The Wombles

The Wombles biography

The Wombles are fictional pointy-nosed, furry creatures that live in burrows, where they help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in useful and ingenious ways. Wombles were created by author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968. Although Wombles supposedly live in every country in the world, the stories are concerned with the lives of the inhabitants of the burrow on Wimbledon Common in London, England.

The characters became nationally famous in the UK in the mid 1970s as a result of a very popular BBC children's television show using stop motion animation. A number of spin-off novelty songs also became major hits in the British music charts. The Wombles (band) was the brainchild of British music writer and composer, Mike Batt.

The Womble motto is "Make Good Use of Bad Rubbish." This green message was a reflection of the growing ecology movement of the 1970s.

Background

Elisabeth Beresford was a freelance ghost writer and children's book author. She was born in Paris and travelled the world with her BBC sports commentator husband Max Robertson.

One Christmas, Elisabeth Beresford took her young children for a Boxing Day walk on Wimbledon Common, where one referred to it as "Wombledon Common." On getting home, Elisabeth Beresford wrote down the idea and started developing the characters and storylines.

Beresford developed the characters around members of her family, and named them after places the family had associations with:

• Great Uncle Bulgaria - the Wombles' leader, was based on Beresford's father-in-law and named after the country of the same name.
• Tobermory - an engineer, was based on Beresford's brother, a skilled inventor, and named after the capital of the Isle of Mull, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides islands.
• Orinoco - a shirker who loved sleep and food, was styled on Beresford's teenage son and named after the River Orinoco in South America
• Bungo - over-enthusiastic and bossy named after Bungo Province in Japan
• Tomsk - an athletic Womble with a rather low IQ named after Tomsk in Russia
• Wellington - scientifically inclined, but very insecure and absent-minded. Named after her nephew's school: Wellington School, Somerset.
• Madame Cholet - a cook, was styled on Beresford's mother, named after the town of Cholet in France
• Miss Adelaide - schoolmistress, named after the city of Adelaide in Australia
• Alderney - Madame Cholet's assistant, was named after Alderney in the Channel Islands where Beresford lived towards the end of her life. She appeared in the early books, but did not make it into the first TV series. Her character was revived in the second TV series, when many viewers wrongly assumed she was a new character.

Later character names for the film Wombling Free and second Wombles TV series developed in the same manner:

• Cousin Cairngorm McWomble the Terrible - named after the Cairngorms, a mountain range in Scotland. He was introduced in the second book (The Wandering Wombles) as a Highland Womble clan chief. He appeared in the TV series when he visited the Wimbledon burrow.
• Shansi - often paired with Alderney, as Bungo was with Orinoco, named after a Shanxi province in China
• Stepney - East Ender with dreadlocks, obviously got his name from the Stepney area in London's East End where he came from
• Obidos named after Óbidos, Pará in Brazil

In the first book, Bungo was the youngest and least experienced of the team, and the story is mostly viewed through his eyes. Afterwards Wellington (who was not introduced until the second book) took over the role of "new boy". Alderney and Adelaide appeared in the earlier books but were not included in the original 1970s TV series. Alderney was re-introduced in the later TV shows produced in the 1990s (the Channel Island of Alderney was actually Elisabeth Beresford's home at the time), along with Stepney (who appeared in none of the earlier versions).

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