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Winnie the who?: See how the beloved books won hearts, upended lives, upset their author
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AA Milne wrote just three Winnie-the-Pooh books. The first is now 100 years old. How is it that they live on, raking in billions each year? Take a look.
Before Winnie-the-Pooh became the honey-loving bear with “very little brain”, he was a stuffed toy in a little boy’s nursery. And while his adventures offered children and their parents a gentle escape from the complexities of the real world, the man who wrote the enchanting stories lived a rather complicated life.
Born in London in 1882, Alan Alexander Milne was a Cambridge mathematician-turned writer (whose schoolteachers included HG Wells). The sharp-witted satirist worked, at one point, at the British magazine Punch, and was a playwright and World War 1 veteran, before he began to draw inspiration from his son Christopher Robin Milne’s collection of toys to create the characters of the Hundred Acre Wood.
Read on for a bit on the twists his life took: a bitter feud with PG Wodehouse, a complicated relationship with his son, his own frustration at Pooh’s insistence on overshadowing all his other work, and the strange afterlife his characters found in pop-psychology.
None of which has done anything to diminish, 100 years on, the world’s affection for a most beloved bear. A look back, in a few quick facts.
* While AA Milne was British, the real-world bear who inspired Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t. She was a North American black bear, bought by British-Canadian veterinarian Harry Colebourn as a cub in 1914. He named her Winnie, after the town he lived in: Winnipeg.
* When Colebourn enlisted, amid World War 1, and was dispatched to France, he handed Winnie over to the London Zoo, which is where Milne and his son Christopher Robin Milne (1920-1996) first met her, in the early 1920s.
* While Winnie came from the real bear, Pooh came from a swan Christopher Robin encountered during a family holiday. He gave the name to his teddy bear, and Milne eventually combined the two.
* The bear first appeared in Milne’s writing in the poem Teddy Bear (1924). He became Winnie-the-Pooh in The Wrong Sort of Bees, a story about a bear who tries to trick bees high up in a tree, published in The Evening News on Christmas Eve, 1925. The first Winnie-the-Pooh book was released the following year.
* At 18 inches, the toy was quite large; it was rather lean and angular too. Illustrator EH Shepard decided to soften the image for the book, turning out a gentler, more rounded, child-friendly character in his illustrations.
*Christopher Robin is based closely on Milne’s son. The boy’s childhood provided the author with much of the material for the stories. Most of the key characters had real-life counterparts among the boy’s stuffed toys too. The real Christopher’s menagerie included a piglet, tiger, two kangaroos and a melancholy donkey. They became Piglet, Tigger, Kanga, Roo and Eeyore. (Rabbit and Owl were pure inventions.)
* All the original toys are now held by the New York Public Library, except for Roo, who was lost sometime in the 1930s.
* The Hundred Acre Wood was based on the Ashdown Forest in Sussex. The Milne family’s country home, Cotchford Farm, stood nearby, and father and son often went on walks and excursions there.
* Ashdown Forest still draws visitors from around the world, eager to visit the spots, some of which have since been named after the books: Pooh Sticks Bridge, Galleon’s Lap, Roo’s Sandy Pit, the Heffalump Trap, and the Enchanted Place, where Christopher finally says farewell to his friend.
* In the real world, the boy would come to resent the way his childhood was exposed to public scrutiny, and the long shadow the books cast on his life. He was so bullied at school, for instance, that he felt compelled to take up boxing. Milne would become frustrated by Pooh’s success too, as these books overshadowed all his other writing.
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* This month marks 100 years since the first full-length book featuring the boy and the residents of the Wood. Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926 and was an immediate success, selling over 180,000 copies in its first year across the US and UK alone.
* The second and final Pooh novel written by Milne, House at Pooh Corner, appeared in 1928 and introduced the energetic Tigger. Between the two novels, Milne also published Now We Are Six (1927), which contained several poems featuring Pooh.
* Several authorised sequels and prequels would follow, after Milne’s death in 1956. Complete collections typically feature as many as 30 titles.
* Pooh remains one of the world’s most commercially valuable licensed characters. In 2004, Forbes ranked it the world’s second-highest-earning fictional character, behind only Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Pooh and the Hundred Acre Wood creatures generate an estimated $5.6 billion in revenue annually, mainly from merchandise and apparel.
* Back to the man who brought them all to life, AA Milne was born in 1882 in Hampstead, London, the youngest of three sons born to schoolteachers.
* At 11, he won a scholarship to Westminster School. He later won another to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he went in 1900 to study mathematics. His academic career was successful, but writing increasingly occupied his attention while he was there. He edited and contributed parody and commentary pieces to the university magazine Granta.
* After graduating in 1903, aged 21, Milne moved to London to pursue a career as a writer. His big break came in 1904, when Punch began to publish his essays, poems and short stories.
* Milne joined the Punch staff in 1906, eventually becoming assistant editor. The magazine was one of Britain’s leading sources of humour and satire, and his work included pieces that were loosely based on his life. He wrote wryly of seaside trips, cricket matches, dinner parties.
* His first published book was Lovers in London (1905), a collection of short, linked vignettes set across iconic London locations.
* During World War 1, Milne served and was wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Later, he was recruited into the government’s military intelligence department MI7(b), and wrote propaganda intended to influence public opinion.
* After the war, Milne found fame as a playwright. Among his theatrical successes was the comedic play Mr Pim Passes By (1919), about a surprise visitor. The Red House Mystery (1922), his only detective novel, was a favourite of Agatha Christie, and sold briskly too. Set in an English country estate, it revolves around a locked-room murder that draws an amateur sleuth into the investigation. By the time of his first Winnie-the-Pooh book in 1926, he had 18 plays and three novels to his name.
* Around this time, he and PG Wodehouse became fast friends. They both invested in Ian Hay’s successful stage adaptation of Wodehouse’s 1919 novel, A Damsel in Distress, which opened in London in 1928 to massive commercial success.
* This friendship would come to a strange end, after Wodehouse made a series of cheerful broadcasts while in German custody during World War 2. Milne denounced him in the harshest of terms. Wodehouse, who felt he had had no choice, was deeply hurt by this.
* In 1949, he hit back, with Rodney Has a Relapse, a story about an author who starts to write poems about his son. “Do you know where Rodney is at this moment,” he wrote. “Up in the nursery, bending over his son Timothy’s cot, gathering material for a poem about the unfortunate little rat while asleep... Horrible, whimsical stuff, that... Well, when I tell you that he refers to him throughout as “Timothy Bobbin’, you will appreciate what we are up against. I am not a weak man, but I confess that I shuddered.”
* It didn’t end there. Wodehouse famously said “nobody could be more anxious… that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose bootlace and break his… neck.” He also penned parodies of Milne’s poems. One went:
“Timothy Bobbin has ten little toes.
He takes them out walking wherever he goes.
And if Timothy gets a cold in the head,
His ten little toes stay with him in bed.”
* He wrote that the tales would come to haunt the little boy, and in this at least, he was prophetic. The adult Christopher Robin would later say: “It almost seemed to me that my father had got to where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”
* Christopher Milne spent much of his adult life trying to extricate himself from this shadow, eventually opening a small bookstore in Devon and refusing to accept any royalties from the Winnie-the-Pooh franchise. Some traditions would continue. Just as his father had read Wodehouse to him when as a child, he would read Wodehouse to his daughter.
* Interestingly, the Pooh we know comes largely from TV and film. In 1930, American comic-strip artist and producer Stephen Slesinger purchased the US and Canadian merchandising, TV and recording rights to Winnie-the-Pooh from Milne. In 1932, his team drew Pooh wearing a short red shirt, and this became the image that stuck. EH Shepard’s illustrations for the books were far more minimalist.
* There would be a few more twists in the tale. In 2000, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a paper titled Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood, clinically profiling Pooh and his friends. It was meant as satire, but it stuck. Decades of pop-psychology have since declared that Piglet has anxiety; Eeyore, depression; Tigger has impulse-control issues, and Rabbit has compulsive traits.
* In 1982, Benjamin Hoff published The Tao of Pooh, a bestseller that used Milne’s characters to explain the principles of Taoism, with Pooh cast as an example of the “uncarved block”, a person who achieves through simplicity and effortless action rather than striving. It spent over a year on The New York Times bestseller list and was followed by a sequel, The Te of Piglet (1992). Reportedly frustrated that royalties from the book went to the Milne estate and its licensees rather than to Taoist causes, Hoff became notably reclusive about promoting his own work.
* In the UK, Winnie the Pooh Day is celebrated annually on January 18, Milne’s birthday. The author died in January 1956, aged 74. In books and exhibitions, his beloved bear would go on to meet the queen, add a penguin to the brood, feature at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He remains one of the most recognisable characters in the world. The rights to the franchise, however, have belonged to Disney since 2001.
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and, occasionally, technology)
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IF YOU GO DOWN TO THE WOODS TODAY...
There are some friends we make, as children, who stay with us all our lives. Often, they come from the early books we read. William. Alice. Christopher Robin.
They dwell in a sunlit, unchanging past. Their adventures continue, gently chaotic.
Here’s a little reminder of who dwells in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Christopher Robin: “We are all going on an expedition”
Christopher Robin is the dependable figure in the Hundred Acre Wood. He’s the one Pooh goes to with problems. The one who writes the signs outside the “wise” owl’s door. He is kind, affectionate, patient, and accepting of the flaws of his little group of animal friends. Yet he is also very much a child, happy to play make-believe and embark on silly schemes alongside the others.
Winnie-the-Pooh: “I am a bear of very little brain.”
It’s a simple statement, simply made, and says all one needs to know about Winnie-the-Pooh. He likes honey. He enjoys making up little songs and going on adventures. His charm lies in his earnestness. If he gets into trouble, he knows his friends will help him out. Being a bear of “very little brain” doesn’t trouble him. It’s just what he is. He is ruled by simple pleasures; he means well, and approaches life with contentment, even when plans go comically wrong. He is often also accidentally wise, stumbling into truths through sincerity rather than intellect.
Piglet: “Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
We’ve all felt like Piglet: Anxious, afraid of the unknown, threatened by a world that seems dangerous and unpredictable. Yet, Piglet is incredibly brave. All his fear will not stop him from defending his friends, whether against packs of Woozils and Heffalumps, hives of angry bees, or a giant storm. Piglet’s defining feature may appear to be anxiety, but what truly defines him is loyalty. He doesn’t overcome his fear; he finds the courage to continue despite it.
Tigger: “Tiggers don’t like honey.”
Boisterous and rambunctious, Tigger bursts into every scene with boundless energy and a total disregard for safety or risk or reality. He insists there’s only one wonderful Tigger in the world. Of course, he revises his opinion when he sees another Tigger, his own reflection. It’s a recurring theme. Tiggers like to eat everything. Except honey. And haycorns. And thistles. Tiggers can do anything. Like fly. But they don’t want to. Or jump. But not right now. His exuberance is infectious. This is simply how he sees the world, and you have to love him for it.
Eeyore: “Thanks for noticing me.”
He’s always worried. What if the worst that can happen, happens? Eeyore’s complaining is used for comic effect, but this often overshadows his greatest quality: generosity. He is willing to give up his favourite thistle patch for Tigger. He builds himself a house, not just for shelter, but because he doesn’t want his friends to worry about him being cold in the snow. In his quiet way, he brings out the best in others, even as he whines about what tomorrow may bring.
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WORDS TO GROW BY
*On being wrong, and being loved anyway
“I have been foolish and deluded,” said he, “and I am a bear of no brain at all.”
“You’re the best bear in all the world,” said Christopher Robin soothingly.
* On courage
“It is hard to be brave,” said Piglet, sniffing slightly, “when you’re only a very small animal.”
* On accepting differences
“I wish I could jump like that,” (Pooh) thought (watching Kanga bound away). “Some can and some can’t. That’s how it is.”
* On patience
For (the grown-up stream) knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”
* On friendship
“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”
