Novelist Charlotte Cory longed to know more about the maker of her 40-year-old ‘washable’ teddy bear. She uncovered a poignant story.
I HAVE never forgotten my first sight of him, through the Cellophane lid of
a large cardboard box. Cellophane was new, Harold Macmillan had just told us
we had never had it so good and there I was on my first birthday, September
23 1957, face to face with a bright yellow teddy bear as big as myself, with
a huge sky-blue bow at his chin and an inexorable grin stitched across his face.
For
years, he went everywhere with me, dragged around unceremoniously by the blue
ribbon about his neck. I thumped him when I got into scrapes and hugged him
to me tight all night. It was the deepest attachment of my life and I loved
him to pieces – literally.
Edward Bear did not stand up well to wear and tear. He was not a traditional teddy bear like the one my older sister possessed, made of hard-wearing mohair, stiffly stuffed, with jointed limbs and a mechanised growl. Edward was modern, one of the new breed of washable, nylon plush, 100 per cent “Playsafe” toys with unbreakable plastic eyes and polyurethane foam-rubber filling, manufactured by Wendy Boston Ltd.
It was the age of Dr Spock. For the first time in history, it occurred to manufacturers to make toys for children to play with. No matter how much jam a child might throw at a bear, the Wendy Boston company’s publicity declared, it could be shoved in the washing machine, put through a mangle and always come out right as rain. Except that Edward didn’t.
It was clear to my doting infant eyes that every time he emerged from his ablutions, he wasn’t quite the same. His unbreakable plastic eyes did not break, but they gradually lost their sheen. His fluffy bright yellow nylon fur compacted and seemed a little less bright, a little less yellow, each time.
“But he’s a Wendy Boston bear!” my mother would cry, sweeping aside my protests as she pegged him up by his ears on the washing line. To her, he was part of the new world order that was to liberate us all: the space race, sliced bread, Sellotape and drip-dry Bri-nylon sheets that did not need ironing but gave out electrostatic sparks every time you turned over.
Eventually, even my mother had to concede that Edward Bear was in a bad way. She knitted him some clothes (from a pattern we tore out of a Woman’s Realm while waiting in the clinic for my baby sister to be weighed), but the smart green acrylic suit could not hide all the patching. His rubber innards went liquid and peculiar and, in the end, I had no choice but to lay my friend to rest.
When my sister went off to college, her handsome bear went with her to sit on her bed – rather like John Betjeman’s Archibald or Sebastian Flyte’s Aloysius in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. When I left home, Edward stayed hidden in a drawer, to be returned to me years later in a plastic bag when my parents cleared out their house.
We none of us expect to grow old – and when I reached 40 last year I realised that Edward Bear was also getting on a bit. This set me wondering about Wendy Boston. Who was the woman behind the name I associate with all that was brightest and yet, ultimately, most disappointing in my young life? A quick glimpse in a teddy-bear encyclopaedia told me that Wendy Boston Playsafe Toys was founded in 1945 in South Wales by Ken and Wendy Williams (née Boston). Based in Crickhowell and nearby Abergavenny, the company accounted at one time for more than a quarter of all the UK’s soft-toy exports. It was eventually bought out, and closed down in 1976.
WHEN I contacted the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood in London, the teddy-bear expert Catherine Howell knew a lot about the toys they made (having owned a Wendy Boston squirrel herself as a child), but nothing more about the people. “If you find out anything, let us know,” she said. I left my name and telephone number, joking that, the way things go, Wendy Boston herself might stagger into the museum tomorrow with the factory records under her arm.
Neither the encyclopaedia nor Companies House provided any current addresses and, as Williams is rather a common surname in Welsh telephone directories, I did not feel I could start ringing round, asking for Ken and Wendy.
When I telephoned the obituaries section of The Daily Telegraph, however, I was delighted to discover that Wendy Williams, née Boston, had never had an obituary. As she was once a household name, I assumed this meant she must still be a live. I pictured her living in a whitewashed cottage halfway up a Welsh mountain and resolved to take Edward Bear to meet his maker, if for no other reason than that she might put an expert stitch, or two, back into his inexorable grin.
An advertisement in Bearings, the journal of the British Teddy Bear Association, produced nothing but a few telephone calls from other owners of Wendy Boston bears who were also curious to know more about the woman behind the name. An announcement in the Telegraph on April 5 this year produced a resounding silence that lasted a whole tantalising week.
In my impatience I contacted Dean’s, another South Wales toy company. The managing director told me he was pretty certain both Ken and Wendy had died a long time back. “Dean’s was making washable bears long before Wendy Boston came along,” he said. “And as for all their emphasis on safety – that was a marketing ruse. Dean’s was just as concerned but didn’t make such a song and dance about it.”
To add to my disillusionment, he put me in touch with a former sales director who used to meet Ken Williams regularly at trade fairs. This gentleman confirmed that the couple were long gone. They had fallen on hard times and sold the company for little more than its debts. Wendy died first, then her husband went off to run a pub. “We always enjoyed a drink together,” he reminisced, the first of many people to tell me how much Ken Williams liked his gin. When he mentioned the pride Wendy Boston’s took in its displays at the toy fairs, I described the box with the cellophane lid in which I had first seen Edward. I had never voiced this early memory before and he confirmed its accuracy in every detail. “Those boxes were Ken’s invention,” he said. “It was all down to Ken. Wendy didn’t have anything to do with the business – they just used her name.
I might have given up at that point had I not received a letter from a Telegraph reader in Abergavenny whose late husband had been a Customs and Excise Officer who had had dealings with Wendy Boston. She suggested I contact Abergavenny library. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier, I wondered.
“Actually,” the librarian who answered the telephone confided, “I’d never heard of Wendy Boston until last week when someone brought four enormous scrapbooks in. They looked like the factory records. Lots of press cuttings and photographs of toys, many stuck down with decomposing Sellotape …” I was on the M6, hurtling towards Abergavenny, before the librarian could put down the phone.
It turned out that after Wendy died in 1972, her husband had indeed moved away but before he went, he handed her meticulously kept scrapbooks to a neighbour. When, in turn, she died, her children asked the people who now live in the Williams’s bungalow to find a suitable home for them. Thus, despite the quarter of a century since Wendy Boston died, the books ended up in Abergavenny library within days of my advertisement appearing in the paper.
If I had searched at any time in the past, I would probably have drawn a blank. As it was, I suddenly had everything I could possibly want to know at my fingertips. It was as if Wendy Boston herself had known I would come along and had carefully preserved everything.
THE quickest glance at the scrapbooks confounded the allegation she had simply been a figurehead. In fact, the reverse was so apparent I felt furious on her behalf. The sheer scale of the firm’s output was breathtaking. Apart from teddy bears there were dogs of every description, dolls, cats, golliwogs, rabbits. Wendy Williams had designed every one. Toys that had travelled in their millions all over the world, bringing much-needed employment (particularly for women) to an industrial black spot and foreign currency into the country in those austere post-war years. As I turned the pages it felt more and more extraordinary that so much enterprise and innovation were now all but forgotten.
Crickhowell and Abergavenny are small friendly places. Word spread. Soon the Abergavenny Chronicle was publishing a piece about my search for Wendy Boston, HTV in Cardiff began covering the story and my telephone didn’t stop ringing all summer long.
No one at the library, the Castle Museum or the Chronicle had – by their own admission – heard of the firm so they were astonished to discover that hardly anyone in the vicinity did not have someone in their family who worked at one time or other for Wendy Boston’s. People were delighted an interest was being taken at last – “before it’s too late,” as one 87-year old said to me.
Ken and Wendy Williams arrived in Crickhowell from Birmingham during the Second World War. He had been a journalist; she had gone to art college and worked briefly as a designer for Cadbury’s. When Ken was invalided out of the RAF, Wendy started making soft toys as presents for nephews and nieces.
Her husband was so impressed that when he recovered he took a batch to Cardiff, sold the lot for £100 and the company began. Starting in a lock-up shop in Crickhowell, it soon ranged across several sites in the town before a proper factory was opened in Abergavenny.
It was an extraordinarily successful partnership. While she was clearly using all the newest fabrics and materials with great flair, he took a very modern approach top public relations. Ken never missed an opportunity to get the company’s name in the paper. If the Queen came to Cardiff, he made sure she took a Wendy Boston toy home for Princess Anne.
“Do it again, Ken!” was the cry at toy fairs as people queued up to see him putting a bear through a mangle. He dreamt up all kinds of incentive schemes to increase productivity among his workers – bestowing lavish treats (trips to see Harry Secombe, Max Factor make-up sessions) on the lucky few.
In the mid-Sixties, though, the company over-expanded, at a time when cheap foreign imports were flooding the market. Wendy’s health was failing, and managers, trained as accountants, increasingly cut corners. The quality of the products slipped and staff who had been with the company since its inception lost heart and left. One can only imagine the Williams’s relief and sorrow when they sold out and covered their debts.
A childless couple famous for their toys: he drank heavily; she chain-smoked. “You’ll find no one with a word to say against her,” I was told early on. This was true. It was harder to find anyone who liked him.
Work at the factory was monotonous, the pay basic, and screwing in those unbreakable eyes hour after hour was no joke. And yet, perhaps it was because it was toys that were being made and the industrial processes were all faintly ludicrous, people spoke of the work with a giggle.
Wendy Boston herself obviously inspired great affection. Shy, modest, with a wry sense of humour, she lived for her work and her dogs. “I can see her now,” a neighbour said fondly, “coming up that hill in her blue Morris Traveller, a woolly hat on her head and her two apricot poodles, Ivy and Harvey, bouncing around in the back.”
One afternoon at the end of June, following a tip-off, Edward and I made our way to Llangenny churchyard, halfway up a hill between Crickhowell and Abergavenny. The sun shone, a brook babbled, a blackbird sang and there, below a whitewashed cottage, stood her lichen-covered tombstone, Nora Wendy Williams, née Boston Jan 1909 – Sept 1972. It was a lovely place to find her.
In September Edward celebrated his 40th birthday in Abergavenny library surrounded by everyone who spoke to me while I was writing this piece. There were people there who had not seen in each other in decades. Mrs Stella Davies who, as a 19-year old Stella Huxley was photographed 50 years ago being instructed by Wendy Boston and then, as Mrs Stella Stockham, managed the factory for 18 years, sat at a treadle machine making bears. She offered to mend Edward. A couple of stitches in his nose? I shook my head. I felt ungrateful – but I had suddenly realised how much I like him as he is.
The Mayor of Abergavenny made a speech and cut the cake (shaped like a mangle) and, as we all sang Happy Birthday, there was a feeling that though Wendy Boston never got the obituary she deserved, she would have enjoyed this celebration far more.
As a result of this article, an exhibition of Wendy Boston
toys was held at Abergavenny
Castle Museum. A limited edition replica bear (made by ex-Wendy Boston staff)
and a book about the company were sold in Wendy Boston’s memory to benefit
children in the Crickhowell and Abergavenny area. Proceeds from this article
started the fund.
WEEKEND TELEGRAPH
SATURDAY DECEMBER 6 1997