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Winnie The Pooh: The Tale of A Father and A Son

   It is an image that warms the heart. A loving father tucking his son into bed, making up stories using the stuffed animals in the room. It is the kind of childhood vision every son wishes they had with their father.  The reality of A.A. Milne and his son Christopher Robin was dramatically different.

            Alan Alexander Milne was part of the Lost Generation, scarred by his time in the trenches of World War I. Commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, within days of arriving on the Western Front in the midst of the Somme Offensive, he witnessed his best friend, Ernest Pusch, killed by a German shell just as the young man was settling down to enjoy some tea. Ernest’s brother Frederick was killed a few days later by a sniper.  On August 12, 1916, Milne watched his friends and neighbors mowed down by German machines as they were ordered to siege the enemy’s trench.  Sixty men died and over one hundred were wounded before the eyes of a man who would create a Pooh Bear. All five officers who led the charge were either killed or wounded. The slaughter stayed with the children’s author for the rest of his life. He later stated, “It makes me almost physically sick of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation.” Sent to the trenches near Loos, he contracted trench fever, which allowed him a medical transfer back to England.  Yet, the damage was done. A.A. Milne was man who carried ghosts with him the rest of his life.

            After that A.A. Milne was a difficult man to get to know.  There was always a distance between others and himself, even his beloved son, Christopher Robin. The son later noted about his father, “Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift. You either have it or you don't. My father didn't—not with children, that is. Later on it was different, very different. But I am thinking of my nursery days.” A.A. had very little to do with the little boy. Christopher’s primary caregiver was his nanny.

            When he was young, the boy enjoyed being associated with the Pooh stories. They gave an importance and spotlight to his life. All that changed when he was sent to boarding school at ten. Young boys can be cruel. His fellow students tortured the young Milne about his famous connection to the teddy bear. The stories that made him the envy of every child that read them were like an albatross around his neck.

            Like his father before him, young Christopher went to war, World War II, and grew to hate the resulting bloodbath like his father. Afterwards Milne had a terrible time finding a job.  Every place he went, potential employers made the connection to the Pooh stories. He noted, “It seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.” This led to arguments between Christopher and his father.

            Things got even worst between the young man and his parents when he married his cousin Lesley, instead of a young woman they wanted him wed to. (A.A. feared that the union between the two would result in a child with severe birth defects. A few months after his death, his granddaughter Clara was born with cerebral palsy.)

            Going into business for himself, Christopher opened a bookstore and even there he could not escape his Pooh bear fame.  Almost every day fans of his father’s books, poems and stories stopped by to get Chris’s autograph and meet the boy that inspired them. Ironically, it was the sale of Pooh books and royalties that kept the shop open. While he visited his father from time to time, especially when A.A. became ill, when his dad died, Christopher made no effort to see his mother in the last fifteen years of her life.  

            Christopher ended up writing three books detailing his childhood and all the problems that Pooh caused him.  In the 1970s, he rid himself of all the reminders of the bear that gave him a celebrity that he did not want. He donated all the stuffed animals that his father used to create his stories to the New York City Public Library, noting that he preferred to focus on things that interested him and not the past.   

            Yet, in another stroke of irony, one of the passions of Christopher Robin’s life was to preserve the Ashdown Forest from oil exploration, the woods where many of Winnie the Pooh’s adventures took place. In order to preserve the place he loved, Christopher dedicated several monuments to his father’s characters to increase tourism and make people realize what a historical place it was.

            What makes A.A. Milne’s relationship with his son so sad was the father generally loved Christopher. Like a lot of fathers, the elder Milne was awkward with children, something that pained the author. It is evident that he paid a great deal of attention to his son and delighted in the boy.  Every story had its roots in something that Christopher had done.

            Even the name of the teddy bear came from a bear in the zoo that Christopher delighted in. During the First World War an officer named Harry Colebourn of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade, when his train stopped at White River, Ontario, paid $20 for a bear cub whose mother had been killed. He named the cub after his hometown of Winnipeg. The cub quickly became a mascot for the brigade and fellow soldiers shortened his name to “Winnie.”  When the brigade was ordered to the frontlines, the idea of a bear in a combat theater did not seem like a good idea. The animal was instead given as a loan to the London Zoo, where he would remain the rest of his life, and was the zoo’s most popular exhibit until his death.  Winnie was particularly popular with Christopher Robin, to the point that A.A. even got his son a chance to spend time with the bear inside the animal’s cage. Christopher loved the bear so much that he named his stuffed teddy bear after him. “The Pooh” came from a swan that lived nearby the Milne estate.

            Tigger, Eeyore (a donkey that was missing his tail), Piglet, Kanga and Roo were stuffed animals that the youngster would carry around with his bear. Rabbit and Owl were animals found on the Milne estate. All of the stories were based on things that Christopher had done that day. After A.A. had written the tales, the youngster often reenacted them for his father.

            Tragically, the stories that made A.A. Milne famous were an emotionally scarred and distant man’s attempt to reach out to his son, to show the child that he was loved. On that level they failed. Instead, it has been conservatively estimated that over 20 million copies of the A.A. Milne’s Pooh’s tales have been sold and translated into almost every known language.  Sometimes one child is worth more than millions.