Wombles Go Round the World
Join in the adventures of the Wombles, the classic and much loved creatures, as they make good use of the bad rubbish they find on Wimbledon Common, in this book by the original creator of the Wombles.
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!
Abridged versions of some of the Wombles stories can be heard on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds at Christmas 2023. New unabridged audiobooks read by Jamie Demetriou are also available.
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.