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

by Shirley Harrison

  The Clare is a unique boat. Based on a Drascombe longboat – a model originally used by fishing boats – she has three sails and has been completely adapted to enable wheelchair access and nicknamed a ‘wheelyboat’. Helen Winchurch, acting manager of the Centre, explains that reservoirs, lakes and ponds are often totally inaccessible to wheelchair users and people with mobility problems.

  This new boat, which will be kept at the South West Lakes Trust Angling and Watersports Centre on Siblyback Lake, will complement the existing boat Echo and provide independent access to the same wide range of waterborne activities enjoyed by able-bodied people.

  The Dartmoor Pony Heritage Trust

  There have been ponies on Dartmoor since the eleventh century. At first they were used to carry tin from the moor but since the sixteenth century they have roamed wild because they were small, fast and agile and so were not large enough to be considered for military use.

  Today these gentle, affectionate animals have become an endangered species cared for and protected by the Dartmoor Pony Heritage Trust. Their size and amenable character make them ideal companions, especially for disabled and special needs people of all ages.

  In June 2009 the Dartmoor Pony Heritage Trust (DPHT) established a pilot project called ‘Ponies Inspiring People (PIP), funded primarily by the Clare Milne Trust and the Big Lottery Fund’s Awards for All. It aims to provide an opportunity for care providers across the South West to access equine-based, interactive, life enriching, educational and inspirational programmes for children and adults with physical and/or learning disabilities. The success of this project has been rewarded by additional help from the Clare Milne Trust for a new purpose-built facility at Parke, Bovey Tracey, Devon.

  The Sensory Trust

  The Sensory Trust was formed to help promote a better enjoyment of outdoors for all disabled people regardless of age, disability or background. Its work with a wide variety of other groups has helped to improve the design and function of many new projects in order to make them easily accessible and enjoyable for everyone.

  The landscaping of The Garden at the centre of the Eden Project in Cornwall aims to create a stimulating, sensuous Mecca where visitors can relax, touch and enjoy the imaginative use of space, colour and scents in a natural setting.

  One of the groups helped by the Sensory Trust is Asperations, a Devonshire charity, which had been established to support children with autistic spectrum disorders and their families. In 2002, it sent a big ‘thank you’ to the Milne family when they became the recipients of a £10,000 gift from the Clare Milne Trust, to help with therapy, outings and basic running costs.

  Chapter Twenty

  Poogle it for Fun

  THE SIMPLE ANSWER TO almost any question today is to ‘Google it’. So try exploring Winnie-the-Pooh, plus whatever the topic of your choice, and you will open up some astonishing and amusing discoveries of varying reliability.

  Winnie-the-Pooh and Hitler

  ‘Operation Winnie-the-Pooh’, was the code name for an alleged plot by the British to smuggle Adolf Hitler from Berlin in 1945. Greg Hallett’s book Hitler was a British Agent, tells the persuasive but unlikely story of his escape. It claims that he left the Bunker at 3.50 p.m. on 30 April 1945 and hid in the bulkhead passage until 8 p.m. ‘Operation Winnie-the-Pooh’ it is claimed, rescued Hitler through the emptied locks of the upper River Spree and then by submarine, boat and plane – destination Spain.

  Winnie-the-Pooh and the Indian Ocean

  On 27 December 2009, 24-year-old Sarah Outen rowed alone into Mauritius. She was the first woman and youngest person to make the journey single-handed across the notoriously unpredictable Indian Ocean.

  ‘Adventures make life real and exciting’ she said, ‘I had known since a youngster that I would live for adventures.’ Her eclectic iPod list was loaded with Winniethe-Pooh, War and Peace, Jane Austen and various adventure books. The music shuffled between Mozart, Queen, the Rolling Stones, the Dixie Chicks, Fleet Foxes and Sigur Ros.

  Winnie-the-Pooh and Barak Obama

  Before he became U.S. President, one of Barak Obama’s key advisors asserted that Winnie-the-Pooh, Luke Skywalker and British football hooligans could shape the foreign policy of the United States.

  Richard Danzig who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and was tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of U.S. strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh, which can be shortened to: ‘If it is causing you too much pain, try something else.’ Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: ‘Winnie-the-Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.’

  Winnie-the-Pooh and the big guns

  Having just survived the Dunkirk evacuation and Battle of Britain, the British did not have an immediate answer to the German artillery threat from France. The high ground to either side of the Port of Dover was fortified on the personal order of the Prime Minister (who had visited to see the situation in person), and large calibre guns dug in there. At first, the only British cross-Channel guns already in place were Winnie and – later in 1940 – Pooh (named after the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the bear Winnie-the-Pooh). These were two 14 -inch (35.6 cm) guns positioned behind St Margaret’s, Kent. They were spares taken from the stock of guns of the battleship HMS King George V. As they needed mountings, one was used from HMS Furious and the other from a test range. Neither was in a turret. Operated from a separate firing-control room, they were manned by twenty-five men of the Royal Marine Siege Regiment.

  These boosted morale. Winnie fired Britain’s first shell onto continental Europe in August 1940 – but proved slow and ineffectual in comparison with the German guns. Together they targeted the German guns (though they were too inaccurate and slow to target German shipping).

  Winnie-the-Pooh and Queen Elizabeth II

  In June 2006 Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 80th birthday with several hundred children in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Among the guests was Winnie-the-Pooh – sadly, not the original Winnie who, at the age of 85 was too old to travel but sent greetings from New York.

  The Palace gardens were transformed into a fantasy land and actors performed a rollicking drama based on Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant about the terrible day the Queen’s handbag was stolen.

  Speaking on the platform afterwards Her Majesty admitted she was relieved to be reunited with her bag as she was never normally without it. ‘British children’s literature has been for many years an extraordinary success story’, she told the crowd, who sang Happy Birthday to her.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Don’t Ever Forget Me

  In 1998 the formidable Mrs Gwynneth Dunwoody, Member of Parliament for Crewe and Nantwich, introduced a question in the House of Commons, in London, which was reported in the very serious official Government journal, Hansard. ‘What plans has the Culture Secretary for the repatriation of Winnie-the-Pooh?’

  It seems he had none.

  Mrs Dunwoody had met Pooh and the other animals on a visit to New York and thought they looked very sad. Like the Elgin Marbles, she declared, they should be in their original home. So she organised a petition.

  Tony Blair and President Clinton were locked in discussion over the possibility of war in Iraq and the Global Economy at the time. unsurprisingly, in reply to questions when Mr Blair appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America, he said that Winnie-the-Pooh was ‘down the agenda’. The White House issued a statement declaring that the subject was not expected either to be on the formal agenda for the President’s meeting with Mr Blair but that it might come up in informal conversation.

  Newspapers in both countries covered the confrontation with banner headlines ‘Free the Hartfield Five!’ they protested in Britain. ‘Pooh on You’ and ‘Brits Ignite a Poo-Haha’ replied the New York Times .

  Mayor Rudolph Guiliani made an emergency
visit to the Donnell Children’s Room and issued a statement. ‘Like millions of other immigrants, Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends came to America to build a better life for themselves and they want to remain in the Capital of the World.’ He said that he had personally assured Pooh that he should not be bothered by the British Parliamentarian who was demanding his return.

  So that was that and Pooh remained an American citizen.

  He had outlived most of those who had been his friends and family.

  Anne (Darlington/Ryde) died in 1958. Blue and Moon and she had been lifelong friends, writing often. Milne himself saved first editions for her and wrote lengthy doggerel verses in them, signed Blue. A copy of his 1950 book of short stories A Table Near the Band, is signed with ‘25 years’ love’.

  Her daughters, Julia and Katie, treasure especially the heartrending sadness of Moon’s own letter to their grandparents when Anne died at the age of only thirty-eight:

  ‘Dear Bill and Marjorie,

  I learnt this morning of Anne’s death. It is almost as though a sister had died.She was so very close to me when we were children and she has remained close to my family ever since. I think she possessed more kindness and sympathy than anyone I have ever known.’

  Remember my affection and admiration for dear Anne, but don’t write back, please.’

  Moon.

  Daphne Milne died, almost unnoticed in London on 22 March 1971.

  Elliott Graham, Winnie-the-Pooh’s devoted guardian, died in 1988. He was in his 83rd year. His charge of forty years was, by then, safely secure in New York Children’s Library.

  Christopher Robin Milne died in 1996. For almost half-a-century he had lived a happy, book-lined, life with his wife, Lesley and their daughter Clare, in the Harbour Bookshop, Dartmouth, Devon. His father’s biographer, Ann Thwaite, wrote an obituary for The Times in which she said: ‘Christopher Milne was a remarkable man who triumphantly survived a remarkable childhood, though not without considerable pain on the way.’

  Finally he escaped the shadows of the past and his three autobiographies The Enchanted Places, The Path Through the Trees and Hollow on the Hill, offer his readers a rare glimpse of a very private, yet inescapably public man and his passion for the countryside, learned all those years ago as a little boy with his teddy bear in Hartfield. He had proved, as Eeyore had claimed, ‘this writing business’ is not ‘all stuff and nonsense.’ He could do it, too.

  Peter Dennis, Pooh’s Ambassador Extraordinary, died in 2009. He had adopted a characteristically courageous, death-defying, attitude to the end, throwing himself into work and life. His last gift to the bear to whom he had devoted so much of his professional life, was a set of recordings of his friend Christopher Milne’s autobiographies.

  Shepard died in 1976. Many years before, A.A. Milne has written a poem which included the words “when I am gone, let Shepard decorate my tomb”: Shepard was never invited to fulfil these wishes and it is rather sad that his own grave bears the drawings not of Pooh and Piglet but of those other much loved characters, Mole and Ratty.

  For A.A. Milne himself there seems to have been no funeral when he died in 1956: there was the rather surprising memorial service for a man who was an atheist, but no recollection among family or friends of what Daphne did with her husband’s remains. The Dictionary of National Biography says he was cremated at Tunbridge Wells: but this is impossible since the Crematorium was not opened until 1959. This launched us on extensive but fruitless investigations around archives in Kent, Sussex and London. As our quest for Pooh’s story was coming to an end, researcher Sally Evemy decided to double check several cemeteries and crematoria. When she telephoned the Downs Crematorium in Brighton they again found there was nothing ‘on the system’. But probing their paper records produced an astonishing revelation.

  The Downs is situated high above Brighton looking out towards the English Channel. It was to here, on 3rd February – a bitterly cold winter’s day, on which the East Grinstead Courier headlined ‘Arctic Spell Hits Road and Rail Traffic’ – that the remains of the genius, A.A. Milne, were driven across Ashdown Forest towards Brighton an hour away. There is no suggestion of a funeral, or of any mourners present. The Crematorium staff say that his ashes were scattered over the upper Memorial Garden.

  Today the only memorials to the author who created one of literature’s great immortals are the blue plaque on his home in Chelsea, that overlooking the slopes of Ashdown Forest and perhaps, most important of all – the elderly British-born teddy bear who inspired him.

  In England, there is to be a new web-site appeal for recognition of the inspiration that Pooh’s life and thoughts have been to so many and the immense contribution his commercial acumen has made to the welfare of the disabled and deprived.

  The problem is, where and what should that memorial be? A statue? A blue plaque? A museum? Could The Elms in Acton where it all began be the ideal setting? Or would the Conservators of Ashdown Forest, perhaps, now welcome the publicity?

  Whatever is decided, whatever happens on the way, the real Winnie-the-Pooh sits safely in his air-conditioned American retirement home welcoming homage from far and wide. Far away across the Atlantic, in Sussex, pilgrims from around the world still follow in his footsteps to the Enchanted Place on top of the Forest, where as A.A. Milne promised all those years ago ‘a little boy and his bear would always be playing.’

  Waiting for Pooh – Shirley Harrison with Hartfield playgroup children.

  Story time with Winnie-the-Pooh and Hartfield playgroup children. (c. Mike Champion)

  Teddies galore! The Farnell factory in the grounds of The Elms in Acton, where Pooh was ‘born.’ (The Toy and Fancy Goods Trader)

  The Elms - the Farnell family home, now Twyford Church of England High School.

  Harrods toy department in 1921 – as Pooh knew it. (c. Harrods)

  Mallord Street, Chelsea –Pooh’s first home.

  Daff with Moon and Pooh. (c. Marcus Adams, Camera Press)

  Nanny Nou in retirement. (The Pitt-Payne family)

  Moon, Blue and Pooh. (Source unknown)

  Lieutenant Colebourn with the bear cub Winnie, who came from Canada to live – and play with Christopher Robin – in London Zoo. (Gord Crossley of the Fort Garry HorseMuseum, Winnipeg)

  London walks. Anne Darlington and Christopher Robin. (Dr Katie Ryde –Anne’s daughter)

  The Orangery at Plas Brondanw, Wales – where A.A. Milne started to write When We Were Very Young. (Robin Llewellyn, Portmeirion)

  Painting of Hartfield as Pooh knew it.

  Welcome to Hartfield! The village sign. (Alex Harrison)

  George Tasker, the gardener who created he gardens. (Peter Tasker, his son)

  Christopher Robin’s playmate, Hannah Symons, who lived in Cotchford Lane. (Tim Rooth, her son)

  The gardens at Cotchford Farm just after the Milnes moved in. (Peter Old)

  Cotchford Farm – much the same today as in 1924 when it was home to Pooh. (Alastair Johns)

  Mrs Jacques ’ bakery – where Christopher Robin bought his bullseyes. (Dawn Boakes, Mrs Jacques’ grand-daughter)

  Christopher Robin in 1929 at the Pageant of Ashdown Forest with the animals. (Trevor Trench, Michael Hall School, Forest Row)

  Posingford Bridge in 1907 – before it became Pooh Bridge – with the men who made it. (Mike Parcell )

  Schooldays. Moon and Anne start school. (Dr. Katie Ryde, Anne’s daughter)

  On Ashdown Forest - where Piglet learned to jump. (Alex Harrison)

  Inside Gills Lap – Pooh’s Enchanted Place. (Mike Ridley)

  The grown ups who, as children, took part in the Pageant of Ashdown Forest. (Angus Beaton)

  Christopher Robin’s first-ever grown-up school bag with his initials inscribed. Given by Mrs Milne to Bill Belton, Mr Rabbit Man. (Alex Harrison)

  Pooh and friends – Eeyore, Kanga, Piglet and Tigger – at home in the New York Children’s Library. (c. New York Public Library – NYPL)

 
The Elliott Graham diaries. (photo Duncan Field)

  Elliott Graham, who looked after Pooh for 40 years. (Judy Henry, his niece)

  Pooh and Elliott’s favourite hotels - the Great Western Royal in Paddington (c. Steam Museum of the GWR) and the Algonquin in New York.

  In 1976 Pooh returns to the Ashdown Forest to play Poohsticks with Peter Taylor from the Hartfield Playschool. (c. Mike Champion)

  Pooh witnesses the engagement of a young couple at the New York Children’s Library. (photo John Peters)

  The late Peter Dennis, the actor who took his performance of Oh Bother to the United States and Britain. (Diane Dennis)

  Children sign the visitors’ book in the Library.

  Pooh accompanied on his travels by American author, Nancy Winters, and her own bear, Moreton Hampstead. (c. Nancy Winters)

  The old bakery today -now Pooh Corner and visited by thousands of tourists from all over the world every year. (Mike Ridley)