Imagine you are an anthropologist, tasked with visiting Britain and investigating its culture. Almost immediately, you would find him: on the sides of trains and on the back of coins, on jars of preserves and in books of stamps. There are statues of him in Birmingham and Cardiff, not to mention those in Edinburgh, Liverpool, York, Chester, Reading, Sunderland, Manchester and Penrith.
He is not the king of England, but you would be forgiven for making that mistake. After all, he has been to Buckingham Palace and had tea with Queen Elizabeth II. He once had his own exhibition at the British Library and currently has his own bus tour. He is Paddington Bear – and who’s to say that he doesn’t rule over us all?
Paddington originally came from Darkest Peru, but it’s almost impossible to list all the different places you can find him today. The UN officially recognises 193 member states and two non-member observer states globally, while the CIA website records 261: either way, Paddington’s most recent animated television series, The Adventures of Paddington, is available in 232. The accident-prone, marmalade-loving bear has starred in 29 books and three blockbuster live-action films. Since 2018, he has had his own “town” dedicated to him in the Sagamiko theme park in Japan, and “The Paddington Bear Experience”, which opened in London this May, has generated £4.5m in ticket sales. To date, more than 27 million Paddington teddy bears have been sold worldwide.
The bear’s latest movie, Paddington in Peru, revolves around a quest for gold. The one hour and 46 minute run time could have been cut considerably if someone offered Paddington a mirror.
Paddington Bear began life in the shops. On Christmas Eve 1956, a Berkshire-born, 30-year-old BBC cameraman named Michael Bond saw a small teddy sitting alone on a shelf at Selfridges, looking “rather sorry for himself”. Bond bought the bear for his wife and, months later, started writing a story about it “in order to get my brain working that morning”. Paddington was so named because Bond lived near the station; the iconic brown label around his neck (“Please look after this bear. Thank you”) was inspired by news footage of evacuees Bond had seen during the war. “Paddington’s old hat and his duffle coat were simply replicas of what I happened to be wearing at the time,” Bond wrote in a 1996 autobiography, Bears & Forebears: A Life So Far.
“Mr and Mrs Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform,” Bond’s first book in the series, A Bear Called Paddington, began. Following the now-familiar story of an immigrant bear adopted by a British family, it was released in October 1958 and was an instant success. The chaotic but permanently polite character captured hearts, with the New York Times declaring: “Paddington is certainly the funniest and most charming bear to appear in a book in a long time.”
Sequels followed thick and fast, like marmalade spread on sandwich bread. Paddington’s escapades were brought to life by artist Peggy Fortnum’s pen and ink illustrations as much as Bond’s words. “I don’t like whimsy or sentiment,” she once wrote. “This bear had character. I felt a real rapport with this brainless innocent who always came out on top.”
Paddington really did come out on top – once, the police had to be called after crowds flooded a Glasgow book signing offering free marmalade sandwiches. Still, merchandising didn’t begin in earnest until ten or so books later. In January 1976, the BBC began airing a new stop-motion series, Paddington. Because the BBC only paid around a fifth of the show’s £60,000 budget, it was a risky endeavour for producer Graham Clutterbuck, who – according to Bond – needed “to bridge the financial gap as quickly as possible by the sale of merchandise”.
The timing was fortuitous – children’s TV merchandising had just been transformed by the success of The Wombles, which sold £17m worth of goods in 1975 (Clutterbuck also produced that series). Bond was inundated with requests but, keen to avoid “any kind of excess”, he “turned down Paddington toilet rolls, not to mention a fur-covered wastepaper bin with a removable head”. Still, by October 1976, Paddington had been declared one of “the richest animals in the business” by the Sunday Times – two years later, that same paper advertised a £3.99 sterling silver Paddington necklace (“delight yourself or someone else”). Soon you could buy Paddington soaps, duvet covers, clocks, china, stationery sets, mirrors, jigsaws, candles, aprons…
Perhaps the most popular piece of merchandise, however, was the bear himself. In 1971, a tea-cosy designer named Shirley Clarkson created a toy Paddington as a Christmas present for her children Joanna and Jeremy (yes, that Jeremy Clarkson). Clarkson’s bears wore wellies (unlike the character himself) to enable them to stand up. In 1972, she was granted the very first Paddington licence and soon had a “phenomenal pile of orders”. The reason for this success – she speculated in her 2008 autobiography, Bearly Believable: My Part in the Paddington Bear Story – was due to the “helpless appeal of the little bear lost, who was just begging to be picked up, and loved”. By 1980, the Washington Post listed Paddington as one of the “in” people of the year, after everyone from Twiggy to Margaret Thatcher was pictured holding him. (Thatcher’s bear was a knock-off.)
All of this is nothing compared to today. The French production company StudioCanal released Paddington’s first film in 2014; two years later, it acquired the intellectual property rights before taking full ownership of the character in 2022. Today, the biggest bear in business boasts more than 100 licensees globally, partnering with everyone from Barbour to Mastercard. This summer, you could have bought his limited-edition £124 cologne from Jo Malone. When Asda’s George clothing line released Paddington pyjamas for adult women in the autumn, 40 per cent of the stock sold in a week. Next year, he will star in his own stage musical, while a new family attraction is set to open in Hong Kong.
Paddington currently has not one but two stores dedicated to him inside the station he was named after – the first is permanent and the second, themed around Paddington in Peru, opened in October and will operate until March. (Consider the ever-crowded Harry Potter shop at King’s Cross and it’s a wonder that an enterprising children’s author hasn’t already set their next book in Liverpool Street.)
When the pop-up shop opened its doors on 29 October, children and the childless alike formed a queue. “They’re very expensive! Twenty-five quid!” I heard a mother bemoan of a pint-size Paddington teddy – but she bought it anyway. As she was paying, her daughter sweetly asked: “What about the bookmarks?” (Those go for £6.99.) Also available: £17.99 mugs, £23.99 water bottles, £16.99 notebooks and £4.99 lanyards.
“It’s very much not a children’s brand; it’s much, much broader than that,” says Harriet Hastings, founder of the biscuit company Biscuiteers, which sells various Paddington iced biscuits for “50th birthdays and first birthdays” alike. David Hutchinson, founder of the Path Entertainment Group, agrees. This summer, Hutchinson launched the Paddington Bear Experience, an immersive event in which audience members can walk through the bear’s home, interact with actors and play toddler-friendly games. He is now looking into selling “adult-focused” evening tickets.
Tourists love Paddington – Biscuiteers displays his biscuits next to London- and royal-family-themed ones because “it very much fits into that category”. Paddington “met” the Queen three months before her death in a televised sketch commemorating her Platinum Jubilee – as a result, more than 1,000 teddies were left by mourners at royal palaces.
“It’s a very British brand: it stands for good ethos, the good qualities of British society,” Hutchinson says. As such, “It’s chiming with international audiences… You go to Buckingham Palace, you see Big Ben, you go to see the bear.” Paddington’s 66-year history means nostalgia is potent – as Hastings puts it, “It’s the emotional ties and triggers that these extraordinary brands have that make them so powerful.”
I see all of this in action on one Saturday afternoon in York. Entirely by accident, a group of friends and I walk past one of the 23 permanent Paddington statues that have been erected by StudioCanal to promote the newest film. Around 15 people are queuing to get their photograph with the bear – quite a few are elderly couples without any children. But as we discuss the Paddington phenomenon, a friend’s boyfriend remarks: “Didn’t they used to be, like, books?”
Biscuits, mugs, lanyards: has the padding of Paddington had any effect on book sales? Mercifully, yes. Since Nielsen BookScan records began in 1998, Paddington stories have netted over £19.6m, the majority of which (£13.5m) has been earned since the first film. While some of these sales are new film tie-in picture books, Bond’s own stories have made £2.3m in the past 12 months – his best year ever. Paddington is even catching up with Winnie-the-Pooh, a bear 32 years his senior. Since records began, Pooh books have sold £30m – but this year, Paddington sold three times as much as Pooh.
Why exactly is Paddington the bear of the moment? We also have nostalgic and emotional ties to British-born Pooh – he also met the Queen (in a 2016 book) and starred in his own shiny live-action film two years later. But while he doesn’t struggle for merchandising opportunities (you can buy an official Disney Winnie-the-Pooh toilet-paper holder), Pooh doesn’t have the same cultural dominance.
The simple answer offered by those in the Paddington business is that Paddington represents something else – but what, exactly? He can be seen both on protest signs reading “Refugees Welcome” and in popular royalist memes (in one viral illustration, he appears to be leading the late Queen into the afterlife). He is an optical illusion that looks different depending on the angle you view him from. As the cultural critic Henry Wong noted in Esquire: “Paddington is, now more than ever, a four-quadrant bear: cute to the young, comforting to the old, poster boy for immigration, pals with royalty.”
But Paddington’s non-partisan appeal isn’t the only explanation for his merchandising success – it also comes down to logistics. From 2007 to 2012, Melanie Humberstone-Garley was the UK territory manager for the now-defunct media multinational Chorion, whose properties included Noddy, Paddington, Mr Men and Peter Rabbit. “It was a much stricter process for Beatrix Potter,” Humberstone-Garley says, “whereas it was a little bit easier with Paddington to get things approved.”
Beatrix Potter was famously protective of her work – according to her biographer Matthew Dennison, Potter “decided to design dolls based on her characters, so that no one else could get it wrong”. A “beady” and “tough” perfectionist, Potter even turned Disney down when the company offered to make an animated film of Peter Rabbit in 1936 (she feared that enlarging her drawings would reveal their imperfections).
Of course, Paddington’s story has also aged better than Peter’s – in 2006, the Guardian called the world of Beatrix Potter “dark”, “sadistic” and “bloodthirsty” – which makes the bear more attractive than the rabbit to licensees. “Beatrix Potter was much more of a very classic, staid brand… whereas Paddington was all about fun and sharing and family,” says Humberstone-Garley, who now works as senior licensing manager at the National Gallery. And the less said about “poor old Noddy”, she laughs, the better.
Potter’s principles outlived her, but they couldn’t last forever – eventually, Peter Rabbit was updated for modern audiences when he twerked in a 2018 film. But ultimately no one liked it; the movie received a low approval rating on the film site Rotten Tomatoes at just 64 per cent. That same year, Pooh’s first live-action movie, Christopher Robin, scored 73 per cent. You can’t separate Paddington’s merchandising success from the fact his first and second movies – which feature both deeply emotional, tear-jerking performances and Hugh Grant dressed as a nun – are that good. Paddington 2 once scored a perfect 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, surpassing Citizen Kane.
At their heart, Paddington stories are about love. The Browns are always there for the bear, who in turn is prepared to offer “hard stares” to anyone he believes is behaving poorly. Unfortunately, things are not always quite as harmonious behind the scenes.
When Michael Bond began working with Graham Clutterbuck, producer of the 1976 Paddington series, he felt no need for complicated paperwork. “We parted on a warm handshake,” he wrote of their first meeting (Clutterbuck was later best man at Bond’s second wedding). “Although from time to time there would be situations when others felt it necessary to involve lawyers, with their 40- and 50-page contracts covering every possible eventuality, including references to future developments yet to be invented,” Bond wrote, that handshake “was all we ever needed”.
Alas, it was not so. Clutterbuck died in 1988 and Bond continued to pay Clutterbuck’s company, Pixdene, until his own death in 2017. The two men seemingly agreed that Pixdene was entitled to 10 per cent of all future Paddington merchandise royalties – this was formalised in a 2013 distribution agreement. But in 2022, Clutterbuck’s son Michael took Paddington and Co Ltd to court, believing his royalty payments did not reflect Paddington’s growing success. The case is ongoing.
“Michael Clutterbuck is an elderly and vulnerable gentleman suffering from autism… Michael is upset that the role his late father played in launching Paddington Bear is not being respected,” says Stephen Sutton, Pixdene’s solicitor. In 2017, the worldwide Paddington merch market was allegedly worth £5m, but Michael Clutterbuck received an average of £30,000 a year between 2016 and 2022. In 2023, he received just over £54,000. “Paddington Bear may be loved by millions,” Sutton says, “but his owners are not quite as cuddly!” (StudioCanal declined to comment on the case.)
It’s impossible to know what Bond would make of all of this – and what he would think of Paddington’s ever-expanding empire. Though he was overall a fan of the first film, Bond told the Sunday Times that he disliked Paddington hijinks “that I don’t think would happen in the books” – in particular, he was alarmed by Paddington plunging his head into a toilet. Critic Peter Bradshaw felt it was a “shark-jumping move” to take Paddington to Peruin the latest film, and Bond might well have agreed. In 1996, he wrote that Paddington “quickly established his credentials as a solid citizen of west London. Apart from occasional excursions with his friend, Mr Gruber, or an outing with the Brown family, that is where he belongs.”
On merchandising, Bond wrote: “If ever I had feelings of doubt over a product, I used to ask myself what Paddington himself would think of it. If I thought he would give it a hard stare, that answered the question.” I wonder what expression Paddington would adopt when faced with his officially licensed non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?
Michael Bond sometimes had doubts even after agreeing to particular Paddington collaborations. On one factory visit, the author “came across a giant machine being fed raw tin-plate at one end and spewing out wastepaper bins adorned with Paddington’s likeness at the other”. He was alarmed. “Picturing a world flooded with them, I longed to press the stop button,” he wrote. No one, I think, could press the stop button now.
[See also: The best children’s books for Christmas 2024]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024