Before Paddington Bear there was Mary Plain

If the Paddington phenomenon has Gone A Bit Far, as Lord Bonkers would put it, is there an alternative bear whose adventures we can enjoy?

There is. A post on Scones and Chaises Longues has reminded me that I enjoyed the Mary Plain books when I was very young:

Readers of a certain age (mine) may remember Gwynedd Rae's Mary Plain books. I have fond memories of sitting on one of the little wooden chairs in the children's section of Bromley Public Library, working my way through the adventures of the bear cub from Berne while my mother chose her novels from the grown ups' shelves.

The series was old before I first encountered it (I don't quite date from 1937...although the last Mary P book was not published until 1965), and I did wonder how it would read now, all these decades later. I needn't have worried; I enjoyed Mary Plain on Holiday just as much, in fact probably more, than I had before, because now I could also appreciate Rae's skill in creating stories that entertained children whilst also amusing their long suffering parents; their dry wit that would have flown straight over my six year old head.

Mary Plain is a small bear from the Bear Pits at Berne. And no, as a 6 year old I had no idea what Bear Pits were, nor indeed that Berne was even a place; no matter. Mary is an orphan who has grown up with her grandparents, her small cousins Little Wool and Marionette, and a large extended family. How she came to be living with her friend the Owl Man (he wears horn-rimmed spectacles) in his smart London flat is explained in the first book, Mostly Mary (though there is a diagram of Mary's family tree at the beginning of Mary Plain on Holiday.)

Mary is extremely full of herself, very inquisitive and always getting into trouble.

I assumed the book was Swiss, because Mary Plain came from Berne, and even now I remember her egotism, which was that of a small child.

An unworthy part of me wonders if Michael Bond read these books too.

Paddington Bear: Slapstick, boosting Jeremy Clarkson's career and becoming our grim reaper

Paddington Bear is a couple of years older than me, so I had one of the books about him when I was a little boy. 

I quite liked the Paddington stories and certainly liked his friendship with Mr Gruber, who treated what was essentially a furry child as though he were an equal. Children really appreciate characters like that.

But you didn't have to grow that old before you started to find all the slapstick a bit babyish. And then there was the weak characterisation. The son of the Brown household was called Jonathan, and he added little to the action beyond saying "Crikey!" now and then. I was bound to notice that.

But the television and film adaptations have made the meh bear a huge cultural figure. Not only has he become the 21st century's grim reaper, conducting the dead to the underworld- more of that in a moment - he was also partly responsible for Jeremy Clarkson's television career.

Here's part of a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

Clarkson and the BBC go back a long way. All the way back to 1973, when as a 13-year-old, be played Atkinson in BBC Radio 4 serialisations of the Jennings books.

Then he went to public school, his fees paid from his mother's business making Paddington Bear toys. And the BBC was Paddington-friendly even before the animations with Michael Hordern's voice, because Michael Bond was a cameraman with them. So you got exclusive Paddington stories in your Blue Peter annual.

And, then, of course, the BBC's Top Gear made Clarkson a millionaire. A little gratitude wouldn't come amiss.

Personally, I'd have taken Paddington's marmalade sandwiches off him for that.

And his new role as our angel of death? Here's the abstract for Jennifer Riley and Matthew Hilborn's paper (Br)Exit pursued by a bear: Paddington's polysemic political power as the `new Grim Reaper':

Though hailing from distant “darkest Peru”, Paddington Bear has become a bastion of British identity. His critically-acclaimed films (2014, 2017, 2024), starring icons of British cinema, trade on nostalgic national tropes. This symbolic imbrication peaked in 2022, starring alongside Queen Elizabeth II in her Platinum Jubilee celebrations – and later becoming a symbol of collective mourning, materially and digitally, after her death. Paddington – endangered and repeatedly imperilled onscreen – thus became the Establishment’s new mor(t)al totem, what Douglas Davies would call a ‘paradigmatic’ figure ‘good to think’ in life, and in death. 

His incongruously cuddly ‘Grim Reaper’ became a globally recognisable meme. Yet, since symbols are malleable, and film-based memes subversive and satirical, Paddington has proved a provocative meme(nto mori). Analysing social media posts (X, Instagram) and the films, this article explores Paddington Bear the Grim Reaper as politically polysemic. 

If, following Robert Hertz, society grieves those ‘in whom it incarnates itself, and with whom it identifies itself’, Paddington’s mortal multivocality forces a reckoning. Whose lives – and deaths – are grievable? And which version of Britishness should Paddington embody: the polite, Establishment-aligned “Good Immigrant”, or the racialised, once-incarcerated refugee?

 I thought such wordp(l)ay had gone out of fashion in academia in the early Nineties: I do hope it's not making a comeback. Anyway, if you really want to, you can read the whole article online.

And if you didn't believe me about Jeremy Clarkson being in Jennings, here's a cutting to put your doubts to rest.