Archie is here described as a member of the Strict Baptist denomination, riding a hedgehog to chapel, and enjoying amateur archaeology, digging up molehills, "which, he considered, were the graves of baby Druids". In the 1940s, Betjeman also wrote and illustrated a story for his children, entitled Archie and the Strict Baptists, in which the bear's sojourns at the family's successive homes in Uffington and Farnborough are fictionalised. Together with a toy elephant known as Jumbo, he was a lifelong companion of Betjeman's.īetjeman brought his bear with him when he went to university at Oxford in the 1920s, and as a result Archie became the model for Aloysius, Sebastian Flyte's bear in Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited. Archibald Ormsby-Gore, better known as Archie, was the teddy-bear of English poet laureate John Betjeman.
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