Xavier Roberts' cuddly-toy business grew into a billion-dollar empire in the space of a few years. What was it about these dolls that made Christmas shoppers turn violent in 1983?

"Is that what Christmas is about? A full-grown woman taking a doll out of a child's hand."

While there had been toy crazes before, no one ever suffered a serious injury in a stampede to get their hands on a Rubik's Cube, skateboard or hula hoop. In the run-up to Christmas 1983, Cabbage Patch Kids inspired a different kind of mania in cities across the US, with one department store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania becoming the scene of a near-riot.

As supplies of the dolls ran out, one woman broke her leg and four others were hurt, while a desperate shop manager armed himself with a baseball bat to restore calm. The cost of missing out on the must-have toy was too much for some anxious parents. By the time local mother Patti Colachino fought her way to the toy counter, the dolls were all gone. She said: "What do we tell our little girl on Christmas morning? What are we supposed to say? You've been good but Santa ran short?"

While the scenes were described by BBC newsreader John Humphrys as "the latest awful example of pre-Christmas selling hype to hit America", he noted that in Britain "the reaction's been rather more restrained and, costing as much as £24 ($31) each, perhaps that's hardly surprising". Intrepid BBC reporter Guy Michelmore was duly dispatched to London's Oxford Street, doll in hand, to gauge opinion among Christmas shoppers. The adults' views ranged from "it's all right, I suppose" to the heavily ironic "I'd rather have a doll than my very own child". It might have been an unscientific survey, but every child who was shown the doll loved it.

Britain hadn't yet come down with full-blown Cabbage Patch fever, but as the hype spread, toy shop shelves were emptying ever faster. US postal worker Edward Pennington, unable to buy a Cabbage Patch Kid for his daughter back home in Kansas, heard rumours that they might be available in London. He told the Daily Mirror newspaper: "I decided to jump on a plane, pick one up, go straight back to the airport and fly home again." At the upmarket London department store Harrods, the last nine dolls were snapped up by six air hostesses from Dallas. One of them, Barbara Ericson, told the newspaper: "It's crazy, but once our friends knew we were going to England, they all asked us to get these dolls."

The dolls came with a whimsical concept that captured the imagination of many people. The marketing spiel was that each was computer-designed to have a slightly different face; it came with its own personality profile, birth certificate and adoption form to be filled in by its new "parent". Each one bore the name of Cabbage Patch Kids creator Xavier Roberts on its bottom, signed as if it was a genuine artwork. "When I first delivered the first Cabbage Patch Kid, I never saw it as a doll – it was always a piece of art to me, being a sculptor," he told the BBC's Sally Magnusson.

Roberts was a 28-year-old former art student from Cleveland, Georgia, whose new fortune had allowed him to build a mansion complete with a water slide that ran from an upstairs hot tub to a swimming pool below. Just over a week after the near-riots back........

© BBC