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Fred Banbery (1913-1999)


Frederick Ernest Banbery (1913-1999)

The versatile draughtsman Fred Banbery made an important contribution to the development of the immortal character of Paddington Bear. During the early 1970s, he drew on his wide range of experience as illustrator and cartoonist to produce images to accompany texts simplified by Michael Bond from his original ‘Paddington’ stories. These variants, published over a decade after the initial book,
A Bear Called Paddington (1958), were aimed at the under fives and known collectively as the ‘Young Set’. Their picture-book format placed much greater emphasis on the visual element than had the original form of publication. So Banbery had much greater scope than his predecessor Peggy Fortnum, not only through the formal potential of size and colour, but through the need to delineate personality and narrative.