Taking place on Sunday, June 10, the event is organised by Hilary Pauley, who runs an online teddy museum, and toy specialist Daniel Agnew of Special Auction Services.
Agnew will be offering teddy bear valuations on the day.
With 500 visitors last year, 2018’s festival brings 150 exhibitors selling antique and vintage teddy bears and soft toys. This specialist fair will surely attract as many children and their parents full of longing for special teddies as it does dedicated arctophiles.
Entry tickets are £13 and include admission to the festival and fair and the historic gardens and grounds of the abbey all day.
To purchase tickets visit the website below.
Safe landing
The teddy bear once lost at Bristol Airport but reunited with its owner after an appeal.
This one-eyed, floppy-eared, broken, forlorn and indeed forsaken teddy, tagged as lost property at Bristol Airport in 2012, was only reunited with its owner after a public appeal. It will be the star of an exhibition of rare and famous bears at the second Teddy Bear Festival.
It was found in a bag, along with an old black and white photograph dated March 1918 of the bear being cuddled by two small children (pictured alongside the bear above).
Staff at the airport spent 14 months researching and trawling flight records to find two passengers with the same names as those on the back of the picture. The faded message read: With dearest love and kisses to our darling Daddie from your loving Dora and Glyn.
The owner was tracked down: a shocked Robert Baker, living in Cyprus, who is the son of the Glyn Baker pictured with his sister in the photograph.
The 1910 German golden mohair teddy, nicknamed ‘Bristol’ by airport staff, was later sold at Special Auction Services of Newbury in 2015 for £2600, to a collector.
