It was a scene of carnage at a teddy bear display in Wookey Hole Caves near Wells, Somerset, when a dog employed to guard the collection went berserk and inflicted fatal injuries on some of the prized exhibits.
Barney is a Doberman Pinscher, a dog first bred by a German tax collector around 1890 to protect him from his clients. Mabel is German, too, having been made in 1909 by the famed toymakers Steiff and is therefore an aristocrat among teddy bears.
What made Mabel really special, however, was that she was once owned by the King of rock’n’roll.
He bit a 2in lump of fur from her stomach and all but severed her head. She was lucky to escape with her moveable limbs intact, but exhibition staff say that her injuries are probably terminal.
Sir Benjamin Slade, the eccentric Somerset landowner and Mabel’s owner, was said yesterday to be incensed at the fate of his bear, and declined to answer his telephone. He had lent her to the exhibition after buying her for £40,000 at an auction in Memphis, Tennessee, believing her to have been the property of the singer, who counted Teddy Bear among his greatest hits.
“We have contacted Sir Benjamin. He is taking this very, very badly,” Daniel Medley, the general manager of Wookey Hole Caves, said yesterday.
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