Goodbye Christopher Robin: A. A. Milne and the Making of Winnie-The-Pooh by Ann Thwaite

Author:Ann Thwaite [Thwaite, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: children's lit, biography
ISBN: 9781250190918
Google: 4-guDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250190908
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

He gets what exercise he can

By falling off the ottoman,

But generally seems to lack

The energy to clamber back.

The ottoman was in Billy Moon’s nursery on the top floor at Mallord Street, and the toys slept in there at night. The bear was the absolute favourite, the child’s inseparable companion. Eeyore was already around (a present for Christmas 1921); he was a donkey with a drooping neck which naturally gave him a gloomy disposition. (Soon there would be a real donkey called Jessica in the thistly field beyond the Cotchford garden where later, after the animal’s death, they planted a wood.) There was Piglet too, a present from a neighbour in Chelsea.

There have been many explanations of Winnie-the-Pooh’s name, so many that it is a wonder Milne did not make a story out of them, in the manner of the Just So Stories. There is no question that the Winnie part came from a female Black Bear called Winnie (after Winnipeg), who was one of the most popular animals in the London Zoo during this period. (If you go to the Zoo now you can see a sculpture of a bear cub, which celebrates the link between them.) The real bear had crossed the Atlantic as the mascot of a Canadian regiment, the Princess Pat’s, and had been left on Mappin Terrace in the safekeeping of the Royal Zoological Society in 1914, when the regiment went to France. She lived there until her death in 1934.

Christopher Milne certainly met this bear on more than one occasion. There are various accounts of how he reacted. His father, as reported by Enid Blyton, would say ‘the bear hugged Christopher Robin and they had a glorious time together, rolling about and pulling ears and all sorts of things.’ It sounds rather hazardous. E. V. Lucas was a member of the Society and knew many of the keepers. Through him it was possible to open doors and gates not normally opened to the general public. Laurence Irving, Henry’s grandson, told a story – which had wide circulation in a letter to The Times in 1981 – of a visit to Winnie, when he invited the children of two of his Garrick friends, A. A. Milne and John Hastings Turner, to join his daughter Pamela on her fifth birthday. Mrs Irving’s version was that Pamela, who had a keen sense of smell, had exclaimed ‘Oh pooh!’ on meeting the docile beast; Daphne certainly told the story that Christopher had said the same, but with pleasure rather than distaste, having decided he liked the bear after some natural initial trepidation on meeting the huge if friendly beast. (‘The girls held their ground, Billy wavered, retreated a step or two, then overcame his awe.’) However, the date of the expedition, so firmly fixed by Irving on his daughter’s fifth birthday, makes it impossible that saying ‘pooh!’ to Winnie the bear at the Zoo can have had anything to do with the naming of Christopher Robin’s teddy. Pamela was

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