Our 70st teddy bear: Told in an enchanting book, how a childless British couple raised a beer-drinking, 8ft grizzly as their son - and how his death left a huge hole in their lives
• Maggie and her husband Andy owned a 70st grizzly bear named Hercules
• His death in 2000 from natural causes had a huge impact on the couple
• Hercules The Bear by Maggie Robin is published on November 19 at £12.99
Bear Necessities is a very particular sort of women’s boutique. There are racks of tasteful, candy-coloured two-pieces, a whole floor dedicated to mother-of-the-bride outfits and, at the centre of it all Maggie Robin, a warm, affectionate and strikingly beautiful 64-year-old.
Maggie is the sort of shop owner who hugs her customers. The type who’ll make you a cup of tea while gently guiding you towards just the right pair of sparkly kitten heels.
Since a devastating death in the family 15 years ago, Bear Necessities has been Maggie’s refuge — from her grief and her sometimes turbulent marriage.
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Hercules the grizzly bear, owned by Maggie and Andy, pictured eating breakfast with Maggie Robin in 1994
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Party animal Hercules the bear celebrates his 10th birthday by blowing out candles on a cake with his owners
That the death was of a 70st grizzly bear named Hercules seems — to Maggie, at least — almost incidental.
In his day, Hercules was the most famous of bears. A cuddly giant who lived with Maggie and her husband Andy, a professional wrestler, Hercules toured the world, met Margaret Thatcher, starred in a James Bond movie and once spent three weeks on the loose in the Outer Hebrides.
His death in 2000 from natural causes had a huge impact on the couple who had raised him from a cub, shared their lives with him for 26 years and considered him their son.
‘Andy was so desperate, he said he couldn’t live without a bear,’ says Maggie. ‘But I knew that to be touched by something like Hercules once in your life makes you very lucky. And also, when I’m in my 70s, I can’t be saying: “I need to go home and feed my grizzly.” '
Quite. Looking after Hercules, all 8ft and 980lb of him, involved rather more than a morning walk and the occasional tin of Pedigree Chum.
The bear lived with the couple, drinking his morning tea from a mug and sitting up at the table to blow out the candles on his birthday cake. At night he would sprawl in front of the fire while Maggie rested her feet on his enormous, furry bottom.
He ate copious amounts of prawns from Marks & Spencer, preferred his steak well done, thank you very much, and spent his days wrestling Andy in the glens and burns near their vast Scottish ranch.
The bear’s presence was so all-consuming that, for a couple of years after his death, it looked as though the couple’s marriage might not survive either.
‘It was awful,’ says Maggie. ‘Andy was just lost. His focus for life, his everything, had just been whipped away from him.
‘For the first two years I didn’t know if we’d make it. I thought: “Are we going to last?” Andy just shut himself away. He wouldn’t talk about how he was feeling.’
Life today in the well-heeled Perthshire town of Auchterarder is rather different for the Robins from the glamour of the Eighties.
Hercules with owner Maggie, who has recently written a book about him, which is published on November 19
Back then, they toured America in a big bus emblazoned with the words ‘Hercules the Scottish Big Softy’, were regularly feted by heads of state and movie stars, and were accustomed to having Disney on the phone, hoping to book Hercules for its next movie.
Andy, now 77, had a stroke three years ago, but has recovered well.
Just last year, 14 years after Hercules’s death, the couple finally replaced their beloved bear with a hilariously diminutive substitute, a Jack Russell named Robbie — a tiny ball of energy who scampers among the shop’s well-to-do customers, dragging a blanket behind him.
The couple adopted Hercules from a wildlife park for £50 in 1974.
Andy, a Commonwealth wrestling champion, had fallen in love with the idea of owning such an animal after being asked to wrestle a chained, muzzled black bear during a trip to New York.
That poor beast had had its teeth taken out, and on his return home Andy became obsessed with the idea of getting one of his own — and treating him like an equal.
But surely even the most smitten of young wives (Maggie was just 21) don’t simply say ‘yes, dear’ when their beloved suggests bringing home one of the world’s fiercest animals as a pet?
She shrugs. ‘I just thought it would be lovely. I walked into it. I know it’s nuts. But I love animals, so it made a strange sort of sense.’
The couple reared Hercules by hand, slowly training the little bear to become comfortable around humans, to wrestle Andy without tearing an arm off and walk around un-muzzled.
Experts the world over rang them up to say that a grizzly bear could never be domesticated, and they would both end up dead.
In her new book about the couple’s life with Hercules, there are lots of old pictures of Maggie, leggy, blonde, puckering up to give the bear a kiss or riding around the garden on his back.
At every step of his development it was as if Hercules were thumbing his big wet nose at the experts. Maggie says he was gentler with her than with Andy, and she called herself his mum.
‘It was a much more innocent time,’ says Maggie. ‘You could do tons of stuff with a bear and nobody really bothered you.
‘Nowadays, with all the red tape, you can’t do anything without health and safety. Herc would have been locked up, and it would have destroyed him. He loved to go out, wandering over the hills.’
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Andy, a professional wrestler, pictured with Hercules the bear. Hercules died in 2000 of natural causes
Neighbours in Sheriffmuir, near Dunblane, where the Robins ran a pub, grew accustomed to seeing the beast lumbering around in the nearby heather, before coming into the bar and downing a few shandies with the locals by slurping from a pint glass.
‘He was a happy drunk,’ Maggie explains. ‘And he was always very careful when he was indoors. He didn’t like to knock anything over.’
She recalls when a young blind girl came to see him at the Edinburgh Playhouse. The girl was so excited to meet the bear that she gripped him very tightly round his neck. Maggie’s heart was in her mouth.
‘I was very nervous because she had a tight grip on him, she was touching his eyes and his ears, and she was just so excited,’ she says.
‘But he seemed to know he needed to be careful. He just sat there and let her touch him. It was way beyond anything I could ever have expected. He was a gentle giant.’
She insists he was never violent towards her or Andy. Not really, anyway. ‘I mean,’ she says airily, ‘he caught you with little nips if you were lying over the top of his tummy and he had his big teeth over your face. It was just like playing with a cat. But much bigger.’
They treated the bear like a baby, so much so that they never got round to having children of their own.
‘It was just the three of us,’ says Maggie. ‘We were a family, and we were happy with that. He was my boy. You actually feel like you’ve had a child with a bear. You’ve just got that connection and that depth of feeling. It was quite amazing.’
Not having a conventional family still nags at Maggie’s heart. ‘Now I think, well, I would have quite liked to have had children, but we just never seemed to have the opportunity. We were so wrapped up in life with Herc, plus there’s the idea of a toddler roaming around . . .’
She pauses. ‘Hercules was a big, 8ft bear. It would probably have been fine, but it never seemed like the right time.’ She sighs. ‘My grandmother used to say to me: “You won’t have any of the smiles, but you won’t have any of the tears.” ’
Instead, Maggie built up a career as an accomplished horsewoman, rising to become a national ladies show jumping champion. But there was one episode that threatened to throw their life off-course: during the shooting of a Kleenex advert in the Outer Hebrides in 1980, Hercules went missing. A huge military operation was launched in an attempt to find the bear, but for weeks there was no sign of him.
‘We were up in a helicopter and looking at everything down below. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t see this great big thing moving about,’ she says. ‘But he would be frightened, and his natural instinct was to hide.
‘A lot of locals were scared or thought he would eat their sheep, but I knew he wouldn’t touch anyone because that’s not who he was. He liked his food cooked, his spaghetti, his meat properly done.
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The couple adopted Hercules from a wildlife park for £50 in 1974. Neighbours in Sheriffmuir, near Dunblane, where the Robins ran a pub, grew accustomed to seeing the beast lumbering around in the nearby heather
‘And his sheer gentleness meant he wouldn’t attack you. It would be like saying Robbie [their dog] would turn round and eat you.’
Hercules’s eventual recovery after 24 days — cold, starving and 15st lighter — served only to cement his reputation as a gentle soul.
A documentary was made about life at home with him, and he was voted a TV personality of the Year. He even appeared with Roger Moore in the Bond movie Octopussy.
He became a genuine celebrity, much beloved by everyone, except footballer Graeme Souness, who apparently took great fright while presenting Hercules with an honorary Rotary Club membership and legged it into the nearest toilet.
Such was the bear’s reputation that, driving down the motorway in their specially adapted bus, the Robins would see police lights flashing behind them and panic, only to have the officers ask: ‘Can we have a look at the big fellow?’
No wonder, then, that his death in 2000, after months of deterioration following a back injury — devastating to a beast of Hercules’s size — sent shockwaves through the Robins’ marriage. Even today, 15 years on, the pain is still there for both of them.
‘It’s been really difficult for Andy to move on,’ she says. ‘That seems a ridiculous thing to say after all these years, but Hercules was his right arm.
‘And you know what men are like, especially big, strong men like Andy. Hercules was the only thing on this earth that Andy’s ever given himself up to completely.’
Not even you? She shakes her head. ‘Not even me. A lot to me, but not like that. It’s always been very hard for him. He just would not accept that Herc would not be here.’
Maggie’s grief was quieter, sadder. For years, she kept a tuft of the bear’s fur, getting it out every so often to inhale its sweet, musky scent.
‘That was my comfort blanket,’ she says. ‘I didn’t even tell anybody I had it until about three years ago. It was mine, and I didn’t tell a soul.’
She still has the fur, but the smell — like Hercules himself — is long gone. Her memories of him, however, are still vivid.
‘You wouldn’t believe the number of people who come into the shop and tell me they saw him somewhere,’ she says. ‘It’s nice to hear the stories.’
She keeps some photographs, and a few old framed newspaper clippings on a wall at the back of the shop for curious customers to peer at. ‘I just loved him, that was all,’ says Maggie.
Listening to her remarkable story, it’s clear the feeling was mutual.
Hercules The Bear, by Maggie Robin, is published by John Blake Publishing on November 19, at £12.99.
by Emma Cowing
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