There are endless stories from the 1970s and 80s that shock and amaze us today. Because, as we all know, things were a bit different back then.
But, surely, the menage-a-trois (of sorts) between Maggie and Andy Robin, a couple from Clackmannanshire, Scotland, and Hercules, the 9ft, 65st grizzly bear who lived with them for 25 years, ate fry-ups for breakfast at the kitchen table, lounged in front of the fire, and drank buckets of beer with punters in the pub they ran, takes the biscuit.
‘It was a love story between the three of us, a definite love story,’ says Maggie, now 76.
‘No one’s lived like that with a bear before. He was our wee boy.’
A wee boy who, as anyone over 50 will remember, went missing in the Outer Hebrides during a restorative swim in a loch after filming a loo paper advert for Kleenex in 1980.
His disappearance sparked a desperate 24-day bear hunt involving the police, Army, and locals in helicopters, boats, light aircraft and on foot with nets and tranquilliser guns.
And his eventual recovery turned him into a superstar who met Margaret Thatcher, appeared with Roger Moore in Octopussy and made his mark on the chat show circuit not just here with Russell Harty and Bruce Forsyth, but in America, Australia, Japan and Italy.
‘It was a love story between the three of us, a definite love story,’ says Maggie, now 76. She is pictured here in the late 70s with Hercules
Scottish ex professional wrestler Andy Robin had fallen in love with the idea of owning a bear after being asked to wrestle on in Canada; the couple raised Hercules, who grew to 8ft and 65stone, like a child, with one friend describing their relationship as a ‘love triangle’
Now, a quarter of a century after his death, an extraordinary and moving documentary, Hercules The Bear: A Love Story, which airs tomorrow on BBC2, tells how Andy and Maggie – who did not have children – raised him from a six-month-old cub, as their son.
So we learn how Maggie would hug, chat to him – ‘I was mum, I got all the cuddles’ – and cook for him endlessly.
Eggs, beans, burgers, spaghetti bolognese, M&S prawns, coffee with condensed milk, cola, birthday cakes complete with candles which he’d blow out before wolfing the lot.
‘I cooked and cooked. He was a fussy eater and didn’t really like uncooked food,’ she says.
Though he was partial to a pint of shandy and the odd Babycham in the pub.
‘We had to be careful with Babycham. He got a wee bit tipsy a couple of times, he was like a big stumbly fur coat – so we didn’t encourage that,’ she says firmly.
We also hear how Andy, a champion wrestler and lumberjack, who died in 2019 aged 86, would run over the moors with his furry ‘boy’, swim with him in lakes and rivers (and later his own swimming pool), and play-wrestle with him for hours, despite the sharp claws and ever-expanding bulk.
‘He was our boy. Our beloved big boy, our baby,’ says Maggie in the documentary. ‘He was just a magical creature and we had a magical life.’
Going on a bearhunt: The story of missing Hercules gripped the country; he was eventually rescued, 15 stone lighter, just over three weeks later
The grizzly, who was partial to M&S prawns and bottles of sparkling perry, found fame in a series of TV and film roles, including opposite Roger Moore in Octopussy in 1983
A life, which, even before Hercules joined the family, was a bit out of the ordinary.
The couple met at Perth Agricultural Show in 1970 and were not an obvious match. Maggie was a beautiful blonde showjumping champion and Andy was a stocky wrestler in very tight blue shorts.
‘He was a strong beef cake. Every mother’s nightmare. Suntanned, mega-fit, blue piercing eyes and very charismatic,’ says Maggie.
‘I was 21 and he was 37 and we were totally content.’
Partly, I suspect, reading between the lines, because Maggie let Andy be Andy. ‘He was always full of dreams, and he never dreamt small,’ she says.
As a wrestler, Andy competed across Canada and the US and was always open to new challenges.
So when he was offered £1,000 to take on a black bear called Terrible Ted, he was in the ring in a flash, where he wrestled with Ted and had an epiphany – one day, if he ever had the space, he’d have his own bear. If Maggie agreed. Of course she did!
‘I was standing looking out of the window and he said, ‘What would you say if I wanted to get a bear cub?’ And I said, ‘Oh babe, that would be fabulous!’ ‘
The statue at Langass Woods, on the Scottish island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, where Hercules is now buried. Andy Robin, who died aged 84 in 2019, was laid to rest by his side
Barely six months later, after picking him out as a cub – ‘the softest of the three’ – they collected Hercules from the Highland Wildlife Park in Kincraig in Scotland, in exchange for £50 cash.
It was unusual even then, but the park had too many cubs to handle and its manager at the time, Eddie Orbell, decided it was better to sell him than put him to sleep.
Naturally, everyone thought Andy and Maggie were mad. And maybe they were.
Because to begin with, Hercules was a nightmare – biting and clawing and lashing out, trying to escape from his purpose-built shelter. But he also had Andy’s complete focus – for hours every day, swimming, running, wrestling – and he thrived. And grew.
‘He seems to think what I’m thinking and I think what he thinks,’ said Andy at the time.
‘The bond between us, it’s super. It’s just there.’
‘To have a good relationship, there needs to be trust,’ explains Maggie. ‘Hercules gave us his trust and we gave him ours.’
She also insists, very firmly, that no one ever pushed back against their ‘adoption’ of Hercules.
In Hercules the Bear: A Love Story, which airs on BBC Two on New Year’s Eve, Maggie Robin describes the bond her husband had with the gentle giant, calling it ‘magic’
Not even when he was drinking cola, eating cake, shedding all his natural instincts and going everywhere with Andy – into town for errands, standing in the back of his adapted van with the wind rippling through his fur, visiting local schools, wrestling together at shows.
‘Hercules was quite a showman himself,’ says Maggie. ‘He’d chase Andy round the ring and try and pull his trunks off.’
Suddenly everyone loved ‘Hercules the softest bear in Scotland’. Particularly when Andy commissioned a £10,000 documentary – Hercules The Wrestling Bear – about him.
The offers from advertising agencies poured in and Andy invested in a converted bus to ferry him around.
It was while they were up in the Highlands filming another advert that Hercules vanished. One minute he and Andy were having a nice swim in the sea. The next, Andy was caught by the tide and Hercules was swimming away.
‘He was gone!’ says Maggie.
The hunt for Hercules was a sensation. Journalists and TV crews flew in and Maggie and Andy searched tirelessly for weeks.
But as time passed, hopes faded and the more determined experts became that he’d start killing – livestock, game, even people – in order to survive.
The bear almost came a cropper while filming an advert for Kleenex in the Outer Hebrides in 1980 when he went missing on the Scottish island for 24 days
‘I could hear Andy crying in bed. And he’d hear me too. We missed him so badly. He was our constant,’ says Maggie.
Finally, on the 25th day, Hercules was spotted rummaging around the bins outside a croft house in North Uist in the Outer Hebrides and, after a dramatic helicopter pursuit, was shot in the buttocks with a tranquilliser dart and airlifted in a net back to safety, and to a very emotional reception.
‘Andy was cuddling him, everyone was crying. And, oh my goodness, he was in a sorry state,’ says Maggie.
Hercules had lost at least 25st by starving himself, rather than killing anything for dinner.
It was then that Hercules really went global. Hollywood beckoned. Publishers battled over the rights to the book of his life.
He was crowned ‘Personality of the Year’ by the Scottish Tourist Board. In London, launching his single Come Back Hercy at the Café de Paris, he was granted sole access for two hours a day to the indoor pool at Heathrow’s Holiday Inn.
And, several times, driving down the motorway in their specially adapted bus, the Robins would be pulled over by the police who had stopped them just so they could ask: ‘Can we have a look at the big fellow?’
It was brilliant and mad and fun. But they were happiest when it was just the three of them.
So after a flurry of attention, they moved back to the hills and built themselves a ranch-style home with a log cabin and a swimming pool for Hercules.
The end came suddenly.
In 1999, on the way back from filming an advert, Hercules fell ill with an abscess on his spine and lost the use of his back legs.
Some might have thought it was time for the great cave in the sky. But not Andy.
‘Andy wasn’t a ‘no’ person,’ says Maggie.
Determined to get him walking again, he spent thousands of hours over the next few months, nursing him back to health with aqua therapy in the pool.
But in the end, even his determination couldn’t save Hercules and, just after 8am on February 4, 2000, with a choked voice, he told his wife: ‘Your big boy’s away, Maggie.’
‘And that was it,’ she says. ‘I still miss him so much.’
But not quite as much as Andy did. ‘They were brother, father and son – they were everything together,’ says Maggie.
While it goes without saying that her husband’s extraordinary love for Hercules put a strain on their marriage at times, in some ways, it was even worse after the bear died.
‘It was awful. Andy was just lost. His focus for life, his everything, had just been whipped away.’
She was terribly worried about him. But somehow she managed to stay strong when, two years after Hercules’ death, Andy came to her and said: ‘Maggie, I need another bear. I can’t live without him.’
Because this time she put her foot down and said, very firmly, ‘Babe, you’re kidding me!’
