Famous Five Style

Bobs and brooches

In the spirit of Helen Bonham Carter’s Enid wardrobe, here is my take on the Bobs brooch, found in the lovely (if a tad overpriced) Home & Colonial in Berkhamsted, Hertforshire. It’s not diamante like Enid’s/HBC’s, but it is vintage 1950s and I really like it.

Bobs was the black and white smooth-haired fox terrier that Enid bought in 1926, shortly after she and her husband Hugh Pollock moved to the quaintly named Elfin Cottage in Beckenham, Kent. According to Blyton aficionado Norman Wright, Bobs ‘could do many tricks, including sitting up and having a biscuit balanced on his nose, and rolling on his back when Enid told him to “die for the King”‘. The little dog was first mentioned in Enid’s ‘Letter from my Window’ in November 1926 and from 1929 a ‘Letter from Bobs’ became a regular feature of Enid’s Teachers’ World page. As ‘Bobs’, Enid would report events that happened in the family that week and after Bobs died in 1935 his column was produced posthumously, unbeknownst to his eager readership. The great modernist writer Virginia Woolf was blatantly influenced by ‘Letter from Bobs’ when she wrote Flush (1933), a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning written from the point of view of the poet’s cocker spaniel. Yes. Well, maybe…