HAMBURG: The Teddy Bear turns 100 this autumn even as toy collectors are turning elsewhere, according to alarming news from the German company which claims it delivered the very first jointed soft toy bears to toy shops in time for Christmas 1902.
Rival companies in Britain and the United States insist their bears were first off the mark. But the Steiff company in Germany claims it has the documented proof to back up their claims.
And with German thoroughness, the Steiff company files are full of sketches, photographs and diagrams of that first Teddy.
News had reached Germany of US President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt’s brush with a bear on a hunting trip. The story, perhaps rather exaggerated in the tabloid press, claimed that Teddy had gone bear hunting in an area devoid of bears.
So, someone tied a cub bear to a tree in hopes of pacifying the president. Instead, of course, Teddy was infuriated as such unsporting behaviour and called off the hunt.
Pundits and cartoonists had a field day with “Teddy Bear” stories and sketches, as did composers and entrepreneurs keen to seize a merchandising gimmick. Soon everything from tea cozies to ink blotters was emblazoned with Teddy and his Bear.
Toy manufacturers jumped on the idea too, and here is where the rival claims come in, with the Germans claimed they edged out the competition.
Back in Germany, toymaker Richard Steiff fished out his sketchbook containing drawings of a family of bears that he made at a zoo in Stuttgart. They provided the basis for a jointed toy bear.
Finished in the autumn of 1902, the result was the very first Teddy Bear — “Bear 55 PB” (55 for its size in cm, sitting, ‘P’ for Plush, ‘B’ for jointed (“beweglich” in German), whose arms and legs were secured to the body with strong thread in a fairly primitive manner.
The Teddy Bear’s breakthrough came at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1903, when an American buyer ordered 3,000 bears at the last minute.
For a century, through good times and bad, Teddy Bears consoled and comforted young and old alike and never went out of style.
In the Nostalgic ‘90s, as Baby Boomers entered middle age, Teddies became highly collectible. There had always been a few serious collectors. But in the 1990s Bearology became a science in itself.—dpa
