Winnie-the-Pooh

Winnie-the-Pooh—also called Edward Bear, Pooh Bear, or just Pooh—is a make-believe teddy bear who acts like a person. He was invented by the English writer A. A. Milne and brought to life in pictures by the English artist E. H. Shepard. The character first showed up by name in a children’s story that London’s *Evening News* asked Milne to write for Christmas Eve in 1925. Milne got the idea from a stuffed toy he bought for his son Christopher Robin at Harrods, and from a real bear named Winnie they had seen at London Zoo. The first book of stories about Pooh came out in 1926, also called *Winnie-the-Pooh*. A second collection, *The House at Pooh Corner*, followed in 1928. Milne also put a poem about the bear in the 1924 verse book *When We Were Very Young*, and more poems in *Now We Are Six* (1927). Shepard drew the pictures for all four books. The tales take place in and around the Hundred Acre Wood, which was based on the real Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex—about 30 miles south of London—where Milne, a Londoner, had a country home. The Pooh stories have been turned into many languages. One notable version is Alexander Lenard’s Latin translation, *Winnie ille Pu*, first printed in 1958. In 1960 it became the only Latin book ever to land on *The New York Times* Best Seller list. The original English manuscripts sit at the Wren Library in Trinity College, Cambridge (Milne’s old school), to which he left them. The first Pooh book ranked number 7 on the BBC’s *The Big Read* poll. In 1961, The Walt Disney Company got permission from Milne’s estate and the licensing agent Stephen Slesinger, Inc. to make films and other works based on the Pooh stories. Disney dropped the hyphen, calling the character “Winnie the Pooh,” and turned the stories into a series of features that became one of its biggest moneymakers. In popular movies, Pooh has been voiced by Sterling Holloway, Hal Smith, and Jim Cummings in English, and by Yevgeny Leonov in Russian. **History**

**Origin**

A. A. Milne named the character after a teddy bear his son Christopher Robin owned—the same boy who inspired the character Christopher Robin. Shepard, however, based his drawings of Pooh on his own son’s teddy bear, Growler, not Christopher Robin’s. The rest of Christopher’s toys—Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, and Tigger—all ended up in Milne’s stories. Milne made up Owl and Rabbit from scratch. Gopher was added later for the Disney films. In 1947, the real toys went to the United States with Milne’s American publisher, who kept them until 1987. That year the publisher gave them to the New York Public Library, where they have been on display at the Main Branch in New York City ever since. Back in 1921, Milne bought his son the toy bear from Harrods. Christopher Robin first called it Edward, then Winnie—after a Canadian black bear named Winnie he often saw at London Zoo—and finally Pooh, after a friend’s pet swan they met on holiday. That real bear cub had been bought from a hunter for C$20 by Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn in White River, Ontario, while he was traveling to England during World War I. Colebourn, a veterinary officer with the Fort Garry Horse cavalry regiment, named the bear Winnie after his adopted hometown, Winnipeg, Manitoba. He sneaked the bear into England, and she became the regiment’s unofficial mascot. Colebourn left her at London Zoo while his unit served in France; after the war she was officially given to the zoo, where she became a much-loved attraction. Pooh the swan appears as a character in *When We Were Very Young*. In the first chapter of *Winnie-the-Pooh*, Milne explains why the bear is often just called “Pooh”: “But his arms were so stiff … they stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think—but I am not sure—that that is why he is always called Pooh.” American writer William Safire guessed that the Milnes might also have been influenced by the snooty character Pooh-Bah from Gilbert and Sullivan’s *The Mikado* (1885). A bronze statue of Winnie as a young cub, made by Lorne McKean, was unveiled at London Zoo in September 1981 by Christopher Robin. The real Winnie’s skull is kept at the Hunterian Museum in London, part of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. A 2015 study of the skull showed she had chronic periodontitis—an inflammation and loss of tissue around the teeth—likely caused by a poor diet, such as the honey Christopher Robin spoon-fed her. **Ashdown Forest: the setting for the stories**

The Winnie-the-Pooh stories take place in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, England. This forest is a quiet area of open heathland on the highest sandy ridges of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, about 30 miles southeast of London. In 1925, Milne, a Londoner, bought a country home a mile north of the forest at Cotchford Farm, near Hartfield. According to Christopher Robin Milne, while his father kept living in London, “the four of us—he, his wife, his son and his son’s nanny—would pile into a large blue, chauffeur-driven Fiat and travel down every Saturday morning and back again every Monday afternoon.