Bear facts

There are two stories as to how the teddy bear was created, which both occurred in 1902, but there is no documentary evidence to prove that either is true. The only proven fact in either tale is that on 18 November 1902 the Washington Evening Star carried a cartoon by Clifford Berryman showing the president of the United States, Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt, refusing to shoot a captive bear cub that had been cornered for him during his favourite sport of bear-hunting.

Struck by Berryman's cute, cuddly image of the little bear, Russian immigrant Morris Michtom displayed the cartoon in his New York shop window alongside a brown, plush bear, hand-sewn by his wife, to replicate the cub, which he labelled 'Teddy's Bear'. A letter seeking permission to do so elicited the president's reply: 'I don't think my name is worth much to the toy bear cub business, but you are welcome to use it.'

By 1903 the Michtom 'Teddy's Bear' was so popular that the wholesale firm of Butler Brothers agreed to purchase the shop's entire stock, thereby guaranteeing Michtom's credit with plush suppliers.

Germany credits the creation of the teddy bear to the Steiff Company, founded by seamstress Margarete Steiff in 1880, which by 1902 was manufacturing a whole range of soft animal toys. The founder's nephew Richard Steiff designed a plush bear in that year based on sketches of bears drawn during visits to Stuttgart Zoo. At the Leipzig Trade Fair in March 1903, New York wholesalers George Borgfeldt and Co ordered 3,000 of Richard's bears and by the following year, Margarete and Richard had sold 12,000 in the US.

The Steiff claim to presidential authority for the title of 'teddy' bear is that when President Roosevelt was asked by Richard Steiff why bears were used as table decorations at his daughter Alice's wedding, he allegedly said they were 'a new species called Teddy bears'. However, both the Roosevelt Association and the president's son Archibald denied the use of Steiff products at the event.

Runaway success

Demand for the bears continued to soar during Roosevelt's second term of office from 1905 to 1909. The craze spread to Britain in 1908, prompted by the country having its own popular 'King Teddy', Edward VII.

With the restriction on the importation of German teddy bears during the First World War various British manufacturers seized on the opportunity to take up production. By the middle of the 1920s Britain had a flourishing teddy bear manufacturing industry.

It was inevitable that teddy bears would assume their own fictional status.

The most famous teddy bear in fiction was bought in 1920 by Dorothy Milne as a present for her son Christopher Robin's first birthday. Initially christened 'Edward' by the family, it was later changed by its owner to a combination of the name of 'Winnie', his favourite bear at London Zoo, and that of a swan he called 'Pooh' which he used to feed on a lake near his home. As 'Winnie-the-Pooh' the bear first appeared in print when Christopher's father, Alan Alexander Milne, published When We Were Very Young in 1924.

At a dinner in the mid-1960s, one guest confided in British actor Peter Bull that she had never forgotten how her teddy bear was decapitated by a customs officer as she was travelling across Europe. 'At the time,' Peter Bull wrote, 'my main feeling was one of astonishment that I was not the only person in the world with a teddy bear secret! Mine was that my mother had disposed of my beloved friend one term-time to a local jumble sale.'

Teddies to war

Telling the story later on American TV, he received more than 2,000 letters containing teddy bear stories which resulted in his book Bear With Me in 1969. It stimulated a wide interest in teddy bears, especially for those who had carried their teddies into adult life such as Royal Air Force personnel who took their favourites with them on bombing raids during the Second World War and American soldiers who took them to Vietnam.

It is estimated that over 60 per cent of British households have a teddy bear in residence and that something like 140 million share homes in the United States. November marks the centenary of the teddy bear - perhaps the best-loved toy of all time.

Unfortunately, the letter, supposedly kept by the Michtom family, could not be found among the effects of Morris's eldest son Joseph when he died in 1951.