The Winnie-the-Pooh stories were inspired by the adventures of Christopher Robin’s collection of soft toys. Milne bought the first of them, a teddy bear, at Harrods, the department store in London, as a present for his then one-year-old son.
As a child, Christopher Robin – who himself inspired a character of the same name in the children’s books – called him Edward Bear, but later changed the name.
The bear’s new – and now very famous – name was based on those of two other animals: Winnipeg (Winnie for short), a black bear at London Zoo, and Pooh, a swan in When We Were Very Young, an earlier book by Milne, first published in 1924.
Brandreth, who is writing a biography of the Milne family, described how the toys ended up in New York in the Telegraph last year.
He revealed that Christopher Robin had come to resent the “empty fame” of being “Christopher Robin”, while Milne resented the way he had come to be seen purely as a children’s author.
“In 1947, when Milne’s American publisher, Dutton’s, came up with the idea of sending all the toys on a promotional tour of the US, father and son both said blithely, ‘Let them go,’” he wrote. “They never came back.”
In the late 1980s, Brandreth tried to get Pooh and friends back to Britain and approached the New York Public Library about the possibility, only to be sharply rebuffed.
In the late 1990s, Gwyneth Dunwoody, the MP, also gave it a go. On a trip to New York, she saw the animals and decided they looked “very unhappy indeed”, announcing a campaign to bring Pooh back to his native country.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
