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

by Shirley Harrison

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  Remember When

  An imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Shirley Harrison 2011

  ISBN 978 1 84468 078 8

  ePub ISBN: 9781844683208

  PRC ISBN: 9781844683215

  The right of Shirley Harrison to be identified as Author of this work

  has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

  any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying,

  recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from

  the Publisher in writing.

  Typeset in 12pt Bernhard Modern by Mac Style, Beverley, East Yorkshire

  Printed and bound by MPG Books Group

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation,

  Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military, Wharncliffe Local History,

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  Seaforth Publishing and Frontline Publishing.

  For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

  PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

  47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England

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  Contents

  Pooh Preface

  Explanation: Hand In Hand

  Chapter1: A Bear is Born

  Chapter2: A Present for the Baby

  Chapter3: Introducing Moon, Blue, Daff and Nou

  Chapter4: When They Were Very Young

  Chapter5: Winnie the Who?

  Chapter6: Pooh and Friends

  Chapter7: Hand in Hand

  Chapter8: Home to Hartfield

  Chapter9: Pooh’s Corner

  Chapter10: His Fingers Blew Across the Page

  Chapter11: Pooh is the Spur

  Chapter12: The Doldrums

  Chapter13: War and Peace

  Chapter 14: The Immigrants

  Chapter 15: Winnie the Star

  Chapter 16: Home Again

  Chapter 17: Turmoil

  Chapter 18: The Shop at Pooh Corner

  Chapter 19: Pooh the Philanthropist

  Chapter 20: Poogle it for Fun

  Chapter 21: Don’t Ever Forget Me

  A Pooh Lifeline

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Pooh Preface

  YOU MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT there was nothing left to say about Winnie the-Pooh. But of course there always is and Shirley's Expotition takes us into unexpected and exciting new territory. She explores not only the past but looks also to the future and the long overdue possibility of a permanent memorial to a national icon.

  We can visit the factory where Pooh was made in 1921 and the store where he was bought 90 years ago as a present for baby Christopher Robin. We are introduced to some of the people who knew him in the magical world of Hartfield in Sussex. Her journey then follows Pooh over the Atlantic after World War II. There he became a touring celebrity, eventually inspiring the Disney Corporation to make him an international film star. He never returned.

  As companion to Ann Thwaite’s impressive biography of Milne, Shirley’s perceptive, affectionate approach is extremely welcome. The fictional Pooh is never likely to be forgotten but we now have a book which tells so much more than even his faithful readers know about the original teddy bear.

  I was personally delighted too, that Elliott Graham, the American editor at Dutton in New York, is acknowledged for the first time. He published my own early novels and became a close friend for many years. This stout and growly man did more than anyone else to ensure the real bear’s survival. For over 40 years Elliott cared for Pooh and kept vivid, detailed diaries covering his travels with him around America. They have never before seen daylight until Shirley was invited to read them by Elliott’s niece, Judy Henry.

  In 2009, Egmont published my sequel to A.A. Milne’s classics – Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. In it I imagined a more grown-up Christopher Robin returning to the place and friends of his childhood. The only newcomer to the Forest was Lottie the Otter. The next year I travelled to New York to introduce Lottie to the real Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood. Ricketty and threadbare now, like so many of us, but still disarmingly loveable, they are all now living in retirement in the Children’s Department of New York Library.

  It is a curious tale when you consider it. Milne never regarded his Pooh stories as significant compared to his other books and plays. Yet these are little regarded these days. His son had, to put it tactfully, mixed feelings about the fame Pooh had brought him too. It is a bitter sweet story. Daphne Milne, on the other hand, was delighted that the books were so successful because of the opportunities which then arose for her to decorate their home in Mallord Street and to take annual trips to New York.

  At the epicentre of all this kerfuffle is a small teddy bear. But who owns him today? No one is sure. And how can it be that it is due to him that Westminster School and the Garrick Club in London look so elegant, or that indigent writers everywhere can occasionally afford a night on the town? On a personal note, I owe the Milne Trust plenty and have not only benefited from the royalties from Return to the Hundred Acre Wood – a new fridge-freezer – but have received funds to enable me to finish a novel (as yet unpublished) and to teach overseas students at Goldsmith’s College how to improve their essay-writing skills.

  Pooh’s philanthropy – like to see him try to spell that! – and the billions of pounds he has raised to help charitable causes and bring happiness to so many needy people, is an important part of Shirley’s story. They are the reason why, at last, there is a move afoot for Arctophiles everywhere to muster support for a statue or maybe a museum to honour him – perhaps on Ashdown Forest where it all began.

  David Benedictus

  Explanation: Hand In Hand

  AT THE OUTBREAK of World War II in 1939, before he left to join the army, my father gave me a set of four books by A.A. Milne. When We Were Very Young, Winnie-the-Pooh, Now We are Six and The House at Pooh Corner were first published in the years between 1924–8. Those books, their covers now a fading blue, the pages yellow at the edges, have been with me, wherever I have been, all my life. I read them to my children, then to my grandchildren and now my great-grandchildren. They all laugh with me, even if they do not always appreciate the gentle humour, the wit and innocent but profoundly perceptive approach to life of Pooh and Piglet, Tigger, Kanga, Owl, Rabbit and Eeyore, just as I still do.

  Embarrassing to recall that my friends and I even assumed their names and that I, being the oldest, was Christopher Robin. More embarrassing still, now in our sixties and seventies, when we greeted each other recently at my niece’s wedding the power of Pooh was undimmed. ‘Hi Piglet’, ‘Hi Tigger!’, ‘Oh Robin, how good to see you!’

  By a twist of fate, in 1962 my late husband and I moved to the Sussex village of Hartfield on the fringes of Ashdown Forest. Looking back, it is hard to credit that, when we first moved in, I did not realise that Hartfield was the home of A.A. Milne, his wife Daphne, their son Christopher Robin and the teddy bear who eventually became Winnie-the-Pooh. Our Forest was the inspirational setti
ng for the magical illustrations of E.H. Shepard. I was not alone, for although those books were loved by children and grown-ups all over the world very few knew, even then, that the stories were about real people, and real toys or that Pooh’s forest was a real forest.

  Soon after we arrived in Hartfield, I learned that A.A. Milne had died, at Cotchford Farm in 1956, and that his widow was still living there. Christopher Robin himself was married and running a bookshop in Devon.

  And Pooh? Well, with A.A. Milne’s agreement he had, surprisingly, emigrated to the united States at the end of World War II and was then living with Tigger, Kanga, Piglet and Eeyore in the New York offices of his American publisher, E.P. Dutton.

  Despite growing international fame, in his homeland of Hartfield itself there were still no notices on the Forest, no mention of Pooh’s life in local history books, no signs recording that ‘A.A. Milne Lived Here’. The shop, known today as Pooh Corner, was still the village bakery where Christopher Robin bought his bulls eyes. And the remote and crumbling bridge where Pooh and his friends invented the game of Poohsticks was a peaceful haven known only to local folk and seldom visited by them. The ‘Enchanted Place’ on top of the Forest was still magical. Tourists were rare enough to be stared at. All this was about to change.

  In 1961, after her husband’s death and because she admired Walt Disney’s work, Mrs Milne had astutely, if controversially, licensed the motion picture rights in Winnie-the-Pooh to the Disney Corporation.

  Five years later the company produced its first cartoon – Winnie the Pooh And The Honey Tree – which began the transformation of the bear of not so little brain into the multi-billion pounds a year juggernaut that he eventually became.

  English through and through, the cartoon bear that the original bear inspired is, today, the Disney Corporation’s hottest property. He has his very own place on Hollywood’s Pavement of the Stars. He is richer even than Queen Elizabeth II herself.

  That year – 1966 – with a group of friends I started a pre-school playgroup in the village and not long afterwards Mrs Milne sold her lop-sided Tudor farmhouse to an American family. Before she left I went to interview her for the magazine Sussex Life, hoping, perhaps naively, that residents would like her to share with them the story of Winnie-the-Pooh, their furry local hero.

  The elegant Mrs Milne was not particularly popular in the village. The Milnes were not churchgoers – quite the reverse – and Daphne appeared to be rather distant and somewhat snooty. Most of their friends had hailed from London’s literary scene and they did not mingle at village fetes or flower shows, although their gardener, George Tasker, had been very proud of the produce he exhibited from their garden.

  We sat in the comfortable living room of Cotchford Farm, as she talked enthusiastically about her role as the voice of Piglet and of the hidden heartache the bitter-sweet success of the books had brought them all. Then we walked around the garden watching real-life rabbits lolloping on the lawns, and sauntered among the bluebells and little streams that fed the river itself, as she remembered those early days.

  ‘We had no idea when we first sat making Pooh and Piglet voices that those terribly English toys would amuse other families so far away’, she said. ‘But I suppose that my husband’s dream characters had the faults and foibles of all people, whether they live in igloos or wigwams’.

  Then, in 1976, I heard that Christopher Robin’s teddy bear himself was coming to London for the 50th anniversary celebration of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. I wrote to his English publishers, Methuen, and asked them to allow him to return to Hartfield, so that we could photograph him with the children of the village playgroup in some of his favourite ‘warm and sunny spots’. Amazingly they agreed! Pooh was coming home.

  There were to be two events that June. The first was with our playgroup, where Pooh was to be filmed by television. This was to be followed by a giant Teddy Bears’ picnic at Forstal Farm, in the next door hamlet of Withyham. The hosts were actress, Joan Wood, and her husband, Alan, who was a member of A.A. Milne’s favourite, Garrick Club.

  Three years later, in 1979, children in Hartfield were queuing up to buy a special commemorative eleven pence stamp issued by the Post Office to mark The Year of the Child. It illustrated their very own Winnie-the-Pooh – the Pooh they had met and played with only a few years before.

  The great Disney take-over created a new character that many of Pooh’s original devotees regarded as sacrilege. The animations did not look much like the original, innocent, rather wistful book illustrations by artist E.H. Shepard, who thought they were a travesty. They looked nothing like Christopher Robin’s toys and WORSE – they spoke American!

  In truth, Pooh the film star has generated even greater fortunes for all who flocked to dip into his golden hunny pot. Much of this income from film, books and merchandise has today been diverted to charities raising funds for an impressive range of causes for both adults and children. Disney’s Pooh has also touched the hearts of a new generation who have come to love him and don’t much mind if he has strolled off the pages of a book or a cinema screen.

  To A.A. Milne’s own great regret, the extraordinary acclaim accorded those four books totally overshadowed his literary work as an internationally respected and popular dramatist and author. He admitted ruefully, in a poem, that he had brought Winnie-the-Pooh to life little thinking that his prolific output would be eclipsed by these ‘four trifles for the young’. E.H. Shepard, too, lived to regret that much of his later work as a brilliant artist had been sabotaged by ‘that bear’.

  Sadly the boy who grew up to be Christopher Milne, a Devonshire bookseller, also felt overshadowed as an adult by the fame of his once-loved teddy bear.

  Recently Pooh was made an Icon of the World, yet few of his faithful followers, young and old across the globe, realise when or how, or even where, it all began. unlike Harry Potter, or any of the characters in the best loved children’s classics, such as Mole or Toad in The Wind in the Willows, Rupert Bear, Paddington or Babar the Elephant, Pooh is not fiction.

  The rather threadbare Winnie-the-Pooh himself lives on, celebrating his 90th birthday in 2011 in the Donnell Children’s Centre of the magnificently ornate New York Public Library. Adults and children press their noses to the glass of his retirement home and write their thoughts in the visitors’ book. He has even been invited to witness the engagements of couples who love to be photographed in his company. They, at least, know that he is real, although very frail now and so none is privileged, as our Hartfield pre-school children were in 1976, to hold him by the paw.

  Those children are grown-up, and package tourists – especially from Japan – pour into their village to pay homage and sometimes to do battle with residents, many of whom still resent the increased traffic and the crowds infesting their Forest.

  On the final page of the last book, The House at Pooh Corner, as Christopher Robin prepares for boarding school, he and Pooh make a pilgrimage together to the Enchanted Place on top of the Forest. There, sitting under the trees among the pine needles, he breaks the news to Pooh that he won’t be able to do ‘Nothing any more’ because ‘they don’t let you’.

  ‘Pooh, promise you won’t forget me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.’ Pooh thought for a little. ‘I promise’, he said.

  Despite the razzmatazz that has surrounded him, despite the happiness and the riches he has generated, despite the controversy and feuding behind the scenes, the true story of the real teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and of his life has never been told. After all he is just a stuffed toy in a book – or a cartoon – isn’t he? He cannot be found on Facebook, can he? He doesn’t breathe, does he? He was not really born, was he? He can’t really speak – and yet………

  Once upon a time an anonymous teddy bear set off, from a factory in a north west London suburb with a van-load of similar bears and other toys. His spectacular journey was to take him into the hearts of people of all ages, around the world and that is where we will
join him first – in Acton where it all began.

  Chapter One

  A Bear is Born

  DURING THE NINETEENTH century the character of Acton changed rapidly. Once a rural farming community famed for its healing wells, by the end of that century it had acquired the nickname of ‘Soapsud Island’. This was due to the proliferation of laundries (servicing the smartest hotels of London’s West End): in the twenty years from 1873 their number had risen from sixty to at least two-hundred-and-twelve. By the 1920s, Acton was also to become home to one of the largest concentrations of industry in the south of England and was known as Motor Town.

  Previously an Agent for Servants, it was there, in 1871, that Joseph Kirby Farnell started a new business following the Victorian fashion for fancy goods – such as tea-cosies, pin-cushions and elaborate cards for all occasions. This would almost certainly have included a limited selection of toys.

  The Farnell name is all but forgotten by the general public today, although its memory is hugely respected by toy trade magazines and writers. Kathy Martin’s excellent book, Farnell Teddy Bears, places the company, for the first time, in its true historical context.

  Until the middle of the nineteenth century, toy shops were few and far between and even then were found only in larger towns and cities. They would have stocked games and dolls and some mechanical animals such as bears or donkeys on wheels which were scary rather than cuddly. The concept of childhood had not yet been fully appreciated. However, it was the growth of department stores during the second half of the century which had offered new and exciting marketing possibilities.

  The best known centre for toys in London was Lowther’s Arcade, off the Strand, a glass-covered walkway which was described by the writer George Augustus Sala in 1861 as ‘the toyshop of Europe’. It was a magical place in which the ‘honest, hearty, well-meaning toys of Old England’ were contrasted with those somewhat eccentric items from Germany and the fierce war-like products of France – all blood and glory.