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

by Shirley Harrison

  With Moreton as founder-member, Nancy had recently launched the ‘Take a Teddy to Tea Club’ in New York’s very smart, literary Algonquin Hotel. Meetings were to be held annually to honour A.A. Milne’s birthday, on 18 January. Winniethe-Pooh had replied to that first invitation that he would be delighted to come.

  Earlier, in the baking heat of 27th July, Elliott took Pooh down to the Algonquin (his favourite hotel) where Nancy was staying. The Manager admired Pooh’s travelling bag. ‘Really!’ wrote Elliott, sarcastically, in his diary. ‘He sees bags all the time.’

  On Concorde with Moreton Hampstead sitting at his side, Pooh, unusually travelling without Elliott, was treated as a VIP and was taken on to the flight deck and presented with a certificate signed by the Crew. The Captain, who obviously knew to Whom he was talking, had written ‘Concordes are faster than Heffalumps’.

  On arrival in London, Nancy and the bears took up residence at the Savoy Hotel in the River Suite, where they were welcomed by Mr Bashford, the hotel commissionaire. He bowed politely and invited Pooh to ‘Come along Edward’.

  Also staying at the hotel on that occasion were Peter and Diane Dennis. Peter was by this time well known in England for his broadcasts and public readings from A.A. Milne’s books.

  The couple were living in London and had been invited to the teddy bears’ tea party Nancy was planning for the following day in the Savoy’s elegant ballroom.

  An arctophile is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a ‘lover and collector of teddy bears’. The word is exactly the same in most European languages.

  Arctophile actor Peter Bull was naturally there too, with about thirty other guests and their bears. While they were all enjoying themselves, the cream-coloured telephone rang.

  It was Christopher Milne! He said that he was very sorry that he had not been able to accept the invitation, so Nancy asked him, ‘Would you like to speak to Pooh?’ To which he replied – ‘Oh, I’m too old – he won’t remember me!’

  ‘Pooh loved London’, says Nancy. ‘Especially travelling in black cabs, although he was much impressed by the occasional limousine.’ During that two-week holiday, he stayed in a number of very smart establishments such as Brown’s. He also took tea in Claridge’s elegant restaurant in Brook Street and at The Ritz and Simpsons. When it was not appropriate for a bear to join the party, he would remain reclining on the chaise longue in Nancy’s suite at the Savoy, overlooking the Thames.

  As a treat he was taken out sight-seeing when he was always the centre of attention. ‘Wherever we went children recognised him and were thrilled to be introduced’, Nancy recalls today.

  Pooh returned to a New York sweltering in temperatures of 94 degrees. He was taken by Nancy to Tiffany’s for a little ‘smackerel’ and then, with Moreton alongside, on to Dutton’s. Elliott was somewhat stunned by her dramatic all-black attire and large black glasses and by her gift – a jar of orange marmalade from Paddington bear!

  Nancy admits that she had thought of kidnapping Pooh: ‘I really felt that he belonged there in England’, she says and being an honourable person, she had rung Dutton in New York to suggest the plan but Elliott said ‘No. It’s too late now’.

  It probably was too late. That year in America, Dutton saw the beginning of a period of turmoil within the company largely because they were losing money and were ripe for a take-over. It was a time which has been described since, by many of those who were there, as a bloodbath.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Turmoil

  BY 1981 ELLIOTT’S DIARY had begun to reveal profound and sad changes in the ageing man. He was not well and was becoming increasingly aggressive about many of his colleagues at Dutton. The frequent colourful expletives in his diary are unrepeatable. There were also signs of discontent and job losses, too.

  Dutton was no longer a happy ship. In fact one of the Directors described the company as ‘the Titanic’ but there was one topic of conversation that united them all. What would happen to Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends?

  Elliott wrote:

  1981 Tuesday March 17th

  Cold

  … our Mail Room is decimated in fact it has all but vanished. I unbolted the glass that protects Winnie-the-Pooh and friends from the public and had a photographic session with Edward T. Bear in my office.

  However, at the end of May Elliott abandoned Pooh to take his annual visit to London but he seems to have carried his anxieties with him. For the first time his stay was ruined by bitterness, anxiety and increasing ill-health.

  He met some of his usual friends and visited writer David Benedictus and his family, who he describes as ‘the Benedicti’. David gave him a copy of the Athenaeum edition of the Antique Collector’s Guide inscribed ‘For Elliott with love, happy memories and more to come. David. Derby Day 1981.’

  In June he wrote despairingly:

  1981 Sunday June 21st

  Cold

  For a week I’ve been anxious to get the hell out of here, and right now I’m counting the minutes!

  The next day he added: I’m not anxious to go back, ever.

  1981 Wednesday June 24th

  Fair

  Back to the office. Jane tells me that a couple of banks are now involved in selling us to a mysterious individual who owns a big corporation and she thinks it is going to be another month before we’ll know.

  On Wednesday 14 October 1981 the directors of Dutton assembled to be introduced for the first time to ‘our new high lords’. They were Charles Dyson, who owned the Dyson Moran Corporation, one of America’s richest men, and his son John, financier, today Chairman of Millbrook Capital Management and owner of Millbrook Vineyards, with an understandable passion for good wine. He was later to become Deputy Mayor to Rudolph Giuliani and had been a cabinet officer in New York State, holding the positions of Commissioner of Agriculture, Commissioner of Commerce and Chairman of the New York Power Authority. He was also said to have developed the ‘I Love NY’ advertising campaign for the State.

  By 1981, he was looking for a publishing company to add to his portfolio and was about to acquire Dutton with their entire book list, their spectacular gallery of world famous authors and the somewhat incongruous quintet of stuffed animals from England with their leader, the priceless Winnie-the-Pooh.

  Pooh presented no problem to John Dyson who had loved the Milne stories himself as a child and whose young daughters were growing up with him as their bed-time reading.

  It is heartwarming that amidst the upheaval of high finance and executive discussion there was constant concern at Dutton about the welfare of the Milne animals. No-one knew the answer to the big question – ‘WHO owns Pooh?’

  Elliott wrote in his diary that Dutton had bought the animals from Mrs Milne. But there were others who were equally sure that this was not so and that the Publishers were merely their Trustees and legal guardians and that they should probably have gone home years before.

  Despite the uproar surrounding them, Pooh himself had been happily earning his keep and was certainly in no danger of redundancy, while Elliott continued to chronicle their movements in his diary:

  1981 Thursday August 6th

  Hot

  Chicago Public Library asked Mimi Kayden if they could have Winnie in October and I was delighted to say “Yes”. It will be his first expedition to the hinterland since last year’s trip to Atlanta. Incidentally, Christopher Robin is to unveil a statue to Pooh at the London Zoo in October, so I’ve written to Methuen for more information.

  1981 Sunday September 20th

  Fair

  The day of the Fifth Avenue Book Fair…… I dressed in some of my Fall finery. I marched up Vanderbilt and Madison Avenue and soon I was at our booth at Fifth and 53rd (NE Corner) – Pooh House, I guess – anyway it was Too Much but who cares. I heard a man exclaim over it approvingly and that is what counts. The Pooh animals were lost in it. All we needed was a sign ‘The Original Winnie-the-Pooh’ … Really the “Fair” is dreadful but I enjo
yed the event!

  1981 Thursday October 1st

  Cold

  I must be losing my mind – or lost it yesterday – for I forgot to mention that I spent half an hour on the phone to Chicago answering questions about Winnie-the-Pooh. I talked with the Director of Public Relations, and it was recorded and the librarian listened in. Winnie is to arrive there on November 12 and great things are planned. They are determined to show Atlanta that they can outdo them. So later I mail my 3 incomparable releases – the ones on Milne, Shepard and Winnie himself.

  To Elliott’s great delight – and pride – because he had masterminded the translation of Winnie-the-Pooh into the Latin Winnie Ille Pu, Edmund McDowell of the New York Times decided to interview him for a feature on that book’s remarkable ongoing success:

  What a wonderful achievement that was! My greatest, and I like to think that no one else in the world could have got it on the Best Seller list for so many weeks. A book in a foreign language – or a dead language at best. Dutton never knew what I was doing, but that made it all the more fun.

  The interview was on the same day – 1981 Friday October 30th (Cool) – that the contract with the Dysons was signed and a new era began.

  On 11 November Pooh was packed unceremoniously into a carton with his hunny bowl and into his usual carrying bag on his way to La Guardia Airport for his trip to Chicago, where he was to be ‘King of the Hill’ at the Chicago Book Week. At the airport he came off the plane ahead of other passengers and was welcomed by Mother Goose and a crowd of children waiting to be photographed with the American Airlines pilot. Next day he was guest of the Mayor at City Hall. The Mayor, too, had read the books to her daughter when she was growing up.

  There was consternation on 24 November when Elliot, waiting for Pooh’s return at the airport, discovered that his protégé was not on the plane! He had missed his flight and had to wait until the following day for Elliott to collect him and the hunny pot and return him safely to his glass home.

  In December 1983, Pooh appeared on Elliott’s lap on the Today programme. ‘The more you look at him the more he comes to life’ said his now also elderly Friend and Companion. ‘I must be crazy but I keep thinking that HE is about to talk.’

  That month, too, he was invited to the usual Dutton’s Christmas party and was introduced to John Dyson’s two daughters – Lee, then ten years-old who had read Willie Ille Pu and Eliza, eight years-old who hadn’t.

  Elliott wrote that ‘they gave every impression of leading very sheltered lives, talked in faint voices. No attempt to sell themselves. With their millions why should they?’

  Their father, like Elliott, had warm feelings for Pooh. However he also had a pang of guilt that they were so far from home. Shortly after he joined the company he says that he made contact with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and offered to return the toys to them but that, astonishingly, they were not interested. He then took them to the palatial premises of his company, Millbrook Capital Management, on East 51st Street and later to his family home where, he says, the children were not allowed to play with him.

  ‘I wanted to keep Pooh in the public eye and didn’t want him to become an asset that could be sold or auctioned.’ Sitting in his New York office thirty years later, with a small crystal model of Pooh bear on the table, he admits – ‘he still makes me smile.’

  The problem of what to do with Pooh erupted again when, in 1986, Dutton became an imprint of Penguin Books.

  Joe Kanon had joined Duttons in 1982 and from 1983 was President. He was part of the team that organised the eventual sale of the company to Penguin.

  While all this was being discussed Joe Kanon kept Pooh safe in a cupboard in his apartment on East 79th Street ‘in dread the whole time that something might happen to him. I did have two young children aged four and one at the time but they were never allowed to play with them, or even touch them as they had become fragile.’ He remembers Elliott as ‘a wonderful man and unofficial historian.’

  John Dyson decided finally to offer the animals to the Donnell branch of New York Central Library. Years later when the Donnell Library closed, they were rehoused in the Children’s Library at 135 East 46th Street.

  Joe Kanon is happy. ‘I go to the Library most days to write and so I pass the animals on my way. We have come full circle. The odd but nice thing about all this who-owned-what business is that it all came right in the end and Winnie and his friends have been well cared for just as we all hoped.’

  The following year a party was held there to welcome the new residents. It was an impressive affair and the guests suitably distinguished for what the New York Times called, in a feature which occupied a whole page, ‘such a historic occasion’ and one in which Pooh became officially an American citizen.

  The President of the Library then was Dr Vartan Gregorian who became 12th President of the Carnegie Corporation in New York. In 2010 he was awarded an honoury degree from Edinburgh university.

  With the bear cradled in his arms, he said: ‘Pooh is the one thing that unites all people of all colours and all races – he is a symbol of hope and joy.’

  John Dyson agreed: ‘He will now be here so that children of all ages can see these magical animals that inspired the original stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the Forest.’

  Naturally, there were refreshments on hand; tea, shortbread and, of course, honey.

  Christopher Milne gave his blessing to the donation of the toys and sent his apologies that he could not be there himself, explained John Macrae III former President of Dutton.

  Of course Elliott Graham was on hand too, as it was such an emotional occasion. ‘If I were an ordinary person, the tears would be streaming down my face,’ he admitted.

  ‘He seems bemused’, observed John Macrae III, nodding toward Pooh, who, sitting on a shelf, was holding court for ‘Assorted-Friends-and-Relations’, photographers and reporters.

  Six year-old Sara Gould of Brooklyn had been given the honour of symbolically accepting Pooh on Behalf of the Children of New York and she hugged him.

  Peter and Diane Dennis were also invited to be part of the fun and that year they, like Pooh had done forty years before, settled permanently in America and went off to live in Shadow Hills, California. So began their eight-year battle for a green card. Eventually, the fact that Peter was the only person authorised by the Milne Trust to perform the Pooh material came to his rescue and his application was finally approved as being ‘in the national interest.’

  Another accolade for Pooh indeed!

  In a letter to Christopher Milne, Peter wrote of the Dutton move to Penguin and described his visit to John Dyson’s home, ‘where the toys were all sitting on a table in the front entrance of his lovely house.’

  In his reply dated 3 March 1987, Christopher admitted: ‘Though I’ve lost touch with those creatures and don’t specially wish to be reminded of them, I feel they would be happier in their native country rather than in the office of an American millionaire financier.’

  Years later in 2009 an article appeared on the Internet by American author, Jenny Boylan. She wrote of her own visit to New York Children’s Library where her first sight of the animals in their new home recalled the time when, as a young would-be student she worked for Dutton. When she saw Pooh again, sitting, a little lop-sided, in his glass home she burst into tears.

  She explained:

  ‘In 1984 when I was at E.P Dutton, one of my friends there was an elderly man named Elliott Graham. Elliott was a grumpy, dignified soul and why he took a liking to me, I can’t tell you. He was a generous, lovely man, with a very dry sense of humor.

  ‘I hadn’t thought about any of this in 25 years, until recently, when I walked into the New York Public Library and there in a glass case were all the Pooh animals, just as I remembered them at Dutton. Even little Piglet, who is not much more than a threadbare pin-cushion. Apparently the animals did, in time, find their way to the library, where they have been ever since
.

  ‘But that’s not why I was crying.

  ‘What brought me to tears was recalling my last day of work at Dutton. I was off to graduate school and a new career. At 4.45, there was a knock on my office door and a very soft, grumpy voice – sure, a bearlike voice – said “There’s someone here who wants to say goodbye to you.”

  ‘I turned to see Elliott Graham standing there in my door, holding Winnie-the-Pooh. He held the bear toward me, and he nodded. “Go ahead,” he said. “It’s okay.’”

  ‘So I hugged the original Winnie-the-Pooh.

  ‘When I was done, I gave him back to him. That was the last time I ever saw him. Elliott Graham looked at me and nodded and said, “Good luck at school”. And he walked away.

  ‘I was lucky to have had that old man as my friend, even if only for a little while, such a long time ago. I would have liked to have called him on the phone one last time and let him know I did, in time, become a writer.’

  Despite his venerable age, in retirement Pooh remained the source of delight and fascination he had always been, not only for entertainers and the young at heart but for learned academics around the world. Serious-minded university students have explored the underlying psychology of it all for their PhD theses and even more serious-minded academics have written learned articles.

  The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff, a writer with a degree in Asian art first appeared in 1982. Basic Taoism is simply a way of appreciating, learning from and working with whatever happens in everyday life. From the Taoist point of view, the natural result of this harmonious way of living is happiness.

  Benjamin Hoff uses Winnie-the-Pooh and the other characters from A.A. Milne’s stories to explain the basic principles of philosophical Taoism. Winnie-the-Pooh, he claims, is a master of psychology – recognised by one of the century’s greatest child psychologists and President of the Psychoanalytical Society, D.W. Winnicott who wrote, ‘one must recognise the central position of Winnie-the-Pooh.’