The local heritage museum celebrating the creation of Rupert Bear in Canterbury closed in 2018. This was unfortunate, in and of itself, but also symbolically, because it was just two years shy of the centenary of the first date the cartoon bear had appeared, in November 2020 in the Daily Express newspaper. Mary Tourtel (1874-1948) was the creative genius behind this – a native of Canterbury, memorials to whom are sprinkled around the city. Her birth place at 52 Palace Street right in the centre of the city near the Cathedral is marked by a plaque. So too is the house in which she spent her final years, on Ivy Street, leading from the eastern walls towards the coast. She is buried with her husband, Herbert Bird Tourtel, in the graveyard of the ancient church of St Martin’s nearby.
While Tourtel might not be recognised as a major literary figure, in terms of reach and sales, she ranks as one of the most successful that have ever lived. Her books sold fifty million copies, and the Rupert Bear strip is still published, albeit after a series of different chief authors since Tourtel herself retired from the work in 1935 due to poor eyesight have left their mark. The most significant of these successors was probably Alfred Bestall (1892-1986) who was in charge for thirty years till 1965.
Annuals, films, television series have all sprung from the Rupert franchise. And the role of these in the early years of children, in the UK and abroad, has maintained a sizeable fan base even to today. The adventures of the bear were mostly, under Tourtel, gentle, almost to the point of being other-worldly. They sprinkled into their plots toy soldiers coming to life, pirates, nursery rhyme staples like Humpty Dumpty, and morality tales around greedy princesses or selfish and proud princes.
Tourtel was from a well established Canterbury family. Her maiden name was Caldwell, and her father Samuel was a stained glass restorer and stonemason working on the magnificent medieval work at the cathedral – work that remains, to this day, ongoing. She attended the local Simon Langton Girls’ School, and then the Sidney Cooper School of Arts (now the University for Creative Arts). By 1920, she was already a successful illustrator of children’s book, specialising in drawing animals. It was only the request by her husband’s editor at the Daily Express where he was working to come up with a cartoon to compete with those being run in competitors like the Daily Mirror that prompted her to come up with the `Little Lost Bear’ in cream trousers and a blue jumper who first appeared. This soon evolved into the yellow checked trousers, scarf and red jumper that were to be trademarks for decades afterwards of the name she settled on, Rupert – along with this home in Nutwood, and his friends Podgy Pig and Bill Badger, et al.
The death of her husband in a German sanitorium at the relatively young age of 57 in 1931, and her own deteriorating health issues (about eyesight), meant that after retirement from 1935 she lived largely in hotels till her final years. The couple had had no children, and this meant that she was free to travel, and did so, widely. She collapsed in Canterbury High Street in March 1948, and died in the local Kent and Canterbury Hospital a few days later.
As part of her work, Tourtel did produce a series of 18 small books, with poetry and illustrations, which were reissued, very successfully, through the now defunct Woolworths stores in the early 1970s. With their distinctive yellow covers these can still be easily found in second hand bookshops today. Woods feature a lot in her artwork supporting her writing – as places of intrigue, mystery and adventure. In a very different way, this unsettling quality of the wooded landscape around Canterbury features in the novels of Jocelyn Brooke, and others. In `Rupert in the Wood of Mystery’ the bear goads Tim Pig to come with him for a walk into the nearby woods. Once on their journey, the two end up coming across a ruined gateway. As ever, in stories like these, these sort of portals are entries to other world’s or spaces (look at Allice and the hole she fell down to arrive at Wonderland!). Going through, they enter `a mysterious sort of place.’ Once inside, they are immediately beset by temptation – strawberries growing for them to eat – and weariness. Once that happens, they become lost. `Oh, how I wish I had not come!’ the Pig complains, `I knew it would be so:/I was quite happy there at home/Till out you made me go.’ Immediately however they find a golden cage in which a bird is trapped, who, as a reward for letting them out, with Wagnerian panache tells them `Don’t touch or taste.. anything in this Wood.’ Of course, no sooner had the warning been issued than they come across a house where delicious food lies inside, which they cannot resist. Once more they are besieged by threats – this time a wild boar dressed as a page, and dragged off to a large caste. The fable continues though ups and downs until the bird they had liberated returns, sees their plight, flies off, and rouses the Wise Goat, who comes to liberate them.
There are endless archetypes in stories like that Tourtel wrote for her creation. But in the end the main appeal was the clarity of her illustrations. And the ways in which they show a world which is ever so slightly like the one we live in, and ever so definitely not like it at all.