Object in Focus: The Ancient Britons’ Paddington Bear

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Object in Focus: The Ancient Britons’ Paddington Bear

July 17, 2025

A Paddington Bear figurine adorned with a blue coat, a black hat decorated with hockey pins, and a cork accessory, showing a gentle and curious expression.

Ancient Britons Hockey Club logo

In the last few months, the museum has unveiled a new display in our exhibition area. It features a series of recent acquisitions which have been kindly donated by members of the public and the hockey family and will periodically change.

This Paddington Bear from an Ancient Britons Hockey Club tour is part of the first rotation of recent object donations on display.

A Paddington Bear figurine dressed in a blue coat, red wellington boots, and a black hat adorned with various pin badges, displaying a cheerful expression.

The Ancient Britons were a veterans’ hockey club that was formed in response to the dreary cold weather of England. Whilst sitting outside in the bitter rain and wind at Bournemouth Easter Hockey Festival, the spouses of hockey players in attendance formed a plan. The plan was to create a club that would tour around the world to sunny locations for a ‘holiday with hockey’ feel. The club officially started in 1988 and every two years for the next 30 years, players and their partners would come together to travel abroad and see the world!

The club built an impressive roster of 25 locations, visiting places like Barbados, Malta, Chile, Hong Kong, Holland, Fiji, and South America. The Ancient Britons were one of the earliest masters hockey clubs to tour internationally. They played matches against various local and veteran teams before returning home having made long standing friendships.

The large Paddington Bear on display in The Hockey Museum is a teddy bear of a beloved character from British children’s literature, created by the author Michael Bond. He was collected on a tour to Australia in 1989 – slightly odd for bear from “darkest Peru”! This was the Ancient Britons’ first ever tour since their formation and the Australian Hockey Association welcomed them warmly with this fabulous, classic British memento to take home. Their trip to Australia spanned six weeks and they played a total of eight matches at each stop, starting in Bangkok, Thailand, before visiting Perth and the Southeast of Australia and then returning home via Singapore.

Ancient Britons Hockey Club ceased to exist in 2021 but objects like this Paddington Bear help tell the club’s story.

A Paddington Bear figurine wearing a blue coat with wooden toggles, a black hat covered in hockey pin badges, and cork decorations, displaying a curious expression.

A visual map of the Ancient Britons’ travels can be seen on Paddington’s hat, decorated with pin badges players had collected along the way and adorned with corks in true Australian fashion to keep away the flies!