The Wombles may famously be ‘of’ Wimbledon Common, but each Womble is also connected to somewhere else in the world, by their names.
Creator Elizabeth Beresford named almost all of the Wombles after places: hence Great Uncle Bulgaria, Orinoco (as in the river), Tobermory (as in the town in the Hebrides) and so forth.
And so, we’ve put all the ones we could find on an interactive map:
The blue pins are the main characters, the yellow ones appear only in the books, and the green ones appear only in TV or film adaptations.
The particular derivation of Womble names is not always obvious – Hoboken, an American womble is, confusingly, named not for the New Jersey city of Hoboken, but for the Antwerp district from which it borrowed its name. Wellington is named not for New Zealand’s capital, but for Wellington School in Somerset, which Beresford’s nephew attended. And some Womble names that don’t sound like places names actually are: Bungo derives from Japan’s historical Bungo Province, now called Ōita Prefecture.
The reasoning behind all this, according to Wombles canon, is that a Womble does not get a name until they have come of age, at which point they pick one they like the sound of from an old atlas belonging to Great Uncle Bulgaria. (Of the variety of things I’ve seen “left behind” on Wimbledon Common I’ve never come across an atlas, but artistic licence and all that.)
There are apparently some exceptions to this Womble naming rule: Stepney, an East London womble added in the ‘90s, picked his name from a London A-Z. Livingstone, a hot air ballooning womble, is so old he forgot his original name and borrowed that of the explorer Dr Livingstone. And there’s also a Cousin Botany. Who is named after botany. Because he does botany. Obviously.
Chief musical Wombleteer Mike Batt has apparently been working on a computer-animated Womble revival for the last few years, but he hasn’t yet revealed whether we can expect to see any new Wombles with hip modern names like “Silicon Valley”, “Midtown” or “Garden Bridge”.
To find your Womble name, tweet the name of a place you’ve found in an old atlas, followed by your credit card details.
Ed Jefferson works for the internet and tweets as @edjeff.
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