Alfred Bestall Views
Alfred Edmeades Bestall (1892-1986), best known as the author and illustrator of Rupert Bear from 1935-1965, fell in love with North Wales when he was a schoolboy at Rydal Mount in Colwyn Bay from 1904-1911. He had two holidays with his parents at Trefriw in the Conwy Valley in 1912 and 1913, which confirmed his love of the area, and he visited Beddgelert for the first time then.
David in Germany I was lucky enough to know Alfred Bestall in the 1980s. I've never known a sweeter, kinder, shyer man who seemed to be constantly amazed by how loved he and hispaintings and stories were! A very positive man, the world has been a much more uninspired place since his passing. Tue Apr 10 10:47:35 2007
Trudy Cowx, Co Clare, Ireland I was given several old prints of drawings of characters obviously from school plays. The style of the drawings always intrigued me. I just knew I should know who had done them. It wasn't until I got my computer that I could search for the illustrator 'Bestall.' It was, of course Alfred Bestall, illustrator of my favourite children's character, Rupert Bear! Wed Nov 23 21:50:52 2005
For 30 years Alfred Bestall spent most of his working week drawing a bear in checked trousers getting up to all sorts of adventures with a collection of chums including a badger, a fox and a cross-looking creature made entirely of twigs. Rupert Bear had been created as a strip cartoon in 1920 by Mary Tourtel, the wife of the night editor at the Daily Express, with the idea of besting the Daily Mail when it came to grabbing a family readership. But it was Bestall's rendering of Rupert from 1935 which turned the bear into a brand and cleared the way for the bestselling Christmas annuals which became such a key fixture of so many mid 20th-century childhoods. One of those childhoods belonged to Paul McCartney, who has expressed his wistful gratitude to Bestall by writing a foreword to this book. Another belongs to the author, Caroline Bott, who was Bestall's goddaughter (and cousin) and who inherited the artist's archive on his death in 1986.
Alfred Bestall Images
