In Please Look After This Bear: How Paddington Became British, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold and Aishwarya Subramanian trace the development of Michael Bond’s fictional refugee bear. The book tells how, over 70 years – from his birth in 1958, when Bond saw a lonely bear sitting on a shelf in Selfridges to the film juggernaut Paddington in Peru (2024) – Paddington became a comfort blanket that swaddled Britain with the idea that it is not racist.
They have a point: but they oversell it. They argue that Paddington is an idealised refugee created by white people to soothe themselves; and behind him, British people of colour are lost. He is Atticus Finch, but a bear. Paddington’s “ambiguity mirrors the ambiguous place of the immigrant in British society: welcome, but conditional; protected, but surveilled; childlike yet held to adult standards”. Paddington, “performs Britishness so convincingly that readers and viewers quickly forget he is, in fact, a refugee”. His hard stare, “inherited from Aunt Lucy, is moral protest stripped of real menace”. And finally, this: “He does not demand structural change”.
They can’t acknowledge that Paddington must be this way. If he weren’t this Paddington, he couldn’t be an idol of mid-20th century children’s literature. Malcolm X Paddington cannot exist, and, though I long for Dark Paddington and Vigilante Paddington – the slasher film Pooh: Blood and Honey came out in 2023 – he cannot exist because Paddington is for children, not professors. Even so, watching him be fed into critical race theory is faintly addictive, and I wonder what they would do to Narnia, a kingdom so large it needed not one white saviour, but four. The tension – that the fictional cannot be real – was exposed during the anti-migrant riots of 2024 when the official Paddington X account wrote: “Perhaps it’s time for a little more kindness.” To me this is not ambivalent: the poster is requesting kindness from the rioters, not the victims. Even so, the authors reply, “Critics pointed out that, in the context of violence directed at migrants and Muslims, the message felt not only naïve, but evasive. As one user put it, “You’re a Peruvian asylum seeker they’d beat the shit out of you mate””.
Paddington is vexing – I will come to his true identity later, which the authors glance on then forget, having blind spots as large as any they deride – but he only became dangerous with great fame, when we were encouraged to think about him rather than real people. Toys, you will recall, exist to teach children that they are real. It’s the Barbie Summer of 2023 all over again: and that did as little for feminism as Please Look After This Bear will for anti-racism.
For me, the capitalist critique of Paddington wins out: VisitBritain and its “Britain Through Paddington’s Eyes” campaign was launched in 2014, alongside the first film. “Paddington is GREAT Britain” was its cry. Paddington is completely over-exposed: 50 Paddington statues, stamps, merchandise; the part of Notting Hill not given to Julia Roberts, who is as unavailable as the bear is available; tea with Elizabeth II and, on her ending, a sort of death master of ceremonies ushering her towards the Styx. Paddington is another Elizabeth II, another Captain Tom, and they bespeak anxiety as much as power. They are myths. The authors are right that Paddington fans cannot have a serious conversation about race, but they are not the only people projecting a mythical bear. If they accuse others of stealing Paddington, they do the same. They erase, or diminish, the parts of him they do not like.
Paddington is, or became, many things, but at his heart he is a Kindertransport child. If Paddington’s memorial is at Paddington Station, he could equally stand at Liverpool Street, where the trains carrying the Jewish children from Germany arrived. In his memoir Michael Bond writes about how he called Neville Cohen, a school-fellow, “Jew boy” and was chided bitterly by Cohen’s father. Bond asked to be forgiven, but was not forgiven, and he did not forgive himself. Bond also relates that his family took in German-Jewish children, “who often sat in front of the fire every evening, quietly crying because they had no idea what had happened to their parents, and neither did we at the time. It’s the reason why Paddington arrived with the label around his neck”. Mr Gruber, the Hungarian antiques dealer and Paddington’s best friend, is based on Bond’s literary agent, the German-Jewish refugee Harvey Unna; while serving in the RAF Bond saw a ship filled with Jewish refugees heading to Palestine and said: “As I gazed down at them, I felt ashamed to be British, for clearly they were crying out for help, and equally clearly they were unlikely to get it.”
This is related at the beginning of Please Look After This Jew Bear and swiftly, cruelly, forgotten. Although his character is clearly that of the compliant mid-20th century German-Jewish refugee – the line “Paddington is not just the immigrant who is permitted to stay; he becomes the immigrant who reassures, whose difference is endearing rather than disruptive” – could have been invented for the Kindertransport – Paddington cannot be allowed to stay Jewish. I must remind the authors, which feels incredible for a book about race: not all ethnic minorities have the same experience; not all ethnic minorities are the same.
Here is an example. “Mr. Gruber,” they write, “Paddington’s closest adult ally outside the Brown family, similarly occupies a liminal space. Though his strong accent and occasional confusion over idiomatic English mark him as a foreigner, he often serves as a guide to British institutions, gently inducting Paddington – and by extension, the reader – into the glories of British life. His assessments are unfailingly generous”. In Paddington Goes to Court, Gruber explains to Paddington: “In some countries, Mr. Brown, you are thought to be guilty until you are proved innocent, whereas here it’s the other way around”. The authors note that Gruber fails to name the “some countries”, though I am certain they are Nazi Europe. “While we may agree with this general principle,” they add, this leaves, “Paddington, and perhaps the reader, with a vague sense that they are fortunate to be in Britain, a country whose mechanisms for justice are uniquely “fair.”” Not uniquely fair exactly: but fairer than Nazi Europe. The burden of remembrance falls on the immigrant, they write at one point. Quite so.
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