Daily Mail’s ‘Teddy Tail’. Written and drawn by Mary Tourtel, Rupert was a fictional character inspired by the current passion for teddies, but he was a bear dressed as a little boy with a yellow scarf. His popularity gave an additional boost to the new trend.

  In 1921, the Farnell family decided to formalise their company. Agnes and Henry became company directors, and the factory at The Elms was named The Alpha Works. Their new Alpha range of soft toys, including the Alpha bear, was lauded in the trade press for its quality.

  At the same time they also opened a showroom in union Street in the East End of London. There were huge bears and growly bears, baby bears and musical bears, dressed bears and bare bears.

  In that memorable year of 1921, Sybil Kempe had been with the firm for thirty years and had risen from her role as a simple fur worker to a position of considerable responsibility and importance not only to the factory but to Agnes and Henry personally: they both remembered her later in their Wills.
Her exact role in Pooh’s arrival is uncertain but several magazines refer to her as a ‘gifted designer’ and it is not unreasonable to imagine that she may have been the ‘midwife’ at his ‘birth’. She died in St. Albans on 3 December 1959 at the age of 84.

  Today, the factory itself has been demolished but the Farnell home, The Elms, has become Twyford Church of England High School.

  In Acton, there is no blue plaque on the wall to remind pupils, the people of Acton, or the rest of the world, WHO was born there in 1921.

  During the summer of that year, the Alpha teddy bear who would eventually become Winnie-the-Pooh travelled with his many siblings and a consignment of other toys, including Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddleduck, in the Farnell delivery van from Acton. They sped across London, towards Harrods department store in Kensington. Who would have guessed then that, from all the hundreds of bears who left the Works that year, one alone was destined for fame and fortune and would become a household name worldwide.

  If hand made mohair bears like Pooh seem expensive, that’s because mohair IS expensive! Priced according to thickness and length of pile, it can cost up to £150 per metre today. It takes many hours to make a bear from design to finished article. The price doesn’t really reflect this – bear makers have always designed and made bears with love.

  Mohair is the most durable, soft, huggable fabric. The vintage bears of a hundred years ago, made with mohair, have stood the test of time. Alpaca and cashmere plush are sometimes used for tiny bears. They have the same qualities and are excellent for children who will want their bears to remain with them as they grow up.

  A traditional teddy bear is made, as it has always been made, with wood or hardboard joints held by long cotter pins. The filling is wood shavings and the eyes glass. Modern safety regulations mean they must no longer be sold for children to play with and are for adult collectors only. Much the same character can be achieved for a child’s bear by replacing the joints and eyes with plastic, and filling with a softer acrylic fibre and/or acrylic ‘beans’.

  Caring for your bears

  The ideal place to keep an elderly bear is in a glass-fronted cupboard where it can be seen and taken out from time to time. Alternatively, protect your old bear’s fur with soft clothing and dust occasionally. Above all, keep bears out of the dog’s reach!

  Chapter Two

  A Present for the Baby

  THE YEAR 1921 was a special one for Harrods Emporium – but not solely because of that one particular delivery of Farnell teddy bears and a shopping expedition by young society mother. More importantly for Harrods, this was the year in which the freehold of their vast 34-acre site was finally acquired for £263,850. The impressively monumental building, with its famous terracotta brick façade, had become the largest departmental store in the capital. This was to be Pooh’s first home.

  The ground floor alone covered four-and-a-half acres, and fifty lifts served twenty acres of the four shopping floors above. Thirty nine miles of underground tubes carried money to the cashiers and change back to customers.

  With the grandiose telegraphic address of ‘Everything London’, its advertising claimed that ‘Harrods is winning ever increasing appreciation from thousands of country womenfolk who have never been nearer to Harrods than their nearest pillar box’.

  That year, too, the store catalogue offered a Rhesus Monkey for £5, live cod from the fish department for 1/-d per pound and holiday transport in a Harrods luxurious car with a courteous chauffeur for £7 per one hundred miles. You could also hire the Harrods Royal Red Band and purchase Ashanti hammocks ‘suitable for gardens or exploring purposes’.

  But most important were the teddy bears. They came in a number of sizes costing 10/6d for a 15-inch bear like Pooh, 8/11d for one of 13½ inches and 5/-d for babies of 11-inches. The size and price variations were important, since the appeal of teddies was universal and many of the Farnell bears would have been destined for smaller shops, serving less prosperous families.

  Author Eric Newby described his own childhood memories of Harrods at this time in his book A Traveller’s Life. His mother had worked in the shop and was a regular visitor according to Eric, going from department to department like a combine harvester. To the young boy, Harrods was a world apart from any other he had experienced.

  He was bemused by the wonderland of the great vaulted Food Hall decorated with medieval scenes of the chase, which remains a tourist attraction today. Fishmongers, purveyors of game and butchers assembled there, confronting each other across mountainous displays of crabs and scallops, Aberdeen smokies, turbot and halibut on one side and ‘hecatombs’ of Angus beef and South Downs lamb and mutton on the other. In the linen hall, tablecloths eight yards long could accommodate place settings for twenty four guests and were destined for the dining halls of the gentry in their moated mansions. You could buy christening robes or servants’ uniforms, and use Harrods services to arrange your wedding or funeral.

  Even more exciting was Harrods Zoo, where the noise was deafening and macaws and polite parrots (who had passed a bad language test) lived alongside guinea pigs, tortoises and puppies.

  Harrods, like Farnell, had started life as a modest one-man business. Tea-dealer, Charles Henry Harrod, was running a small grocery shop in Cable Street in the East End of London when Joseph Kirby Farnell was acting as an Agent for Servants in North Kensington.

  In 1868 Charles Harrod moved his shop to a run-down, rat-infested area of South Kensington off the Brompton Road not long before Joseph Kirby Farnell established his fancy goods enterprise in Acton.

  In 1879, Charles’ son, Charles Digby Harrod, launched a mammoth programme of slum clearance and rebuilding to create a larger shop, so that by the early 1880s the number of employees had risen from one hundred to nearly two hundred. In 1883, the separate departments included groceries, provisions, confectionery, wines and spirits, brushes and turnery, ironmongery, glass, china, earthenware, stationery, fancy goods, perfumery, drugs, etc.

  By 1901, social change had transformed South Kensington. The top-floor front of Harrods was converted into flats and many of the nearby buildings which are now shops were leased as luxury apartments designed to appeal to the new class of residents. Harrods was their local store and the new advertising slogan ‘Twice the choice at Harrods. Supplying the needs of well-to-do people’. However, according to the Chelsea Herald, Harrods business ‘is now world-wide, offering free delivery and its clients – or customers – rank from the Peer to the Peasant.’

  Among those who might be spotted among the crowds was the colourful Emir of Katsina in Nigeria on his way to Mecca, who bought ‘a watch, resisted a large plaice, bought grapes and two dozen lemons, non-alcoholic mouthwash from the drug department and clothes such as pilgrims require’. Crown Prince Carol ordered furniture and fittings to be delivered to his home in Romania.

  By the 1920s, the new designs of Coco Chanel from France were all the rage – shorter skirts, clinging fabrics, cloche hats and short soft-bobbed hair, were seen everywhere as, increasingly, were trousers for ladies. Soon to come – the little black dress and even shorter flapper dresses. Chanel created her most famous perfume – Chanel No 5 – which was, of course, stocked by Harrods. It has been described as ‘the world’s most legendary fragrance’ and, even today, the company claims that a bottle is sold every fifty-five seconds.

  Daphne Milne, wife of author A.A. Milne, a young society mother with plenty of money, was shopping at an exciting time for women. This was the period, after the deprivation of the war, when fashion went wild. It was also the hottest summer on record with soaring temperatures.

  By the time that the Farnell bears arrived, Harrods was arguably the best-known store in the world, with a Royal Warrant from Queen Mary who was, on occasion, seen shopping there in person. It was a matter of chance that Pooh did not find himself in the nurseries of her grandchildren and disappear forever from history into Buckingham Palace.

  The Toy Department was indeed a
spectacular, carpeted, dream world, with its grand pillars and arches and ornately-carved ceilings from which teddy bears were suspended, gently circling and dancing in the breeze. There were rocking horses and bassinets, from which beautifully coiffured, perpetually smiling dolls greeted passing children with their nannies. Very popular then, although politically incorrect today, were rows of cheery golliwogs. There were dolls’ houses, toy soldiers, wind-up dogs, clockwork railway trains, toy theatres and even more teddy bears, everywhere, sitting in rows and waiting for some eager child or parent to fall in love.

  As a boy, Eric Newby was not allowed by his mother to dally in ‘Toys’ where temptation was too great, so he never met Pooh.

  That day in August, when Miss Moran the Manager of Toys welcomed the new consignment of Farnell teddy bears, seemed just like any other day. How was she to know that this was not at all like any other day!

  The new lift carried Daphne Milne, an elegant young woman, to the ‘First floor, Madam’.

  Daphne was now on one of her regular visits, probably to the Georgian Restaurant on the fourth floor (which, seating one thousand, was the largest in London), just beyond the Toy Department. It was a popular rendezvous of fashion and luxury for the ladies of Kensington, Knightsbridge and Chelsea with a recherché cuisine and a first class orchestra. A ‘dainty tea’ with a choice of toasted tea cakes, scones, toasted items and meringues and cream cost 1/-d, rump steak was 1/-d and sago pudding 4d.

  On this occasion Daphne was looking for a special first birthday present for her son.

  In his autobiography, The Enchanted Places, the grown-up Christopher Milne imagined his mother’s first meeting with the toy bear who was to become his constant friend and companion.

  He visualised a row of teddy bears sitting in a toyshop, all one size and all one price. Yet, he wrote, how different each would appear from the next. Some were gay, some sad. Some looked stand-offish, some were loveable. ‘One in particular – that one over there – has a specially endearing expression. Yes, that is the one we would like please.’