The Life and Times of the Real Winnie-the-Pooh

by Shirley Harrison

  Ann Thwaite also explained in her very detailed biography that the reality was rather different. Maybe Blue did not really understand his son, but amongst the mountain of correspondence through Christopher Robin’s childhood, she found that there was scarcely a letter from him to any of his adult friends which does not mention the boy with affection. The word ‘love’ too, appears many times. Like so many men, he just did not know how to show it. The grown-up Christopher always admitted that his father wore his heart firmly buttoned up inside his jacket.

  Blue acknowledged his longing to be more widely accepted as a serious writer for adults rather than children. The runaway success of his children’s books later became an ironically difficult pill for him to swallow, and in his autobiography he declared defensively that his observations of children were no more than any serious writer subconsciously absorbs for his creative work. He appears almost rueful that children had seemingly taken over his professional life.

  Christopher Milne believed that there are two sorts of writers – the writer who is a reporter, and the creative writer. One draws on his experiences, the other on his dreams. His father, he said, was a ‘creative writer’ and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that he sought and found satisfaction by writing about him instead.

  Eventually, the teddy bear became the vehicle through which Blue fused memories of his own very happy childhood with his gently perceptive adult look at life. He had a warm, twinkly smile and talked in a way – rather like Pooh did later – that children themselves understood. His invented words like ‘blusterous’ and ‘rissolution’ and use of capital letters for important words like ‘Bother!’ were huge fun. Soon children (and adults) were going on ‘Expotitions’, finding ‘useful Pots to Keep Things In’ and taking ‘Strengthening Medicine’.

  In fact, despite the adult Christopher’s insistence that Blue was not good with children, according to his nieces they loved him.

  The language of the stories, too, makes them wonderful read-aloud books for bedtime or, as so often they were later, on the wireless.

  Christopher Milne’s own delightfully sensitive, humorous autobiographies are the books to read if you really want to understand something of ‘Blue’, the child ‘Moon’, the adult bookseller ‘Christopher’ and the part that the future Winniethe-Pooh was about to play in all their lives.

  Winnie-the-Pooh grew up with Christopher Robin in a financially-privileged and secure cultural circle. ‘A land fit for heroes’ was promised at the end of World War I.

  It was a period enjoyed by some as ‘The Roaring Twenties’ marked by the birth of Jazz, daring bath and bubble parties and the Bloomsbury Set. There was initially a post-World War I economic boom and victory at last for the suffragettes when, in 1928, after years of courageous battling, women were given the vote on the same terms as men.

  But it was a time, too, of gathering clouds, the rise of fascism and massive demonstrations against the terrible working conditions of poor people, the vast majority of whom were struggling underdogs. In May 1926, a General Strike was called in support of the country’s desperate miners. It was a time when Infantry Battalions patrolled the streets of Liverpool and aristocratic young men took over the manning of the railways.

  In America, prohibition meant the banning of the legal sale and manufacture of alcohol between 1920 and 1932, and when the Wall Street stock market crashed on Black Thursday in October 1929, the world economy was plunged into chaos. By the winter of 1932, America was suffering the greatest depression in its history.

  Pooh survived it all.

  Chapter Four

  When They Were Very Young

  YOUNG MOON, NOT HIS teddy bear, lit the spark which was to launch his father on this surprising new and often bumpy road. The first flickerings of the fame to come emerge through a poem he wrote in 1922, when his son was still only two and 'nearly new'. It was the poem that was to cause Moon such agonies of embarrassment when eventually he went away to boarding school.

  It named him for all to see. He was no longer the anonymous Billy Moon. Overnight, he had become Christopher Robin. The infamous poem was called Vespers.

  Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!

  Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

  In fact, Vespers was never intended for children and has been sentimentalised by some adults and castigated by others for its upper-class smugness. Vera Lynn did not really help with her lump-in-the-throat version, which was later repeated time and time again by the BBC in the 1940s. They all failed to appreciate the atheist Milne’s own shrewd irony and gently-amused interpretation of the reality of the situation. It is neither sickly, snobbish, nor is its intention sentimental. It has to be read with a wry, understanding smile.

  Milne had gone upstairs one evening and watched through the nursery door where his young son was merely repeating, parrot fashion, prayers taught to him by Nou. Those words had no meaning for him, mixed in as they were with the much more exciting events of the day, which meant a lot.

  Nou was aware that her employer was looking on and recalled many years afterwards how she heard him chuckling as he went downstairs. She too, failed to appreciate exactly why A.A. Milne was amused. He saw not childish piety but the innocence of his kneeling son, who had no understanding of the God he was praying to and in whom his father had no belief.

  Blue gave the poem to Daff and said that if she found a publisher she could keep the money. She did. The poem appeared first in Vanity Fair, in New York in January 1923. Daphne was paid only $50 but it turned out to be the most rewarding present her husband ever gave her. Eventually it brought in royalties from the copies hanging on the walls of children’s bedrooms around the world and even found its way into a miniature book for Queen Mary’s dolls’ house library.

  In 1922, two years before the publication of his first children’s book, A.A. Milne was already a hugely successful dramatist courted by the press. His play, Mr Pim Passes By, was a hit here and in America, and was reportedly bringing him a healthy income of between £10,000–£26,000 annually.

  There followed The Truth about Blayds and The Dover Road which, with Mr Pim, were earning him then an additional £2,000 annually and were to remain constants in the repertoires of amateur dramatic societies.

  After the fourth and final Pooh book was published in 1928, A.A Milne never properly regained his place as a playwright although he continued writing until the 1950s.

  His last novel, Chloe Marr, written after a break of thirteen years, appeared in 1946 and sold 16,450 copies in Britain and, in America, Dutton printed 30,000 copies while the press referred to its author as the ‘old enchanter’. It was a story which reflected the complex emotions of a father who loved but could not express love, and a son who was killed by a car. Ann Thwaite has written that A.A. Milne understood the painful truth – if the sensitive, competent and talented Moon was to achieve anything after the War, as the adult Christopher Milne, his relationship with his father would eventually have to be sacrificed.

  At about the same time, Blue was approached by his agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, to see if he would be interested in preparing a dramatisation of The Wind in the Willows, written by his friend and idol, Kenneth Grahame.

  He responded: ‘Now you are talking’.

  In fact, because of production problems, the subsequent play Toad of Toad Hall was not staged until 1929. Its acclaim served, to Milne’s deep disappointment, only to boost his own, by then, already huge public success as a children’s writer rather than as the serious dramatist he considered himself to be.

  It was this book, with its brilliantly-conceived characters, Ratty, Mole and Toad from the river bank, that had long won Milne’s admiration and, so he said, had provided the inspiration for Pooh, Piglet and Tigger and the other inhabitants of Ashdown Forest.

  It had been written thirteen years earlier and never achieved the fame Milne thought it deserved. He talked about it to everyone and felt that it should be ranke
d as a classic.

  In the summer of 1923 the Milne family, including Moon and his teddy bear, went on one of their frequent house party weekends, to Wales this time, with a mixed bag of colourful friends.

  With actor and theatre-manager Nigel Playfair and his family, they rented Plas Brondanw in Gwynedd. The beautiful home of visionary architect, Clough Williams-Ellis, Plas Brondanw had belonged to his ancestors since the sixteenth century. It is situated near Portmadoc, between the mountains of Snowdonia and the sea, surrounded by some of the most beautiful gardens in Wales, which were created by Clough Williams-Ellis when he inherited the property in the early 1920s.

  The house was largely destroyed by fire in 1951. It was restored, but few of the thousands of tourists lingering in the exotic grounds today realise that this is the place where the magic spell of Winnie-the-Pooh was first cast.

  Two years later, Clough Williams Ellis began to design the eccentric, Italianate folly of Portmeirion on the coast nearby. Knighted in 1971, his village dream fantasy has become an international retreat for artists, writers and musicians.

  The Milnes and their party were hoping to walk and climb and swim. But the rain was relentless and everyone was bad-tempered and bored. Nou, the threeyear-old Moon, his Bear and friend Andrew, youngest son of Nigel Playfair, were all packed off to the nursery.

  Some time before they left London, Blue had been asked by Rose Fyleman of There are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden fame to write a poem for her new children’s magazine The Merry Go Round. She had read some of his lighthearted verses in Punch. He refused at first, but changed his mind and produced The Dormouse and the Doctor for her.

  The proofs arrived while he was in Wales and saved the day. Milne escaped to the Orangery and finished the editing in no time. So rather than rejoin the endless card games and bickering gloom in the house and because, as he explained, he had a pencil with a rubber on the end and a suitable red-covered notebook – just the thing for poetry – he started to write some more verse for children. He recorded: ‘One need not fear that one is writing too well for a child. No one can write a book which children will like unless he writes it for himself first.’

  The result of that dismally-wet holiday – a collection of children’s poems entitled When We Were Very Young – came as a shock to Milne’s agent and publishers, who were expecting a new detective story. ‘You can imagine my chagrin and disappointment’, lamented his American publisher at Dutton. He should not have worried.

  E.V Lucas, chairman of Milne’s English publisher, Methuen, and the then Deputy Editor of Punch, decided that it would help publicity were Punch to preview the poems. So he commissioned the amiable, child-friendly artist,E.H. Shepard, known as ‘Kipper’ to illustrate them. Three years older than Milne, Shepard had joined the Punch Table in 1921 and had been drawing bears for years. The name ‘Giddy-Kipper’ had been allotted to him as a rather lively young man. The ‘Giddy’ was dropped as he settled into adult life.

  Milne was not amused by the choice – he originally regarded Shepard as perfectly hopeless. However, when the first line drawings for When We Were Very Young were submitted he was delighted and there began a remarkable partnership.

  When We Were Very Young was finally published on 6 November 1924. The book was a phenomenal success. Within eight weeks Methuen had sold 43,843 copies and, in America, Dutton reported a sale of a further 10,000. It was hailed as the greatest children’s book since Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland .

  Who were the ‘We’ of the title?

  Could it, perhaps, as Christopher Milne has suggested, have been that ‘We’ represents the two sides of Milne himself – the child still within talking to his adult other half? A number of the verses are certainly autobiographical, recapturing his own, very happy childhood.

  In the adult Christopher’s mind there was no doubt for whom eventually all four books were written. He later said that when Moon was three, his father was nostalgically three himself. When Moon was six, so was his father. They grew up side-by-side and, as they grew, so the books grew, too, intended in A.A. Milne’s heart, for just two people: Blue and Moon.

  However, When We Were Very Young was not without its literary critics. Words like ‘sentimental’, ‘middle-class’ and ‘self-conscious’ were once again bandied about in some newspaper columns.

  Despite the perfect marriage of Shepard’s drawings with Milne’s text, the two men never became close friends and were always wary of each other. Shepard thought Milne was ‘cagey’ and said that he had to get to know him all over again each time they met. Ann Thwaite rightly suggested that any claim that Milne owed his success to Shepard is misplaced. After his collaboration with Milne there followed his iconic new illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows in 1931. Although prolific later, like Milne, Shepard’s immortality rests on his inspired interpretation of the Forest and the River Bank. Individually there was great talent. Together there was magic.

  Moon – still only four – was now on the threshold of international fame in his real name of Christopher Robin. The book’s dedication reads:

  To Christopher Robin Milne …

  This book which owes so much to him

  Is now humbly offered.

  The bear, so obviously already very much a part of Moon’s life, makes his debut too but only to illustrate some poems as a much-loved teddy. As Ann Thwaite writes, ‘In the spring of 1925 Winnie-the-Pooh was still a toy. He was not even in a story’.

  He is pictured anonymously watching attentively from the landing in Mallord Street as the little boy sits on his own special stair in Halfway Down, falling off the ottoman to get what exercise he can in Teddy Bear, and, of course, as the grand finale in Vespers, lying feet in air on the end of the bed.

  To the family he was still ‘Bear’ or some times ‘Edward Bear’.

  At that stage, Shepard had not been introduced to Moon’s bear and claimed many years later that as he had originally used his son Graham’s teddy, ‘Growler’, as his model for many previous cartoons, he would carry on as usual. Growler was not quite the same shape as the future Pooh – he was not a Farnell bear and could even have been a Steiff model and he never achieved the fame that perhaps he deserved. Later the two bears might have become friends.

  But at the start of World War II Growler was evacuated to stay with Shepard’s parents near Montreal, in Canada, accompanied by Graham’s wife and daughter Minette, who was three years old. Graham himself was drowned when his corvette, Polyanthus, was sunk in the Atlantic.

  In Canada, the unhappy Growler was attacked and mangled by the family poodle and abandoned with only one photograph to remember him by – sitting in a pram with Minette.

  Minette and her mother returned to England briefly in 1943 for a short visit to her grandfather. They came back finally to live in 1947, when they stayed with him in the new house he had built at Shamley Green near Guildford.

  There, Minette would sit in the summer house while he drew. She recalls how her grandfather loved children and how much they loved being with him. But he ‘didn’t have a clue’ about what would happen and was very amused at the way in which the books took off.

  Although she never met A.A. Milne, she was told that he was not very approachable but the grown-up Christopher Robin, although shy, she says, was a ‘witty, delightful man’.

  Today, Chairman of the British Humanist Association, Dr Harry Stopes-Roe remembers the time when, as a very little boy, he sat on Shepard’s knee while he made plasticine models of the animals he was drawing. It was in the second of the four books that Pooh was named for the first time. After the books were published Harry would invite Pooh to his birthday parties and Pooh would always reply although he never found time to join in the fun and Shepard went instead.

  Two of these letters from Pooh fetched £18,000 at auction in 2001. The first, written in 1930 from Pooh and Piglet read:

  ‘We are so sory we can’t come to yuor party’.

  The secon
d says:

  ‘I am very sory that I cannot come to yuor party, I love Punch and Judy but I am rather frigtend but it could be all rite siting near you.

  Love from Pooh.’

  Marie Stopes was a friend of the Shepard family and in the late 1920s often visited their home. Her son Harry, known then as ‘Buffy’, was sometimes with the artist in the summer house when he was working.

  At first Shepard, who was not a great businessman, was paid a flat fee for his work but eventually A.A. Milne, most unusually, offered him a generous share in the ever-growing royalties. Over the years these amounted to a considerable sum as Shepard was continually asked to produce sketches for new and, later, coloured editions and a vast production of merchandise. This continued long after Milne himself had died.

  Shepard’s last commission, at the age of 91 when he was deaf and going blind, was to colour all his original line sketches. By this time he admitted that he was becoming bored with the bear – he didn’t really like him at all. In fact among the final drawings in the archives is one of Christopher Robin, schoolbag in hand, kicking him out of his life.

  Chapter Five

  Winnie the Who?

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE in 1925, the Evening News ran a banner headline on the front page which was to launch Moon's teddy bear into his new life as the celebrity Winnie-the-Pooh. A story, it explained, had been commissioned especially for the paper and was one that his father had told to Moon at bedtime. It was illustrated by J.H. Dowd and was the first in a series of unforgettable tales that were later published under the title Winnie-the-Pooh. The hyphens are there in the original handwritten manuscript and were removed years later by Disney.

  How did he get such a strange name?

  Pooh it seems came first. Blue had his own explanation for the origin of the Pooh.