The Wombles
One of the wombles; Bungo, in UK television series The Wombles
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| Author | Elisabeth Beresford |
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| Illustrator | Margaret Gordon (initial book illustrations) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's literature |
| Publisher | Puffin Books |
| Published | 1968 - 1976 |
| Media type | Print, audiobook |
| No. of books | 6 |
The Wombles are fictional pointy-nosed, furry creatures created by author Elisabeth Beresford, originally appearing in a series of children's novels from 1968. They live in burrows, where they aim to help the environment by collecting and recycling rubbish in creative ways. Although Wombles supposedly live in every country in the world, Beresford's stories are concerned with the lives of the inhabitants of the burrow on Wimbledon Common in London, England.
The characters gained a higher national profile in the UK in the mid-1970s as a result of a BBC commissioned children's television show which used stop motion animation. A number of spin-off novelty songs also became hits in the British music charts. The Wombles pop group was the idea of British singer and composer Mike Batt.
The Womble motto is "Make Good Use of Bad Rubbish". This environmentally friendly message was a reflection of the growing environmental movement of the 1970s.
Elisabeth Beresford took her young children for a Boxing Day walk on Wimbledon Common, where her daughter Kate mispronounced it as "Wombledon Common", sparking the idea of the Wombles in her mother's mind. On getting home, Beresford wrote down the idea and started developing the characters and storylines. She developed most of her Womble characters around members of her family, and named them after places the family had associations with.
Wombles are essentially burrowing animals. They have retractable claws (like cats), but as they mostly live in long-established burrows, they rarely use these even for digging. Their size and physical appearance has changed somewhat over the years: in the original editions of the books, Wombles are pictured as bear-like and between 4 and 5 feet (about 1.5 metres) in height, making them only slightly smaller than adult humans. This changed with the TV series where they were portrayed as being about knee-high to humans, with pointy snouts like those of raccoons. In the book and movie Wombling Free they are described as "short, fat, and furry", roughly between three or four feet (about 1 metre) in height.
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