Happy 100th, Pooh Bear!

A. A. Milne's classic children's book, Winnie the Pooh, celebrates its centennial this year. The Bear of Very Little Brain is one of the most popular fictional characters of all time.

Winnie the Pooh turns 100 years old this year. Not bad for A Bear of Very Little Brain, as he was wont to describe himself. My folks introduced me to Pooh some 80 years ago, about 20 years after his first appearance, and he and his sidekicks have remained stars in my literary pantheon ever since.

Pooh Bear’s creator A. A. Milne (full name Alan Alexander Milne) also created Christopher Robin, the sole human character in the Pooh stories. A. A. likewise co-created with his wife Dorothy the real Christopher Robin Milne, born in 1920, their true life son who inspired the Winnie the Pooh books.

Pooh is a British bear. The elder Milne based Winnie the Pooh on Winnipeg, a tame and friendly bear in the London Zoo whom his young son Christopher much loved. Christopher’s stuffed teddy bear was originally named Edward, and that remained Winnie the Pooh’s actual name as well in the stories. However, he rarely referred to himself that way, and Christopher Robin always called him Pooh. The “Pooh” came from a swan that Christopher Robin Milne christened with that name.

The other characters in the Pooh stories were also based on stuffed animals in five-year-old Christopher’s toy menagerie: Piglet, Kanga, Roo, Tigger, and the perpetually morose donkey Eeyore. A. A. Milne dreamed up Rabbit and Owl himself.

The fictional Hundred Acre Wood? Milne borrowed it from Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest of East Sussex, England, where the Milne family’s home adjoined its northern edge. A. A. and Christopher regularly hiked its forest paths. As an adult, Christopher commented that “Pooh’s Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical.”

Winnie the Pooh as a character made his first public appearance in a Christmas Eve 1925 poem in the London Evening News entitled “The Wrong Sort of Bees.” The book Winnie the Pooh was published in October 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928.

A. A. had published the nursery rhyme collection When We Were Very Young in 1924, and the second such collection, Now We Are Six, came out in 1927.

The four books together comprise Milne’s best-known writings and are often sold as a single set.

A. A., like some other early 20th Century English writers, had impressively wide-ranging life experiences upon which to draw. He had taught himself to read at age 2, and had H.G. Wells as one of his elementary school teachers. A mathematics graduate of Trinity College at Cambridge, he excelled at cricket and played on a couple of amateur cricket teams, including ones composed largely of writers like J.M. Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and P. G. Wodehouse.

Milne served at the fighting front in France during World War One before contracting trench fever, after which he was transferred to British intelligence as a propagandist. He later served in the British Home Guard in World War Two.

Shortly after the Winnie the Pooh series ended, Milne stopped writing children’s literature, for two reasons. First, he disliked being pressured to write in any one particular genre, including children’s books. And second, he felt “amazement and disgust” over his son Christopher’s immense fame from being the namesake of the child hero in the Pooh books. As he said, “I do not want CR Milne to ever wish that his name were Charles Robert.”

But Christopher couldn’t escape the notoriety, and resented it. Feeling exploited, he became estranged from his parents.

After A. A. Milne’s death in 1956 at the age of 74, the rights to the Pooh books went through various owners before finally ending up in 2001 in the sole hands of the Disney Corporation, which paid $350 million for them. Disney cemented Winnie the Pooh as an international icon.

In the United States, copyright on the four Pooh books expired in the early 2020s. Under British law, the United Kingdom copyright on the prose will expire on January 1, 2027. The original illustrations in the books, however, drawn by Stephen Slesinger, will remain under copyright in the UK until 70 years after Slesinger’s death; in other words, until 2047.

Winnie the Pooh ain’t beanbag. Forbes magazine in 2002 named Pooh the most valuable fictional character of all. Winnie the Pooh merchandise overall generated $6 billion in annual sales in 2005, surpassed only by Mickey Mouse. It’s probably much more now.

And Winnie the Pooh received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2006.

There are spinoffs, too. “In a galaxy far, far away,” as Star Wars puts it, the Ewoks on the forest moon of Endor closely resemble teddy bears, drawing unmistakably on the lovable character of Winnie the Pooh. Youngsters today seem particularly drawn to Ewoks, as I was (and am) to Winnie the Pooh.

There’s just something about teddy bears. One of our granddaughters received for Christmas at the age of 1 1/2 or so a teddy bear named—what else—Teddy. She and Teddy were immediately joined at the hip, and he became a very important part of her young life. He remained there as she grew older.

By her sixth grade, Teddy’s cuddly coat had withered away, he’d lost much of his stuffing, and one button eye had gone missing. The other followed a while later. But she remained as attached to him as ever.

A few years ago, her mom asked Kathy if she would take a crack at restoring Teddy’s woeful appearance to a semblance of his former cuddliness. Happy to give it a try, Kathy undertook the challenge, and was able to make him almost presentable for public viewing.

But he wasn’t the same. Granddaughter was given other bears as substitutes, but the magic wasn’t in them. Teddy remained at home, in repose in her bedroom, after she went away to college

However———

When she was married two years ago, her sister surprised her during one of the festivities by presenting her with good old Teddy, scruffiness and all, and well over 20 years of age, which would be pretty old for a bear in the wild. It was a highlight of the event.

There’s just something about teddy bears, a fact recognized by Christopher Robin, who in the Pooh book series regularly addressed Winnie the Pooh as “Silly old bear.” It was his way of showing Pooh his fondness for him. It’s my endearing mantra for the Milne books as well.