Teddy

 April 13 Word of the Day: Teddy

 

The teddy bear was first produced in 1903, but the New Yorker who made the toys only started the Ideal Toy Co. in 1907, while Steiff of Germany had reportedly already been manufacturing them. This is all happening around 1906, the year of John Betjeman’s birth. Indeed, the teddy bear and Betjeman grow up together. They are peers. When, late in the poet laureate’s life, he was called ‘teddy bear to the nation’ the phrase had more Freudian meaning than the speaker could have been aware of.

 Is it an insult or term of praise? What is it? The English liked to believe the teddy bear was named after the King, though Americans are in no doubt it was named after the President. Evelyn Waugh gives Sebastian a teddy bear in ‘Brideshead Revisited’ to indicate that his character clings to childhood and doesn’t want to know about the adult world; Sebastian becomes an alcoholic and disappears half way through the novel. This was a clever ploy by Waugh, who had led his readers to think the book was all about Sebastian, when it was about Charles Ryder’s relations with the whole family and the attendant Roman Catholicism of its heritage. We are in no doubt too that Waugh got the teddy bear idea from observing the behaviour of Betjeman at Oxford in the 1920s, though Betjeman of course is not Sebastian in any way, shape or form. Aloysius is one of the few comforts and securities in a confusing world

 The teddy bear itself is a 20th century cultural artefact that was given supreme value by the great admirer of English cultural artefacts. Betjeman also wrote a story, one where the teddy bear is the main character. In contrast to the very Catholic Aloysius, Waugh’s name for Sebastian’s teddy, Betjeman’s teddy is called Archibald Ormsby-Gore. Archie, for short. (pictured) He had a lifelong friend, an elephant called Jumbo, who appears also in ‘Archie and the Strict Baptists’. Archie would go to chapel and listen to sermons that went for hours. Betjeman shared with Waugh a fascination with the peculiarities of English religion, though Betjeman would be called thoroughly Anglican, though not of the severe Calvinist kind, and certainly not a Strict Baptist. He has a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Noticeably, Archie in the story is someone whose differences the author both celebrates and tolerates. Through all the vicissitudes of life, Archie the actual teddy was there (and Jumbo) to the end, being in the poet’s arms when he died in 1984.