Beschreibung:

John Betjeman book Archie and the Strict Baptist, 2006 Long Barn Books facsimile reprint of a hand-written and illustrated book by John Betjeman in a 'Winsor & Newton's Drawing Block', limited edition 90/500, in red sleeve —10 ½in. (26.5cm.) high - Archibald Ormsby-Gore, better known as Archie, was the teddy-bear of English poet laureate John Betjeman Together with a toy elephant known as Jumbo, he was a lifelong companion of Betjeman’s. Betjeman 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. In the 1940s, Betjeman also wrote and illustrated this story for his children, in which the bear's sojourns at the family's successive homes in Uffington and Farnborough are fictionalised. 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”.
Betjeman also wrote a poem "Archibald" in which the bear is temporarily stuffed in the loft for fear of Betjeman appearing "soft" to his father. Archie and Jumbo were in Betjeman's arms when he died in 1984.