Obituary - Michael Bond, writer and creator of Paddington Bear

Died: June 27, 2017

MICHAEL Bond, who has died aged 91, was a prolific children’s writer who created Paddington, the polite, sometimes confused bear who arrives from Peru in London with a label that reads “Please look after this bear. Thank you.” Thanks to the many books, the animated series of the 1970s voiced by Michael Hordern and later the film with Hugh Bonneville, the bear with a liking for marmalade sandwiches has been a favourite of families for more than 60 years.

The idea came to Bond, who was a cameraman for the BBC before becoming a full-time writer, while he was sitting at his typewriter trying to think of something to write. “I was looking round the room,” he said, “and we had this small bear, which had been a kind of stocking filler for my first wife, and I wondered, idly, what it would be like if it was a real bear that landed on Paddington station and I typed the first words down. The idea caught my fancy.”

The resulting book, A Bear Called Paddington, was written in around 10 days and was an immediate hit when it was published in 1958 and led to a further 27. Bond was also able to give up his job as a cameraman and later wrote other projects for children, including The Herbs, the much-loved 1960s animated series for young children featuring characters inspired by herbs including Parsley the lion.

Michael Bond was born an only child in Newbury in Berkshire, where his father was a post office clerk and deeply conservative. Bond remembers his father would wear a hat at all times in public, even when paddling in the sea, in case he should met someone he knew.

The young Michael was sent to a catholic school run by monks but it was not a happy experience for him and he left at 14 and worked as an office boy. He then joined the BBC as a trainee engineer before serving with the RAF during the Second World War.

After the war, he started working as a cameraman in the BBC’s famous but primitive Lime Grove Studios. It was the early 1950s and the vast majority of television was transmitted live, meaning that the job of the cameraman was highly stressful.

Away from the BBC, Bond had always had ambitions to be a writer and sold his first short story to a magazine while still with the corporation. Quite by chance, he then bought the toy bear that would inspire his greatest creation when he spotted it in the window at Selfridges.

“There was this one bear sitting on the shelf and I felt sorry for him,”  he recalled, “Someone once said ‘A doll’s always wondering what they’re going to wear next, but there’s something about a bear – you feel you can tell it your secrets and it won’t give them away’.”

By the mid 1960s, Bond was able to devote himself full-time to writing, mostly Paddington. The little bear was very real to him, he said. “I think it’s something bears have. So he comes around with me in spirit and I think an awful lot of stories start because you see a sign or you hear some conversation and you think ‘what if?’”

Other animals also inspired stories. There was a series of books about a guinea pig called Olga da Polga – inspired by his own pet – and stories about Thursday the mouse and JD Polson the armadillo. There was also a series of novels for adults about a French detective called Monsieur Pamplemousse and Bond also wrote various other titles including a guide to Paris. In all, Bond wrote 150 books, selling over 25 million copies in 22 languages.

The Herbs came along in 1968 and was a collaborative project with the animator Ivor Wood, who was also responsible for the Wombles. The series, shown in the Watch with Mother slot, featured Parsley the lion, Dill the Dog and Sage the Owl.

A few years later, Paddington Bear also became an animated series, again by Ivor Wood and narrated by Michael Hordern and the film version was released in 2014. Bond gave the film his blessing because, while the bear has appeared on stage and television over the years, a movie was “the one thing Paddington hadn’t done”.

He said in 2014: “What’s nice about the film is the fact that all the cast are in it because they like Paddington, they’ve all been brought up with Paddington and there was a very nice atmosphere on set.”

Hugh Bonneville, who played Mr Brown in the recent film adaptation of Paddington and its forthcoming sequel, said it was particularly poignant that Michael Bond’s death should be announced on the last day of shooting for the sequel.

Bond was appointed OBE in 1997 for services to children’s literature and CBE in 2015 and was always passionate about the potential power of books in children’s lives. “A story being read to you when you go to bed at night is a very good start in life,” he said. “I never went to bed without a story when I was small.”

Michael Bond’s autobiography, Bears and Forebears, was published in 1996.

He was married twice, firstly to Brenda Johnson, and is survived by his second wife Sue and his children Karen and Anthony.