Bestall’s bear legacy

The Life and works of Alfred Bestall - The Rupert Bear 90th Anniversary Edition

“I NEVER had a teddy”, writes Sir Paul McCartney, who turned as a child instead to the Rupert Bear stories in The Daily Express. Without expanding on this poignant fact, McCartney explains his affection for the fictional bear in his foreword to this account of the life and work of Alfred Edmeades Bestall, MBE.

First published in 2003 and now re-issued to mark Rupert’s 90th anniversary, the book is a reminder that Bestall was an artist of considerable finesse who exhibited at the Royal Academy, although he is mostly recognised as the illustrator of the famous children’s comic-strip character.

Bestall didn’t create Rupert, who was the inspiration of Mary Tourtel, at the time a well-known illustrator of juvenile subjects. That was in 1920 when the Daily Express introduced The Adventures of the Little Lost Bear, told in verse (later written by Hilda Coe) and in 1935 taken over by Bestall on Tourtel’s retirement.

Rupert was — and remains — a creature of the print medium, invented as competition to a comic-strip in the rival Daily Mail, changed from black to white to save on ink, and having succeeded in all that was asked of him is now drawn by Stuart Trotter, who also writes the text.

At 90, Rupert doesn’t look his age; he is older than Pooh Bear (who was born in 1926) and Paddington Bear (1958).

Readers in Ireland familiar with Rupert are usually those who were given the Rupert Annual at Christmas-time. Although the rhyming couplets were on the doggerel side of basic (Bestall decided against even attempting to provide them) they conveyed stories of homely and sometimes threatening excitement. The domestic detail which carried so much conviction was totally due to Bestall’s accurate eye; as the diary entries in this book reveal he could not help but record what he saw, from curtains to fences and fields. It was these features which made the end-papers of the annuals so fascinating: lightly coloured and beautifully drawn they must be among some of his best water-colours, not all of which are of the romantic and fairy-dotted kind he also produced.

A devout Methodist, Bestall was a gifted graphic artist; as reproduced here his portrait sketches reveal flair, sympathy and insight, and his work for Punch — the reader might wish for more of these crisp cartoons — and other magazines show a delicacy of touch belying the sentimentality of some of his subjects.

Author Caroline Bott was Bestall’s god-daughter and inherited his cottage in Wales with its attic store of letters, diaries and sketch-books, from which she has assembled these chapters along with a short biographical section.

The letters tell of Bestall’s army service in France while the diaries record many pre-war days of walking in the Welsh mountains and in 1924 many days of sight-seeing in Egypt and the Middle East. These are presented extensively but prosaically — “got a very decent tea at the Hotel Galilee” — and without mediation such as maps or even Bott’s own commentary.

From the sketch-enriched pages a few items stand out: the consoling fact that the tomb paintings of Queen Nefertari show her playing draughts (a game in which Bestall occasionally indulged) and the note from Nazareth that Mary’s Well “is now equipped with taps”.

Although unfailingly noting both the passing countryside and his daily meals Bestall is rarely inspired to any stronger comment than “very interesting” or “a moving scene”; not even the colossi at Thebes and the broken ruins of the statue of Ramases II strike a memory of Shelley’s Ozymandias. He seems to have had no sense of the dramatic, and was wise not to attempt the story-lines for Rupert Bear.