Book description
Great Uncle Bulgaria loves telling the ancient and revered history of
the Womble clans to the younger Wombles. But to his great sadness he
notices that the young Wombles are not nearly as interested in the
history as he is.
So Great Uncle Bulgaria decides to take action and show these young
Wombles how wonderful - and international - the history of the Wombles
is. Tobermory invents some very eco-friendly clockwork air balloons to
travel in and Orinoco, Bungo, Tomsk and Wellington are sent variously
to America, Tibet and Australia. In these interesting and far-flung
places the young Wombles get quite as much excitement as they could
wish for!
Elisabeth Beresford first came up with the idea for the Womble
characters when walking on Wimbledon Common with her two children. She
started sketching out the characters that day: Great Uncle Bulgaria was
based on her father-in-law, Tobermory on her brother (an inventor),
Orinoco on her son, and Madame Cholet on her mother. She hoped that the
Wombles stories would encourage children to fight pollution and to think
up ways of 'making good use of bad rubbish'. In fact, the Wombles so
charmed the nation that they were chosen as the mascots for the Tidy
Britain campaign. Since then they have had their own television series,
first broadcast on Jackanory.
Elisabeth Beresford was awarded an MBE for her services to children's
literature in 1998 and she now lives in Alderney, the Channel Islands.
