Stuffed Animals, Here & There: John Betjemin's Archie

The things I'm learning, among the stuffed animals.
For instance, E. M. Forster used his Oxford contemporary John Betjemin's stuffed bear Archie (Archibald Ormsby-Gore) as the model for Sebastian Flyte's bear Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited, which (the early '80s BBC version) riveted me when I was twenty.

“If it could only be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper,” Sebastian says to Charles. 

(I dare not rewatch it for fear I would roll my eyes and start assigning the characters DSM mental disorders... Though I would understand the Catholic references now, which were entirely lost on me then.)

Betjeman had a stuffed elephant, Jumbo, too.

Archie & Jumbo are on display at St. Pancras station, London, which Betjeman helped save in the 1960s--where you catch the train for the continent now (via Paris Review).
So, I thought about staying at the St. Pancras Hotel when I'm in London this coming spring, but it's £250  *cough cough* per night.

Betjeman wrote an uncutesy poem about his bear, "Archibald", that ends: 

And if an analyst one day
Of school of Adler, Jung, or Freud
Should take this agèd bear away,
Then, oh my God, the dreadful void!
Its draughty darkness could but be
Eternity, Eternity.

I got half my literary culture when I was younger from British TV.
I first heard of Betjeman when David Brent (Ricky Gervais) hilariously criticized  his poem "Slough" in the British Office.

"And they made him a knight of the realm. Overrated."