Rupert Bear...

Rupert Bear

In November 2020 it was 100 years since the first publication of a Rupert Bear story in the Daily Express newspaper. The intrepid little bear made his debut on November 8 1920; not a comic-strip, not a cartoon, but a ‘drawing’. Newsprint was short, and his creators were limited to one frame a day, either one large panel or a row of four small drawings. Occasionally the story was written in prose with a little marginal decoration. 
Rupert Bear was the invention of Mary Tourtel, a book illustrator, who worked on Rupert until he was handed over to Alfred Bestall in 1935. She was born Mary Caldwell in Canterbury, Kent, in 1874. Mary went to art school and became a professional illustrator, producing her first books in 1897. She died in 1948 and is buried with her husband in Canterbury. 

It is through her husband, Herbert Bird Tourtel, that Rupert Bear comes to be linked to Guernsey.
Herbert Bird Tourtel was born in St Peter Port in 1874 to Peter Tourtel, a draper, originally of St Martin’s parish, and his wife Mary Ann, née Bird. Herbert was the eldest of six children and lived when very young with his family at 4, Lefebvre Street, next door to his grandparents, a shopkeeper called William Warren Bird and his wife Nancy Collenette. By the time of the 1891 census his grandfather had become blind and the Tourtel family were running their drapery business out of Rectory House opposite the Markets.
Herbert attended Elizabeth College on a late scholarship from the Boys' Intermediate School and in 1895 his excellence in Divinity took him up to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1900 he married Mary Caldwell in Eton, and they moved to Pinner. He was working as a journalist at the Daily Express, where he rose quickly to become assistant, or ‘night’ editor. The Express needed a children’s cartoon to rival the success of ‘Teddy Tail of the Daily Mail’ (a mouse), and legend has it that Herbert suggested his wife might come up with an idea, and she did – that of Rupert Bear. Herbert wrote the captions, often in poetry. George Perry comments in his book, A Bear’s Life, ‘Tourtel’s verses enhanced the story, but rarely achieved literary merit, or even competence.’ This is almost certainly an underestimation of Herbert's contribution.

Mary and Herbert had no children. They spent their time travelling the world and were aviation pioneers in their biplane, Mary being one of the first woman aviators. They were a glamorous pair, nomadic, choosing to live in hotels. As his obituary says, Herbert worked extremely hard and his devotion to duty during the Boer War and later the First World War wore him out; he died in a German Sanatorium at the age of 57 in June, 1931.

The collage is of houses in Market Street and Lefebvre Street where he lived in 1881 and 1891