BIOGRAPHY: The Life and Works of Alfred Bestall, Illustrator of Rupert BearBy Caroline G Bott Bloomsbury, 338pp. £25
THERE'S AN ESOTERIC English society based in Sussex called the Followers of Rupert, but Rupert's unofficial followers are legion. From the moment the Little Lost Bear (not lost for long) embarked on the first of his adventures on a page of the Daily Expressin November 1920 he drew in an avid readership. Innumerable childhoods were enriched by Rupert.
Like William Brown and the heroes of Greyfriars School (but not like Winnie the Pooh) Rupert engenders a bracing, enchanting and stupendous atmosphere. This Nutwood atmosphere worked its magic from the start, but it took some time to arrive at its strongest expression.
As every aficionado knows, Rupert was the brainchild of Mary Tourtel (1874-1948), but credit for the bear's ineradicable appeal really belongs to a different illustrator. Alfred Bestall was invited by the Daily Expressto take over the Rupert picture strips in 1935, when the original artist had had enough (due to failing eyesight and flagging inspiration). And almost immediately a new liveliness and gusto became apparent. For the next 40-odd years Bestall devoted himself to Rupert and his escapades, and in his hands the Nutwood bear gained a top-notch position among the classic characters of juvenile literature.
Bestall's achievement has long been acknowledged. In 1985 George Perry, then senior editor of the Sunday Times, brought out a celebration, Rupert – A Bear's Life, in collaboration with Alfred Bestall (whose age at the time was 93).
This is basically a picture book, mostly in colour, but it contains all the available and relevant information about Rupert and his illustrator. We learn, for example, that Bestall, the child of Methodist missionaries, was born in Burma in 1892, and that he and his younger sister were sent back to England following a mysterious accident or incident that left them both with spinal injuries, one with a stammer and the other – the sister – mentally impaired.
No explanation of this disaster was ever forthcoming, and Caroline G Bott, in her book about Bestall, doesn’t get to the bottom of it either. In fact she even questions its authenticity.
Caroline G Bott is Bestall's god-daughter and the custodian of his artwork. The focus of her book, in so far as it has one, is Bestall's non-Rupert drawings: he was a gifted but not outstanding illustrator who contributed to many books and magazines, including Punch, Tatlerand a range of children's annuals. But The Life and Works of Alfred Bestallis billed as "The Rupert Bear 90th Anniversary Edition". "This anniversary edition marks Rupert's 90th birthday," says the author in her foreword – which is, however, dated 2003, while the book's publication date is given as 2011 (not 2010), which is no anniversary at all. We need the Wise Old Goat of Nutwood to sort out these publishing peculiarities.
We might also need him to tell us how to read the book. Is it a biography? A travel book? A “Selected Letters”? An appreciation? Hard to know. The author’s commentary is kept to a minimum, and in Part Two – which consists of Alfred Bestall’s holiday diaries from 1912, 1913 and 1924 (“A pleasant breakfast fortified us for the day”; “Mother being fatigued did not rise to breakfast”) – it’s abandoned altogether. (The ink and pencil sketches are pleasing, though.) And the bulk of Part One is taken up with copious quotations from Bestall’s letters (mostly to his mother).
What you get from all this is the sense of a self-effacing, likeable and thoroughly decent man. He lived through two World Wars and took part in both (as an air-raid warden in the second). For the most part, though, as he said himself, his life consisted of quiet and uneventful days, the last of them spent in a cottage in his revered north Wales. He never married.
When he died, in 1986, his funeral was attended by mourners wearing sombre clothes – offset, in some instances, by yellow Rupert scarves, incongruous and appropriate at the same time. Floral tributes in red and yellow took up the theme. For Bestall’s enduring legacy is Rupert, the epitome of a beloved fairy-tale-woodland-English village culture, small and secure and filled with wonders.
Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Her most recent book is a memoir, Asking for Trouble(Blackstaff 2007)
