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

by Shirley Harrison

  In his Will he left his remaining rights to a Trust, to be operated for the benefit of his widow, Daphne and then for his son. Other beneficiaries were The Royal Literary Fund for Authors, Westminster School and The Garrick Club.

  The Trust became known as the ‘Milne Trust’ or to outsiders, informally as ‘The Pooh Trust’.

  In New York Elliott wrote in his diary:

  Wednesday February 1st 1956

  Fair

  Mr Milne’s obituaries were in the papers this morning and the Herald Tribune’s story was so beautifully worded, so completely right, that it makes me cry when I read it … pure poetry … I guess the entire world felt sorrier about the death of Mr Milne than Duttons did … but all our executives never read the books, don’t realise he was Duttons most important author … Life is rushing a story on Milne and I think they’ll want to photograph the Milne animals … how fortunate it is that Elliott (Macrae) is in London … And how … Milne has been bedded, hospitalised etc since October 1952 and Daphne wrote in December that she had almost reached the end of her rope … she had a new nurse for him every week, he had such a vile temper. She was never much of a bargain – a real screwball … but how ironic to spend all your life writing and then to have your fame rest on four effortless little children’s books!

  Magazines and newspapers from all over America rang Elliott for pictures of Pooh. Even in death, A.A. Milne was haunted by the shadow of Winnie-the-Pooh. It was Pooh they all wanted. Life ran an article of six-and-a-half pages entitled The World of Pooh, illustrated with Shepard drawings and excerpts from a Milne family album. In Boston a ‘great Milne do’ was organised at high speed in the Public Library, due to the national interest in the author.

  Only two weeks after her husband’s death Daphne was ruthlessly clearing the decks. Alone at Cotchford, she immediately began to empty the house of all his remaining possessions. Pipes, books, golf clubs, albums, letters, photographs were disposed of. She buried a sculptured head of the young Billy Moon in the damp patch that had once belonged to Eeyore. She said she did not want to see it again.

  George Tasker remained as Daphne’s right-hand man after Milne’s death. Daphne stayed on at Cotchford, living mostly upstairs and becoming rather reclusive. Her housekeeper Mrs Wilson was there too until she developed arthritis and Daphne sent her off to an osteopath. She married him and never came back.

  Christopher later reflected sympathetically on his mother’s behaviour that perhaps, if you have memories, you don’t need mementos and that she was probably right to start afresh.

  Meanwhile, the sales of the four ‘Pooh’ books shot up. Elliott Graham recorded 6,400 copies sold in February and 9,100 in March. In April, Dutton astutely raised the price to $2.50 a book!

  Elliott noted:

  Tuesday February 14th 1956

  Fair

  A letter came from Elliott [Macrae] saying that Mrs Milne wants to sell the Milne animals and he’s prepared to offer her $2,500 for them. She’ll laugh in his face and she’ll want 10,000. He doesn’t want them to get into the wrong hands. Hah! Hah! If I were Mrs Milne I’d consult a Texas bookseller to see if some doting oil millionaire wouldn’t care to lay it on the line for his spoiled grandchildren. I’ll bet the subject never would have come up if he hadn’t opened his big bazoo. Ah well – once a dope always a dope.

  Friday February 24th 1956

  Snow

  Elliott sails for home tomorrow, and today we were favoured with a letter … describing the Milne memorial service in rich beautiful prose. It sounded awful, for they played Fraser Simpson’s [sic] stupid songs. And our little fools were indignant because the Royal Family didn’t send a representative …

  Christopher Milne went to the service in an elderly overcoat, much to the indignation of his mother. He only met her once again during the rest of her life. He and his childhood companion Anne Darlington left the church together but his wife Lesley was not there for the very good reason, as he explained, she was pregnant and far away in Devon.

  Later that year their much loved daughter, Clare, was born with cerebral palsy.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Winnie the Star

  IN 1956 THE ANIMALS themselves were, not surprisingly, showing signs of even greater wear and tear, and a representative from the New York Natural History Museum, no less, was called in by Elliott Graham, to discuss what action to take:

  Wednesday June 20th 1956

  Fair

  This fool taxidermist, or whatever he is, will charge $150.00 to repair Eeyore. God knows what he’ll want for the others. It‘s all a great shame. We paid $2,500 for these animals.

  In 1961 Stephen Slesinger’s widow Shirley sold the merchandising rights which A.A. Milne had passed to her husband in 1930. The new owner was Walt Disney.

  That same year in June, Daphne Milne perhaps naively, added complication to complication by licensing the motion picture rights also to Disney. Her decision was to give New York’s now rather bedraggled bear earning-potential beyond imagination. It was also to sow the seeds for what was to become America’s longest-running and most bitter legal battle, the one between the Milne Trustees, the Slesingers and Disney.

  At the time Daphne was confident that she was only doing something with which her husband would have been happy. Always a fan of Disney’s work, he had commented that he would be honoured should he ever want to animate the Pooh stories.

  Their admiration was mutual, for Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, has since explained that when she was a little girl her father often read her the stories at bed-time. It was Christopher Robin’s toy – the teddy bear – that had originally caught his imagination and inspired the films that were to follow. The first film, Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree (without the hyphens) was Disney’s translation of the stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees (with hyphens) and Pooh Goes Visiting. Both were taken from the book Winnie-the-Pooh. The film was released on 4 February 1966. Daphne watched it on television and said she was relieved ‘nothing jarred’. The British press, however, were less benign. The Daily Mail headlined ‘Massacre in 100 Aker Wood’.

  On the other hand, A.A. Milne’s niece, Angela, wrote in Punch, ‘It makes me furious the way people are grumbling over Walt Disney’s version of Winnie-the-Pooh as though they had gone and ruined a masterpiece.’ She went on to tell how even the gopher’s appearance in the film, which upset so many purists, WAS real after all! It appears that the Mid Sussex Herald had reported in 1925 that a gopher had actually escaped from a crate in Brighton and how Moon was sure at the time that he had found one in the garden at Cotchford Farm.

  Walt Disney brought together the many talents of the studio to develop and create a new, if undeniably controversial, masterpiece. His inspiration and supervision made the film a classic: from concept-art, to the storyboard, to the animation, music and voices.

  The original plan was to develop Pooh as a feature-length animated film but Disney decided to break the film into short featurettes. The Pooh stories were still not as widely familiar to Americans as they were to the British and Walt Disney believed that Pooh would be much more popular if he was allowed to build up an American following. He under-estimated their impact.

  In December that year, Walt Disney died from cancer but the empire he had masterminded went on from strength to strength – with just a little help from Pooh!

  The fight for the rights in this furry property ever since has been a nightmare of Hollywood screen proportions.

  Journalist David Rowan, bringing the story of the ongoing saga up to date in The Times Magazine of November 2003, likened the fight between an old school family (the Slesingers and the Milnes) and the unstoppable Disney, to a fight between Eeyore and Tigger.

  In Los Angeles, Case No BCO22365 became the longest-running, most complex lawsuit in the history of Tinseltown’s legal minefield. For over seventeen years some of the most high-profile, expensive show-business lawyers in California locked horns eagerly for a curious pr
ize – a tussle that involved allegations of industrial espionage on one hand and the destruction of key documents on the other.

  That prize? Their share in the royalties generated by the small, now elderly British teddy bear.

  The Disney Corporation had turned Winnie the Pooh into the annual five billion pounds-plus juggernaut he is today, but the descendants and Trustees of A.A. Milne and Stephen Slesinger did battle first with them and eventually with each other over who owed what to whom.

  It is a fact, however, that the great Disney take-over created a cartoon character which, though sacrilege to many of Pooh’s original devotees, in his turn had managed to touch the hearts of a new international generation of children. Pooh is, today, the Disney Corporation’s hottest property.

  Not at all bothered at the eye of the storm, was the original teddy bear who inspired it all and who, through the imagination of A.A. Milne, had become, in the minds of his followers, a cult leader. The world already honoured his name but despite this, few of his followers realised that he was not fiction, neither was he American, as Disney implied. Winnie-the-Pooh was a very real English fact.

  This was the wise and innocent bear who had stomped across Ashdown Forest with the little boy Billy Moon. Over the following years Pooh’s fame brought additional excitements for Elliott Graham. He was thrilled by his first-ever ride in a black Rolls Royce limousine that arrived to collect him with his protégé and he enjoyed many television appearances with Pooh and sometimes the other animals at his side.

  In 1960 Winnie-the-Pooh was first translated into Latin by Alexander Lenard with the enthusiastic support of Elliott. It was illustrated by Ernest Shepard. Winnie Ille Pu remains the only book in Latin ever to grace The New York Times List. It was followed by a companion volume Winnie Ille Pu Semper Ludet. The critics raved once again that Latin is not a dead language and Pooh, as everyone knows, will also live forever.

  It was in 1962 that Elliott was responsible for the publication of The Fourth of June, a book by British author and playwright David Benedictus and the two became friends. They met whenever Elliott came to London, went to the races and the theatre. ‘He was a short stocky man, usually in a raincoat and a homburg hat – always on time’, says David Benedictus.

  In those days, David didn’t share Elliott’s interest in Pooh, so it is somewhat ironic that more than forty years later, in 2009, he was to square the circle and write the Pooh Trust-approved book of stories Return to the Hundred Acre Wood which in its turn became a best seller. The drawings by Mark Burgess had a strangely Shepard-like look about them and the book was another success for Pooh, as it told the story of Christopher Robin’s return to the Forest on a bicycle and wearing not girlish smocks but proper boyish shorts.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Home Again

  FOR POOH THERE WERE to be three memorable return visits to England. The first was in 1969. He was guest of honour at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s celebration for the 90th birthday of Ernest Shepard. Pooh was given red-carpet treatment by British Airways for his flight from New York.

  It was at this celebration that British film and stage actor Peter Dennis was first introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh, the bear that was to transform his life too. He was so enthralled that he went away to write a one-man stage show, which he called ‘Bother!’, based on selections from the four books by A.A. Milne.

  Pooh and his friends, he believed, represented the whole of humanity. Peter captured unforgettably the bear’s ponderous thought processes; the jumpily anxious Piglet (peppered with grunts and snorts); the lugubrious melancholy of Eeyore; the clipped, efficient tones of Rabbit and the pompous grandiloquence of Owl.

  For the rest of his life the actor gave ‘Pooh readings’ in venues that ranged from the Palace of Westminster in London to the Hollywood Bowl. He became the Voice of Pooh.

  After one of these events at the Lee Strasberg Institute, Los Angeles, Charlton Heston, who had been in the audience, went backstage and greeted Peter with a very bouncy ‘Hi! I’m Tigger and this is my wife Piglet.’

  ‘There was Moses reflected in my mirror,’ Peter Dennis told The Times. ‘He wrapped his arms around me and said it was one of the most wonderful evenings he had ever spent in the theatre.’

  The second nostalgic journey for Pooh was in 1976. This was the 50th birthday celebration of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh but it was also, sadly, the year that E.H. Shepard died.

  Elliott’s diary records:

  1976 Thursday May 27th

  Fair

  British Airways building at Kennedy Airport. I received a regal welcome from a Miss Levy as soon as I had checked in; I was told I was expected and that I must go to the Monarch Room, the VIP lounge on the second floor …… The other VIPs were a seedy lot – harassed businessmen and over-age pop singers (my guess) and they were galvanized with attention when 2 men were admitted … to photograph Mr Elliott Graham. He took out of his briefcase a copy of Now We Are Six asked me to sign it for his daughter and with Pooh under my arm I went down to the Security Chief’s to find a pretty hostess for the picture taking.

  1976 Friday May 28th

  Overcast

  So here we are in Paddington again, after 11 months.

  On Saturday May 29th he went to see Betjemania written by David Benedictus at Richmond Theatre.

  1976 Wednesday June 2nd

  Cold

  … Jet lag, room 143, hotel has lost a bit of ground since I was last here, reception area carpet shabbier, the great array of bathroom towels dwindled to face towel and a bath towel. Not even a wash cloth.

  On 5th June (Fair) Elliott Graham had lunch at El Vinos in Fleet Street, with Jan Hopcraft of Methuen, Pooh’s English publisher, to prepare for his return visit to the Forest:

  I am sick when I think of all the things I have to prepare for Pooh’s birthday.

  Referring to the Hartfield playgroup organiser he added:

  Jan thinks the Pooh picnic Mrs Hartfield has set up is a great thing and is trying for BBC coverage. Jan and her husband will drive me down to Hartfield. I wish it were here tomorrow.

  So it was, on the morning of 15th June, that the children stood waiting eagerly outside the former Hartfield railway station, once used by Pooh and the Milnes for steam train journeys to London. The building had lain derelict for years after the line was closed and parents had raised funds to buy and convert it into a home for the village playgroup.

  There were many grown-ups in the village who were very worried that Pooh’s real life appearance might expose the truth they had hidden for years which would end the rural peace and quiet they still treasured.

  Two minutes after midday the film crew arrived and a large black saloon turned into the station yard from which emerged Elliott Graham, carrying his usual home-made travelling bag, with Pooh’s head peeping over the top. Hands were shaken and smiles exchanged and then, once inside, Elliott sat down on one of the little red playgroup chairs and lifted the visitor out to greet the children. Pooh was looking surprisingly well as, awestruck, they came one by one to gently shake his paw.

  This was the first time that Pooh had returned to Hartfield since his departure for America in 1947.

  The film crew buzzed around while the children played with Pooh until he was ready to drive up to the Enchanted Place for more photographs and a game of ‘Poohsticks’ on Posingford Bridge. They all trooped down to the wooden bridge over the river where the game had been invented so many years before. A small blond boy named Peter Taylor who looked just like Christopher Robin and was already known as ‘Pooh’ to his family, took his namesake by the paw and helped him to throw sticks into the water once again.

  Peter lived just up the track in Cotchford Lane and so his mother Mary invited Pooh back for a quick ‘smackerel’ of something in their garden where Pooh, seated comfortably in a high chair, was the centre of attention.

  Back at the station, it was finally time to move on and Pooh was driven away. Sadly he forgot to take the
very large welcome card the children had made for him and which is today looked after as a much-prized memento of that special visit.

  The following Saturday ‘it rained and it rained and it rained.’ The appalling weather revived memories once more of that fateful day when little Piglet had been stranded in his tree house, entirely surrounded by water.

  Pooh returned from London and with a bus-load of press made a nostalgic drive to Cotchford Farm where the owner, Alistair Johns and his wife Harriet had laid on lunch. Playgroup supervisor Sonja LeVay and actor Peter Bull watched them go off for another very muddy photo shoot on Poohsticks Bridge.

  There were five hundred people and their bears present that second day for the picnic at Forstal Farm in the next village of Withyham. The crowds paddled stoically around the deeply muddy field with plastic sheets and umbrellas protecting their bears. A table had been laid for the celebrities: the real-life Pooh sat at the head, with toy bears playing Paddington, Rupert and Mary Plain at his side. There, too, was the elderly author, Gwynedd Rae who had created the loveable Mary Plain from the Berne bear pits in Switzerland, and all the way from Edinburgh came Colonel Bob Henderson, the Teddy Bear historian and arctophile who represented the children’s charity Good Bears of the World.

  This was Pooh in his element, surrounded by Friends and Relations, happily content and with only the incessant downpour to dampen spirits. Not to be deterred, when, eventually, the rain eased, Pooh and his bodyguard set off once again for the Enchanted Place for yet more photographs. Jan Hopcraft planted a tree and arctophile author and broadcaster Brian Sibley, protecting Pooh’s paws in some plastic bags, read stories from Winnie-the-Pooh.

  The last trip, seven years later, on 28 August 1983 was extra special for Pooh who travelled supersonically by Concorde with American author Nancy Winters as his escort. His ursine companion on the flight was Nancy’s own teddy bear, Moreton Hampstead. She had bought him for 5p in a British charity shop and travelled with him to some of the smartest places in the world.