The strange and fantastic series of events that led to the creation of The Hundred Acre Wood, Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore, and of course, Winnie the Pooh, began not in the English countryside, but in the small lumber town of White River, Ontario in August 1914.
Barely a month into World War I, a group of Canadian soldiers disembarked from a long train ride in White River and were met with the strangest sight: a black bear cub, barely seven months old, on a leash.
The man holding a leash was a fur trapper. He had killed the cub’s mother but took pity on the little bear and decided to see if he could find a buyer for her. The trapper found the ideal customer in Lieutenant Harry Colebourn, a veterinary officer with a major soft spot for animals. Colebourn bought the cuddly bear cub for $20 and decided to name her Winnie, after his hometown of Winnipeg.
Winnie was loving and affectionate and won the hearts of not only Colebourn but all the soldiers. They trained her using apples and a mixture of condensed milk and corn syrup as a treat. She even became their unofficial mascot, following Colebourn around like a puppy and sleeping under his cot.
In October, Colebourn was summoned to England for additional training, so he and Winnie hopped on a boat and crossed the Atlantic. Seven months later, however, Colebourn was called to the Western Front. He was devastated to leave Winnie but knew he could not properly care for her in an active war zone. So, on December 9th, 1914, he left her in the care of the London Zoo, promising to be back in no more than a few months.
Colebourn had no way of knowing the war would last for another four years, nor that Winnie would become indispensable to the morale of the embattled Londoners. She acclimated well to life in the zoo and was so friendly that children were allowed into her enclosure to ride on her back!
When Colebourn returned to London, he realized his beloved little bear was fully grown, and no longer belonged to just him, but to the entire city. One such Londoner completely infatuated with the bear was the son of playwright, A.A. Milne, Christopher Robin Milne.
Christopher Robin was so smitten with Winnie that he changed the name of his teddy bear “Edward” to “Winnie the Pooh”. This second bear would find a home among Christopher’s other toys, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, and Kanga and Roo to name a few.
A.A. Milne, like Colebourn, had served in the war and was left shell-shocked and emotionally distant from his family. Indeed, Christopher Robin’s childhood was a rather lonely one. Perhaps in an attempt to connect with his child, A.A. began writing stories and poems about the toys, giving them a home in the idyllic Hundred Acre Wood.
The first published appearance of Winnie the Pooh came in a collection of poems for children titled When We Were Very Young (1924). Publishers loved it so much that Milne agreed to write three more books. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Now We Are Six (1927), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928).
The books were a massive success, not all of which was for the benefit of young Christopher Robin. The popularity of his father’s books only served to take him away from Christopher, who was mercilessly bullied at school, to the point he began taking boxing classes to learn how to defend himself.
In his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places, Christopher Robin wrote about his “love-hate relationship with my fictional namesake.”
As an adult, Christopher served in WW2 and attended Cambridge, but the already strained relationship with his father deepened after he struggled to find work post-graduation. “[My father] got where he was by climbing on my infant shoulders, he had filched from me my good name and had left me nothing but the empty fame of being his son,” Christopher wrote.
The relationship finally reached a breaking point when Christoper began a courtship with his first cousin Lesley De Selincourt, whose father A.A. had been estranged from for 30 years. Despite A.A.’s unhappiness, the couple married and soon after opened a bookshop. If Christopher Robin did inherit one thing from his father it was a love of books.
Christopher Robin made peace with his father before he passed and was able to say goodbye to the stuffed animals that had sustained him through a lonely childhood, gifting them to the New York Public Library in 1947.
The real Winnie passed away at the age of 20 in 1934. The success of Milne’s books had only added to her popularity and condolences came in from around the world. There are statues of her at both the Winnipeg and London Zoos, the latter of which, her old friend Christopher Robin was there to unveil.
