IT’S been a long time since Teddy Bears first went down to the woods for a picnic, more than a century in fact, so we’ve opened up our Teddy Bear Nostalgia file for a few photographs.

Although probably the main interest here will be in what the little cherubs who were pictured with them all those years ago are doing now. They will certainly have grown up even if the bears have not.

The Teddy Bear legend does indeed begin in a wood, but not in the peaceful setting of a picnic, but at a competitive bear shoot in 1902. One of those taking part in the event in Mississippi was American president Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, whose entourage was so keen to see their boss do well, they caught a black bear and tied it to a tree for him to shoot.

To his credit a disgusted Roosevelt refused to shoot the injured animal – although it was later shot by someone else on his orders to put it out of its misery– and a newspaper cartoonist produced a drawing of the president’s compassionate gesture, in which the bear had shrunk from being an adult to being smaller and cuddlier.

Toy maker Morris Michtom saw the cartoon and decided to produce a tiny soft bear cub, for which he gained the president’s permission to market as Teddy’s Bear or as it became, a Teddy Bear.

Coincidentally, at virtually the same time the German firm Steiff began producing small soft toy bears and when a buyer for an American firm saw them at the Leipzig Toy Fair in March 1903 he ordered 3,000 to be sent to America. So the Teddy Bear was born and it has been a favourite children’s toy ever since.

Story-time books about Teddy Bears began to appear and in 1907 composer John Walter Bratton wrote an instrumental The Teddy Bears’ Picnic, described as a “characteristic two-step”, which later had words written to it by lyricist Jimmy Kennedy in 1932.

Early Teddy Bears were made to look like real bears, with extended snouts and beady eyes, but modern Teddy Bears tend to have larger eyes and foreheads and smaller noses, baby-like features which enhance the toy’s cuteness. In fact the toy’s appeal crosses the age ranges, because most the keenest Teddy Bear collectors are adults, who may have started off as children with one bear but now own roomfuls, if not housefuls.

In May 1997, this paper featured an article on Jenny Garnett of Malvern, who painstakingly and lovingly made Teddy Bears on her kitchen table. It was the era in which the internet was getting into full swing and for the first time the Midland Teddy Bear Festival at Telford had its own website. Jenny took along a carful of her bears to join the crowds of many thousand.

Now that was some picnic.

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