ArchibaldOrmsby-Gore, better known asArchie, was theteddy-bear ofEnglishpoet laureateJohn Betjeman. Together with a toy elephant known asJumbo, he was a lifelong companion of Betjeman's.
Betjeman brought his bear with him when he went to university atOxford in the 1920s, and as a result Archie became the model forAloysius, Sebastian Flyte's bear inEvelyn Waugh's novelBrideshead Revisited. In the 1940s, Betjeman also wrote and illustrated a story for his children, entitledArchie and the Strict Baptists, in which the bear's sojourns at the family's successive homes inUffington andFarnborough are fictionalised. Archie is here described as a member of theStrict Baptist denomination, riding a hedgehog to chapel, and enjoying amateur archaeology, digging up molehills, "which, he considered, were the graves of baby Druids". A version of the story with illustrations byPhillida Gili was published as a children's book in 1977, Jock Murray, Betjeman's publisher, having declined to publish Betjeman's own coloured illustrations on grounds of cost.
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.
