Somewhere, a boy and a bear
SOMEWHERE, A BOY AND A BEAR
A Biography of A. A. Milne and Winnie-the-Pooh
Gyle S b randreth
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‘Let a man live to be a hundred, his first twenty years will be the greater part of his life. In those years the man was made.’
– J. V. Milne (1845–1932)
‘Whatever subject an author chooses or has chosen for him, he reveals no secret but the secret of himself.’
– A. A. Milne (1882–1956)
‘For us, to whom our childhood has meant so much, the journey back is short, the coming and going easy.’
– C. R. Milne (1920–96)
Contents
The Characters xi
Prolo G ue 1
in which we are introduced to the author of this book and his lifelong interest in the world of A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne, Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh, and me
c ha P ter o ne 35 in which we first meet the parents and grandparents of A. A. Milne A childhood lasts a lifetime
c ha P ter t wo 43 in which we meet three brothers: Barry, Ken and Alan Milne A child’s world
c ha P ter t hree 55 in which we get to know Alan and Ken Us two
c ha P ter Four 68 in which Alan goes to school Memories and dreams
c ha P ter Five 82 in which Alan arrives at Westminster School I do like a little bit of butter to my bread!
c ha P ter Six 94 in which Alan gets a bad report –and Ken gets a worse one Ridiculously wrong
c ha P ter Seven 107 in which Alan discovers love – and poetry Was I in love for the first time?
c ha P ter e i G ht 121 in which Alan arrives at Cambridge I did all the usual things
c ha P ter n ine 133 in which Alan discovers people in London are talking about him The Thing to Do
c ha P ter t en 153 in which Alan confronts his money worries Application
c ha P ter e leven 168 in which the Teddy Bear is born and Alan finds happiness Those Were the Days
c ha P ter t welve 184 in which Alan finds a wife and writes a play She laughed at my jokes
c ha P ter t hirteen 198 in which the world goes to war A cushy billet
c ha P ter Fourteen 210 in which Alan goes to the Front Hell itself
c ha P ter Fi F teen 221 in which A. A. Milne arrives in the West End and Christopher Robin is conceived Surprised, excited, delighted
c ha P ter Sixteen 238 in which Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh enter the scene Mark August 21st in letters of blood
c ha P ter Seventeen 259 in which A. A. Milne hits the heights The roaring twenties
c ha P ter e i G hteen 285 in which A. A. Milne publishes four international bestsellers Tiddely pom
c ha P ter n ineteen 306 in which the tide begins to turn Triumph and disaster
c ha P ter t wenty 326 in which Christopher Robin grows up and goes to war The beginning of the end
c ha P ter t wenty-one 341 in which we lose Alan and we meet Clare The honeypot at the end of the rainbow
c ha P ter t wenty-two 356 in which we look for a happy ending There’s always Pooh
Bibliography 373 Acknowledgements 377
Picture credits and Text permissions 385 Index 389
The Characters
Alan Alexander Milne – who created the world of Winniethe-Pooh and wrote four of the most successful children’s books in the history of publishing – thought of himself principally as a playwright. Each of his forty plays begins with a list of characters. Here is ours.
In England and America
John v ine m ilne and his wife, m aria
Their three sons:
b arry, k en, a lan
And their three wives:
c onnie, m aud, d a P hne
And their children, most notably Alan and Daphne’s only son: c hri S to P her r obin , known within the family first as Billy, then as Moon, then simply as Christopher
And Christopher’s nanny, o live r and
And Christopher’s wife, l e S ley , and their only daughter: c lare
Together with an assortment of relations, family friends and acquaintances, maids, cooks, gardeners, teachers, mentors, editors, journalists, agents, publishers, illustrators, notably E. H. Shepard, and writers of distinction, including: h . G. w ell S , J. m . b arrie, P. G. w odehou S e
somewhere, a boy and a bear
Plus military men, theatrical producers, actors, actresses, and some world-famous figures, among them:
Queen e lizabeth ii and w alt d i S ney
In the Forest and the One Hundred Acre Wood
w innie-the-Pooh
‘A Bear of Very Little Brain’
c hri S to P her r obin
‘Winnie-the-Pooh went round to his friend Christopher Robin, who lived behind a green door in another part of the Forest.’
Pi G let
‘The Piglet lived in a very grand house in the middle of a beech tree . . . “It is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us.”’
r abbit
‘“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully. “Yes,” said Piglet. “Rabbit’s clever.” “And he has Brain.” “Yes,” said Piglet. “Rabbit has Brain.” There was a long silence. “I suppose,” said Pooh, “that’s why he never understands anything.”’
e eyore
‘The old grey donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?”’
o wl
‘Owl lived at The Chestnuts, an old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else’s . . . “And if somebody knows anything about anything . . . it’s Owl who knows something about something.”’
xii
k an G a and b aby r oo
‘Nobody seemed to know where they came from, but they were in the Forest: Kanga and Baby Roo.’
t i GG er
‘“Do Tiggers like honey?” “They like everything,” said Tigger cheerfully.’
Together with an assortment of bees, beetles, Heffalumps, hedgehogs, Woozles, and all Rabbit’s friends and relations
Prologue
in which we are introduced to the author of this book and his lifelong interest in the world of A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne, Christopher Robin, Winnie-the-Pooh, and me
‘Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.’ Pooh thought for a little.
‘How old shall I be then?’ ‘Ninety-nine.’ Pooh nodded.
‘I promise, he said.
24 December 2024: Jamaica
The House at Pooh Corner
This feels like the right day for starting this book. Today, officially, is the ninety-ninth birthday of Winnie-the-Pooh. At least, today is the ninety-ninth anniversary of Pooh’s first appearance in print.
On 24 December 1925, the London Evening News –according to its masthead, ‘London’s predominant evening journal’ boasting ‘The largest evening net sale in the world’ – ran a banner headline right across the top of its front page:
somewhere, a boy and a bear
A CHILDREN’S STORY BY A. A. MILNE
There were other, smaller headlines on the front page. It was going to be a ‘Christmas without snow’ in London, though ‘great storms’ were sweeping over Derbyshire; ‘Lord Cobham’s Mansion’, Hagley Hall, was engulfed by fire, with ‘priceless art treasures’ threatened; there was trouble in China, a financial scandal in the City, and an amusing account of Sir Harry Lauder, the popular Scottish singer and comedian, missing his train home to Glasgow. But the main event was the arrival of Winnie-the-Pooh:
A new story for children, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’, about Christopher Robin and his Teddy Bear, written by Mr A. A. Milne specially for ‘The Evening News’ appears tonight on page 7.
It will be broadcast from all stations by Mr Donald Calthrop, as part of the Christmas Day wireless programmes at 7.45 p.m. tomorrow.
These were the early days of radio (the British Broadcasting Company was founded in 1922) and this was big stuff. A. A. Milne was a famous writer: columnist, novelist and playwright. And Donald Calthrop was a major British film star: he appeared in more than sixty films between 1916 and 1940, including five directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Christopher Robin and his bear had already made a brief appearance in a poem by A. A. Milne called ‘Teddy Bear’ published in the magazine Punch earlier in the year and included in Milne’s first collection of children’s verses published that November, but it was on page 7 of the Evening News that Christmas Eve that the ‘Bear of Very Little Brain’ was introduced to us properly and by name:
Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.
This, then, Pooh’s birthday, is the right day on which to begin my book – and where I am standing now, notebook in hand, is the right place, I reckon, to begin writing it.
I am in the parish of Clarendon on the island of Jamaica in the Caribbean Sea. It is an enchanted place. There are blue skies above and I am in a forest of flowering trees: dogwood and logwood and fiddlewood, wild ackee and yellow sanders. There are mango and papaya groves nearby and along the track through the woodland golden dewdrops, crape jasmine and hibiscus. This is the place where A. A. Milne’s father, J. V. Milne, was born.
This is a book about a boy and a bear, but it is also a book about fathers and sons, about the effects of parents on their children, about the nature of childhood itself – about the magic and the mystery and the importance of childhood.
The notion – and the reality – of childhood has evolved across the centuries, of course. Once upon a time children were viewed simply as small adults and, unless they came from wealthy families, as necessary (and cheap) contributors to the workforce. (They still are in some parts of the world today.) At university, for a time, I studied French and philosophy and I remember reading John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and learning that our modern notion of childhood – a time
somewhere, a boy and a bear of innocence and playfulness, of discovery and learning, of carefree adventure within safe boundaries – began during the Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Romantic period that followed. I read Rousseau’s famous 1762 novel, Emile: or On Education, where he defines childhood as the enchanted place where a child can live freely for a few, brief years before having to encounter the dangers and difficulties of adulthood.
Rousseau would have loved the wild Jamaican wood where I am standing now. Rousseau believed in the essential beauty and goodness of nature. ‘Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world,’ he said, ‘but degenerates once it gets into the hands of Man.’ Famously, he also said: ‘The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.’
In the mid-1840s, when J. V. Milne was born in Clarendon, the son of missionary parents, there were very few children’s books to feed a child’s imagination. There were instructional religious tracts aimed at children, but not a lot besides. The first nursery rhyme collection to be printed was Tommy Thumb’s Song Book, published a century before. Hans Christian Andersen’s first collection of Fairy Tales Told for Children appeared in the mid-1830s. But the golden age of children’s literature was yet to be: The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley appeared in 1862, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll in 1865, Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women in 1868.
Today, the parish of Clarendon is famous as the birthplace of the singer Millie Small, who had a huge hit with ‘My Girl Lollipop’ in 1964, and of Davina Bennett, ‘Miss Universe’ in 2017. Doreen Lawrence (Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon), the British campaigner for social justice, was
born here. Her teenage son Stephen, who was murdered in Eltham in London in 1993, is buried here.
The story of the Milne family that I am going to recount in the pages that follow contains no brutal or horrific murders, but it does contain tragedy, disappointment and heartache, betrayal, dishonesty, and moments of despair. There is joy, too, of course, a good deal of joy, because there is Winniethe-Pooh, and you wouldn’t be reading this book at all if it wasn’t for Winnie-the-Pooh.
Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain
On Monday, when the sun is hot I wonder to myself a lot:
‘Now is it true, or is it not,
‘That what is which and which is what?’
On Tuesday, when it hails and snows, The feeling on me grows and grows That hardly anybody knows If those are these or these are those.
On Wednesday, when the sky is blue, And I have nothing else to do, I sometimes wonder if it’s true That who is what and what is who.
On Thursday, when it starts to freeze And hoar-frost twinkles on the trees, How very readily one sees That these are whose—but whose are these?
On Friday—
Winnie-the-Pooh
somewhere, a boy and a bear
Today in Clarendon right now the sun is hot. It’s 31 degrees and feels like 36 degrees. There was a shower earlier and thunderstorms are threatened for later. This is an enchanted place, but with changeable weather and – I have just seen a huge spider scuttling through the undergrowth –more complicated than it seems on the surface. This is the right place to start.
5 January 2025: New York
I am now in New York, and it is bitterly cold. I have come to meet Winnie-the-Pooh. Yes, the original Winnie-the-Pooh, the real Christopher Robin’s very own teddy bear. He has been living here in the United States since not long after the Second World War. He is here because his proper owner, Christopher Robin, had had enough of him and because the man who made him world-famous, A. A. Milne, was weary beyond words of being forever associated with the Bear of Little Brain.
Milne was a playwright, and probably his most successful play, Mr Pim Passes By, opened in London, at the New Theatre (now the Noël Coward), on this day, 5 January, in 1920. It was a huge hit (with Leslie Howard, one of the future stars of Gone with the Wind, among the leads), transferring to the London Garrick Theatre and then to the Playhouse, running for 246 performances in all. The play opened in New York, at the 910-seater Garrick Theater on West 35th Street, on 28 February 1921 and ran for 124 performances. It was revived in New York, in London, in Australia, and performed by repertory companies and by amateurs for years. In 1921 it was turned into a silent movie and later produced several times by the BBC on both radio and TV.
Milne was a hot ticket on Broadway in the 1920s. Quite a few of his plays opened here before they opened in London. The Great Broxopp arrived at the Punch and Judy Theater on West 49th Street in November 1921, eighteen months before it opened in London. The Dover Road (another of Milne’s most successful plays) opened at the New Bijou Theater on West 45th in December 1921, six months before its London premiere. The Lucky One (‘I used to think it was my best play; well, I suppose it was once’) was presented by the Theater Guild at the Garrick Theater in New York in November 1922 when it could not find a London producer. Michael and Mary arrived in New York in 1929, at the Charles Hopkins Theater (the Punch and Judy Theater renamed), before it opened in London in 1930. The Ivory Door arrived at the Charles Hopkins Theater in 1927 and in London in 1929. For a decade and more Milne was a Broadway fixture: The Truth about Blayds (Booth Theater, 1922); The Man in the Bowler Hat (Belasco, 1924); Ariadne, or Business First (Garrick, 1925); Meet the Prince (Lyceum, 1929); Give Me Yesterday (Charles Hopkins Theater, 1931); Other People’s Lives (Charles Hopkins, 1932).
Most of the Broadway theatres where Milne’s plays enjoyed their first success – the Garrick, the Bijou, the Charles Hopkins – have long since disappeared, demolished to make way for office blocks and high-rise hotels. Most of Milne’s plays are just distant memories, too. All anyone in New York now knows of A. A. Milne is that he’s the guy who created Winnie-the-Pooh.
6 January 2025: New York
Twelfth Night. It’s snowing in New York. Clutching my notebook in very cold hands (it’s minus 1 degree here and
somewhere, a boy and a bear feels like minus 3), I am walking down Fifth Avenue – past St Patrick’s Cathedral, past Saks Fifth Avenue, past the Rockefeller Plaza, where the Christmas tree is still all lit up, past the Dyson store . . . St Patrick, Saks, Rockefeller, Dyson –these are all names to reckon with, like Winnie-the-Pooh.
I am on my way to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. This is where the original Winniethe-Pooh now lives. That’s clear from the posters outside the library. It’s clear from the posters inside the library. Pooh’s image is everywhere. He is in the elevators. He is outside the toilets. He is in the coffee shop.
With my wife, Michèle, I have come to see the official ‘Treasures of the New York Public Library’, and Christopher Robin’s very own Winnie-the-Pooh is here – alongside the Guttenberg Bible, a Shakespeare First Folio, and a fair copy of the 1776 Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand. The library boasts 56 million items, some going back four thousand years, but among its treasures Pooh has pride of place. It also has Virginia Woolf’s walking stick on display: it was found lying on the bank of the river Ouse in East Sussex where, aged fifty-nine, the writer took her own life on 28 March 1941; they also have a letter to Vita Sackville-West from Leonard Woolf telling her he assumed Virginia was dead; her body was not recovered until 18 April. They have Charles Dickens’s desk from Gadshill Place, his house in Rochester in Kent, with the date on the perpetual calendar set at Tuesday 9 June, unchanged since the day he died in 1870. And they have Winnie-the-Pooh: the original Winnie-the-Pooh, the bear Christopher Robin was given on his first birthday on 21 August 1921, the most famous bear in literature, and, thanks to the merchandising (a soft toy bear
sells better than a soft toy mouse), the most profitable character in the Walt Disney catalogue.
Never mind how the New York Public Library acquired Virginia Woolf’s walking stick and Charles Dickens’s desk: how did they get Pooh? And Piglet and Tigger and Eeyore and Kanga, too. (Where’s Roo? He’s missing. That’s a mystery I will need to unravel.)
I have to say the animals look to be in beautiful condition – much fresher than when I last saw them here in New York thirty years ago. They were in the library’s children’s department then, in nothing like so grand a case, and certainly not as dazzlingly displayed and spotlit as they are now. I remember that Pooh in particular looked a bit dishevelled. Now he looks . . well, not as good as new, but exactly as he appears in the famous photographs taken of him with Christopher Robin and A. A. Milne in 1926, when Pooh was five and Christopher Robin was six. Methuen, the London publishers of Winnie-the-Pooh, commissioned the photographs from Howard Coster, who went on to take portraits of most of the great literary and theatrical figures of the day, from Arnold Bennett and E. M. Forster to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Tuft by tuft, Pooh has been restored by the New York Public Library at great expense and with appropriate sensitivity and skill.
The Coster photographs are now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Why isn’t Pooh in London, too? That’s where he comes from. He is a British-made teddy bear, bought from the famous department store, Harrods of Knightsbridge, as a present for Christopher Robin for his first birthday. London is where Christopher was born. Why on earth are Pooh and Co. living in Manhattan?
somewhere, a boy and a bear
Years ago, in the late 1980s, I tried to get them back to Britain. With my wife, Michèle, I had opened a Teddy Bear Museum in Stratford-upon-Avon – birthplace, we claimed, of William Shakesbear, author of MacBear, King Bear and The Merry Bears of Windsor. Because the teddy bear owes his name to the twenty-sixth American president, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, the then US ambassador to the UK launched the museum for us, and because the bears in our collection have pedigree (they include the first Paddington Bear to feature on television, given to me personally by Michael Bond, and, given to me personally by Jim Henson, what the Muppets’ creator told me was ‘the original Fozzie Bear’*), I had hopes that the real Winnie-the-Pooh might be able to come to the museum for a brief English vacation.
I approached the New York Public Library about the possibility. ‘No way,’ I was told. ‘No way whatsoever. We own Pooh. Pooh stays here.’ In the late 1990s, Gwyneth Dunwoody, a British Member of Parliament, on a trip to New York, saw Pooh and his little stuffed companions and decided they ‘look very unhappy indeed’. She announced a campaign to bring Pooh and his pals back to their native country. ‘We’re going to keep him here and keep him safe,’ countered New York’s pugnacious Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, arriving at Pooh’s glass case in the library with a no-nonsense statement ready for the cameras and an appealing, appeasing jar of honey for Pooh.
‘This is to show his friends in England that he’s being fed well and he enjoys New York cuisine,’ Giuliani told the watching world. ‘I think Winnie-the-Pooh is an example of
* Years later, when he heard about it, Frank Oz (the original voice of Fozzie) could not believe it – or bear it.
the very best in immigration,’ the mayor continued, warming to his theme. ‘He’s very, very proud of his background and heritage, but now he’s found a new land and he’s found a better life for himself here.’
‘Does he have a green card?’ called out one of the reporters in the crowd. According to the man from the Los Angeles Times, ‘The mayor leaned to the case and whispered “Hey, Winnie, ya got a green card?” Then the mayor went on to argue that Pooh had three times as much chance of being stolen in London than in New York, due to Manhattan’s plummeting robbery rate.’
Today, almost thirty years on, thanks to an introduction from the most recent US ambassador to the UK, I am meeting Dr Tony Marx, President of the New York Public Library, and his senior team. They are all very charming –and very protective of their bear. Millions visit the Treasures of the Library exhibition every year – and the exhibit they most want to see is Winnie-the-Pooh.
‘Can I tell you a story?’ asks Dr Marx, sixty-six, urbane and handsome, formerly the head of Amherst College in Massachusetts, President and CEO of the New York Public Library since 2011. ‘I don’t get many phone calls. Everyone gets in touch by email nowadays. So a few years back when my assistant said, “You’re wanted on the telephone,” I was surprised. They said, “It’s Number Ten Downing Street.” I took the call.
‘I picked up the phone and a voice asked, “Is that Dr Marx?” I said, “Is that Ten Downing Street?” The voice replied, “Actually, no. I’m calling from the White House –the call was just patched through the Downing Street switchboard. I’m at the White House. The British Prime Minister – it was David Cameron – is meeting with the President
somewhere, a boy and a bear – Barack Obama – right now. They’re in the Oval Office –and they are talking about Winnie-the-Pooh. It seems you have Winnie-the-Pooh . . .”
‘“Well, yes, we do,” I said.
‘“And, at the end of their meeting, in their joint press conference, the President and the Prime Minister want to announce that they’ve agreed that Winnie-the-Pooh is returning to England.”
‘“That would be a matter for the library’s trustees,” I said.
‘“You don’t understand – the President and the Prime Minister are meeting right now. They are in the Oval Office waiting.”
‘“Well, I’m sorry,” I said.
‘“You don’t understand,” he repeated, “I’m speaking on behalf of the President of the United States and—”
‘“You don’t understand,” I interrupted, “I am the President of the New York Public Library – and the answer is ‘no’.”
‘“You don’t understand,” he continued, “I have a Prime Minister who needs to make a statement any minute now –and back home he has an election to win.”’
The President and the Prime Minister made their end-ofvisit statement without reference to Winnie-the-Pooh.
When Dr Marx has finished telling his story, he smiles. I smile, too. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh is the literary world’s Elgin Marbles.’
‘Let’s not mention the Elgin Marbles,’ says Dr Marx, quickly.
It’s clear the New York Public Library’s trustees have always been fearful that if Pooh ever got home to England, it might be tricky to get him back to the US again.
How come he’s in America in the first place?
‘Well,’ says Dr Marx, ‘I always understood that Christopher Robin didn’t want him. That he felt Pooh and the stories had infantilized him and ruined his life. That he and his father fell out over Pooh.’
One of Dr Marx’s colleagues interrupts. Dr Julie Golia, Curator of Manuscripts, says ‘That’s sort of part of the story, but it’s more complicated than that.’ The toy animals lived with the Milne family until 1947, when, at the suggestion of Milne’s American publisher, E. P. Dutton, they were sent to the United States on an extended promotional book tour. They never came home. For forty years they were on show at Dutton’s offices on Park Avenue, until Dutton was absorbed into the Penguin publishing group and the Milne menagerie was donated to the New York Public Library.
Iris Weinshall, the library’s beady-eyed Chief Operating Officer, CFO and Treasurer, now speaks for the first time. ‘I have heard,’ she says softly, ‘that the reason no senior British royal has been to New York in recent years is that they won’t come until Pooh is allowed to go back to England.’
‘I’m sure that can’t be true,’ I say, quickly, adding at once: ‘But we would love to have Pooh back sometime, if only for a brief vacation . . . and 2026 is coming up. It’s the centenary of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh and the centenary of the birth of one of Pooh’s earliest admirers, Queen Elizabeth II . . .’
‘And 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,’ chips in Dr Brent Reidy, six foot seven inches (at least), and Andrew W. Mellon Director of Research Libraries.
I explain to my new friends that I am a trustee of the Queen’s Reading Room, Queen Camilla’s charity promoting the joy of reading, and that I know that Her Majesty would
somewhere, a boy and a bear be happy to welcome Pooh to Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle and look after him if he could be spared for a centenary celebration back in his home country.
‘Pooh is priceless,’ says Dr Marx. ‘The insurance, the security, the transportation – it’d be expensive. And we’d need to have something equally priceless in exchange to have on show here while he’s away – maybe something in the royal archives connected with 1776 or a crown or something. They must have a few spare crowns around the place. Pooh belongs to our crown jewels, you know.’
He is smiling.
‘Let’s see what we can do,’ I say. Where presidents and prime ministers have failed, I am thinking it would be gratifying to succeed.
Later . . .
I have just had an email from Dr Marx: ‘Lovely to meet you and Michèle. Excited to see how this progresses and hopeful we can make it all come out great! Yours, Tony.’
Fingers crossed.
10 January 2025: Austin, Texas
I am enjoying the notice on the door of the locker where I am storing my computer and notebooks. It reads:
ATTENTION
Storage of handguns is not allowed in these lockers
I am in Texas. At the University of Texas. I have been here for a week – an invaluable week – in Austin, the state capital, working in the library of the Harry Ransom Center,
where they have a Guttenberg Bible (of course) and three copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio (this is Texas) and have somehow also managed to collect the papers of – wait for it! – D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, John Steinbeck, Lewis Carroll, Kazuo Ishiguro, Harry Houdini and Robert de Niro, to name just a few. I am here because they specialize in the papers of twentieth-century playwrights, among them George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard – and A. A. Milne.
There are ten boxes of Milne material – a treasure trove, but also a challenge. Alan Milne’s handwriting is small and spidery and not easy to decipher. But the library has let me photograph anything and everything I want, so I can pore over it all at leisure and in detail in the weeks to come. There are the original manuscripts of poems and stories, novels and plays, on most of which is a note to the typing agency requesting ‘One typed copy and two carbons by the end of the week if possible.’ Milne’s wife Daphne’s handwriting is larger, rounder and clearer. She sometimes transcribed to her husband’s dictation and regularly acted as his secretary, replying to fan mail under the assumed name of ‘Celia Brice’.
From these boxes – and the half-dozen boxes, also here, of the working papers of Ann Thwaite, whose magisterial biography of Milne appeared in 1990 – I am realizing that I have to be careful not to accept too readily the Daphne I saw depicted in the 2017 film, Goodbye Christopher Robin, or the Daphne I was told about by Christopher Robin’s wife, Lesley. I met first met Lesley with Christopher in the early 1980s and interviewed her again after Christopher’s death. Lesley was openly hostile towards her mother-in-law.
somewhere, a boy and a bear
This is going to be a complicated family story (I suppose most family stories are), but there is plenty in these boxes to help me understand it – not least wonderful letters between Alan and the key figure in his life, his older brother Ken. There are delightful childhood letters of Alan’s, too, and reflections on childhood from the vantage point of later years, including intriguing observations on the importance of children’s literature that appeals both to the young child and to the adult who may be reading out loud to the little one: ‘It is torture to read anything aloud with which we ourselves are bored.’
There is plenty here to remind me that Milne was a very funny man. Delving into the first of the boxes on Day One of my time here, I found the ‘Opening Chorus’ of what seems to be a musical revue: ‘How I Loathe Everybody’.
I hate the gentleman goggling there . . .
With the plastered hair . . .
And the skull that’s bare . . .
I hate the woman with scarlet lips . . .
And the one that skips . . .
To reduce her hips . . .
I hate the fellow with shoulders high . . .
And the roving eye . . .
And the made-up tie . . .
I hate the girl with the close-cropped head . . .
And the eyebrows dead . . .
And the nails too red.
How I loathe everybody
Everybody, everybody
How I loathe everybody, Everybody! Ugh!
The world is full of ghastly men, And ghastly women too.
There is plenty, too, on A. A. Milne’s preoccupation with war and the horrors of war. The creator of the world of Winnie-the-Pooh is a complex character, but, above all else, a beautiful writer (I have read all six of his significant novels in recent weeks: they are a joy to read and comfortably stand the test of time) and a writer conscious of his own worth. There is much detailed business correspondence in the boxes, mostly with Albert Curtis Brown (1866–1945), Milne’s principal literary agent – including a postcard to Curtis Brown dated 12 June 1918 that should induce a sense of fellow-feeling with every author:
Cheque received safely. Many thanks. – A. A. Milne
Astonishingly, I found there are letters from me in these boxes. This is because in the 1980s I wrote a stage show called Now We Are Sixty. It was a play (produced at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, and directed by James Roose- Evans, whose papers are also here in Austin) telling the story of the Milne family – with music by Harold Fraser-Simson (1872–1944), who composed the music for Milne’s songs and poems in the 1920s, and new music by Julian Slade (1930–2006), a friend of mine, a lovely man, best remembered as the composer of London’s longest-running musical of the 1950s, Salad Days. Julian was a friend of Christopher Robin, and it was through Julian, and through writing Now We Are Sixty, that I got to know Christopher, and because Christopher
somewhere, a boy and a bear – reticent with strangers and naturally a private person –knew, liked and trusted Julian, that Christopher allowed me into his world. We got on well. I think I amused him. He let me visit him at his home in Devon. He introduced me to his wife and daughter. I think he trusted me. He told me that in the play I had got his father ‘about right’.
Because I keep a diary, I can tell you that I first met Christopher Milne on Tuesday 15 December 1981. I was thirty-three and a bit Tigger-like. He was sixty-one, spindly, slightly bent, with owlish glasses, though recognizably Christopher Robin. He had a charming mischievous glint in his eye. Julian Slade and I travelled down to Devon to meet him. I arrived expecting to find him reluctant to talk about either Winnie-the-Pooh or his parents. Not so. His manner was gentle, but he was immediately forthcoming. ‘We must talk about Pooh,’ he said straight away. ‘It’s been something of a love–hate relationship down the years, but it’s all right now. Believe it or not, I can now look at those four books without flinching. I’m quite fond of them really.’
Those four books, published between 1924 and 1928 – the two Pooh books and the two collections of nursery verses: 70,000 words in all, a tiny fraction of A. A. Milne’s lifetime’s output – dominated Christopher’s whole life.
On the day we arrived here in Austin, our host, Dr Eric Colleary, Cline Curator of Theater and Performing Arts, took us to his office, where he let us see and touch a few pages of the original manuscript of the last of those four books, The House at Pooh Corner. It was a special moment in a special place – for Dr Colleary, clearly, an enchanted place. The office was in the basement of the building, I think. (It was difficult to tell: reaching it, we came in and out of elevators, along dark corridors and passageways, with lighting
that came on and off as we passed.) When we reached it, the room had the feel of a stage set: it was windowless and, for reasons not explained, was laid out as a reproduction of the office of John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. The Milne manuscript – and a rough sketch by Ernest Shepard of a dust-jacket illustration of Piglet and Eeyore, apparently never used – were laid out on Dulles’s desk for us.
As well as the Milne treasures, Eric was keen for us to see Evelyn Waugh’s desk in the room next door – and magic tricks belonging to Houdini – and, knowing of my interest in Arthur Conan Doyle as well as A. A. Milne, the manuscript of The Scandal in Bohemia. It was on top of a box that contained the last will and testament of Lord Byron. (I found A. A. Milne’s all-important will in one of the Milne boxes later in the week.) ‘And you love Oscar Wilde, too, don’t you?’ said Eric. ‘You’re President of the Oscar Wilde Society, aren’t you?’ ‘I am,’ I replied. ‘Then you’ve got to see this –it’s the original manuscript of Wilde’s Salomé.’
Talk of Wilde led to talk of The Importance of Being Earnest , which led to talk of Dame Edith Evans and her celebrated portrayal of Lady Bracknell (‘A haaaandbag!’), which led to Eric taking us through the book stacks (they have a million books on site) towards the shelves containing A. A. Milne’s own library (donated by Daphne after her husband’s death), via a vast room full of stage and movie costumes (including those worn by Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard and others in Gone with the Wind ) to see clothes worn by Edith Evans and to be told a story I had not heard before. According to Eric, the young Maggie Smith learned an invaluable lesson from Dame Edith when they worked together in the 1960s. Dame Edith told Maggie,
somewhere, a boy and a bear
‘If you don’t know what a line means, say it as though it’s a little bit naughty.’
It has been an extraordinary week. We did not see much of Texas. In fact, we did not see any of Texas beyond the university campus. From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day, we sat in the library, immersed in the life and times of A. A. Milne. Last night, in the restaurant in the campus hotel, our young server asked me why we had come to Austin. I told her. ‘That’s great,’ she said, ‘then you’ll be coming back in April.’
‘In April?’
‘For Eeyore’s birthday. In Austin, we always have a big party on the last Saturday in April to celebrate Eeyore’s birthday.’
The young server had no idea that Milne’s papers are stored in Austin, but she knew that Eeyore was a gloomy character, and a friend of Winnie-the-Pooh, and that he needed cheering up. ‘Look at the world,’ she said. ‘We all need cheering up.’
Eeyore’s Birthday Party began in 1963 as a spring picnic in the park organized by students and faculty from the university. It was named in honour of Eeyore because of the story in Chapter Six of Winnie-the-Pooh in which Eeyore is at his gloomiest:
Eeyore, the old grey donkey, stood by the side of the stream, and looked at himself in the water.
‘Pathetic,’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. Pathetic.’
It is Eeyore’s birthday and he assumes nobody either knows nor cares.
Over the years, according to our young server, Austin’s Birthday Party for Eeyore has grown into a huge family fun day out, with thousands attending. The original event was
held on campus at Eastwoods Park and featured a single trash-can loaded with ice and cans of beer and lemonade, honey sandwiches, a maypole and a real-life flower-bedecked donkey. Apparently, in the early days the party had a distinctly ‘hippie vibe’. It still does to an extent, with large drum circles featuring hundreds of drummers and dancers as part of the entertainment. Today, alongside the music and the costume parades and the carnival games and food stalls, they still have a live donkey. And in Eastwoods Park there is now a commemorative sculpture in bronze of a slumped and seated donkey. The sculpture is called ‘And He Was Sad’.
‘If anybody wants to clap,’ said Eeyore when he had read this, ‘now is the time to do it.’
They all clapped.
‘Thank you,’ said Eeyore. ‘Unexpected and gratifying, if a little lacking in Smack.’
The House at Pooh Corner
12 January 2025: Mid-Atlantic
I am flying home to London. I have just been watching Goodbye Christopher Robin on the plane. I have seen it before. It’s a well-made movie, directed by Simon Curtis, with Domhnall Gleeson as Alan, Margot Robbie as Daphne, and Kelly Macdonald as Olive Rand, Christopher Robin’s nanny, but it’s a movie, not a documentary, and there is a lot in it that isn’t quite right and some of it that is quite wrong. Alan coming out of the 1914–18 war suffering from long-term post-traumatic stress disorder is certainly overplayed, and making the illustrator, Ernest Shepard (played by Stephen Campbell Moore), Alan’s closest friend is a major mistake.
somewhere, a boy and a bear
Ernest Howard Shepard (1879–1976) was a wonderful artist and book illustrator, and, of course, his drawings for all four of Milne’s children’s books now feel ‘definitive’, but he and A. A. Milne were never close. When Winnie-the-Pooh made his first appearance in the Evening News the illustrator was not Shepard but another regular contributor to Punch magazine, James H. Dowd (1884–1956).
E. H. Shepard got the Milne book assignment at the suggestion of E. V. Lucas (1868–1938), who was on the staff of Punch from 1904 onwards, and, from 1908, also a reader for the publishing company Methuen & Co. He became the chairman of the company in 1924, the year in which Methuen published When We Were Very Young. A. A. Milne had sent his children’s verses to Lucas at Methuen to see what he made of them: Lucas immediately recognized their potential, both for Punch and as a book, and, at Punch one day, asked Shepard to produce some initial sketches to see if Milne might like them.
Milne had a history of not liking Shepard’s work. More than once in the past, he had said to Punch’s art editor, ‘What on earth do you see in this man? He’s perfectly hopeless.’ This time he rather liked Shepard’s drawings, and, over time, he came to like them very much, gratefully acknowledging their contribution to his books’ success and suggesting Shepard have a share of the royalties – a quite unusual arrangement for the period. Later, in a copy of Winnie-thePooh, he inscribed this tribute to his collaborator:
When I am gone,
Let Shepard decorate my tomb,
And put (if there is room)
Two pictures on the stone:
Piglet from page a hundred and eleven, And Pooh and Piglet walking (157) . . .
And Peter, thinking that they are my own, Will welcome me to Heaven.
E. H. Shepard was Milne’s colleague, not his boon companion. Milne invited Shepard to his house in Chelsea to meet Christopher Robin and his toys, and took him on a walk through Ashdown Forest in East Sussex so that Shepard could see exactly where the stories were set, but theirs was always a working relationship – and if Milne wasn’t happy with a Shepard drawing he didn’t hesitate to say so.
This very week, as it happens, an auction house is selling a batch of Shepard drawings and Milne correspondence. It features illustrations from some early spin-off merchandise
– The Christopher Robin Birthday Book, 1930 – with a note from Milne to the publisher telling him that Shepard ‘must do new drawings for April and September as the originals are very poor’. The drawings will all sell for thousands, come what may. Shepard’s Milne-related work achieves astonishing prices at auction. His original illustrated map of the Hundred Acre Wood, which features in the opening pages of Winniethe-Pooh , sold for £430,000 ($600,000) at Sotheby’s in London in 2018, setting a world record for a book illustration. The partnership was valuable to them both, but neither author nor illustrator pretended there was any special intimacy between them. Each was grateful to the other, but both had quite different world views (Milne had a horror of war; Shepard had won an MC in 1917) and full and contrasting creative lives before and after Pooh. In time, Shepard, like Milne, came to tire of what he called ‘that silly old bear’ because it so overshadowed the rest of his work.
somewhere, a boy and a bear
E. H. Shepard wrote two autobiographies, but said of Milne, ‘I never knew him intimately.’ He found him ‘rather a cagey man’ who didn’t give much away. With A. A. Milne, he said, ‘It was difficult to get beyond the facade.’
That’s the challenge. Can I get beyond the facade? I hope so.
16 January 2025: Windsor Castle
In 1981, Christopher Milne told me that now he was sixty he had made his peace with his father’s four children’s books –the books that had made ‘Christopher Robin’ world famous. He enjoyed the Pooh stories unreservedly, and the poems, too, with one notable exception. To the end of his days, he could not stand the verse that first introduced the world to the little boy called Christopher Robin, the poem called ‘Vespers’ that begins:
Little Boy kneels at the foot of the bed,
Droops on the little hands little gold head.
Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.
A. A. Milne lamented in his autobiography that the poem was mostly misunderstood and sentimentalized by readers who took it to be about a darling child dutifully saying his prayers when, in fact, it’s about a real little boy who isn’t saying his prayers because ‘his thoughts are engaged with other, more exciting matters’.
Christopher Milne came to hate the poem because it was turned into a song, with music by H. Fraser-Simson, and the song became very popular. Christopher recorded a version
of it himself when he was seven and, among the many commercial recordings, two of the most popular were sung by Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn. The actor Norman Shelley (the voice of Children’s Hour on the radio in Britain in the 1950s) recited it to an organ accompaniment at A. A. Milne’s funeral. Aled Jones sang it as Christopher Robin in my play, Now We Are Sixty, in 1986.
To me, Christopher called it ‘that wretched poem . . . the bane of my life’. When he came to write his own childhood memoir, Christopher considered the poem carefully ‘for the first time in my life’ and realized it wasn’t as soppy as Vera Lynn had made it sound. In fact, it wasn’t sentimental at all; it was mildly cynical. But as a boy, especially when he was in his teens at boarding school, and later when he joined the army, the poem brought him ‘toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment’. At Stowe, his public school, the other boys teased him mercilessly, he remembered, mocking and taunting him, playing the Vera Lynn record endlessly –until he took the record and ‘broke it into a hundred pieces and scattered it in a distant field’.
I am in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle looking at the first-ever edition of ‘that wretched poem’, ‘Vespers’. It’s an edition of one, not printed, but written in A. A. Milne’s own hand and bound in vellum. It is one of the 595 miniature books created for the Library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House in the early 1920s.
Queen Mary was the wife of King George V. The dolls’ house was the idea of Queen Mary’s childhood friend and first cousin by marriage, Princess Marie Louise, one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. The princess had seen the Queen furnishing a dolls’ house to sell to raise funds for the
somewhere, a boy and a bear London Hospital and, knowing how Queen Mary loved all things miniature, decided to create a special dolls’ house as a gift for her. The great architect Sir Edwin Lutyens (who designed the Cenotaph in Whitehall and so much besides) agreed to design the dolls’ house to a scale of 1:12 (one inch to one foot), and a wide assortment of artists and model makers contributed the contents and fittings. The carpets, curtains and furnishings are all copies of the originals from Windsor Castle. The bathrooms are fully plumbed with piped, running water, and include a flushable lavatory with miniature toilet paper.
One hundred and seventy-six of the books in the miniature library are manuscripts, contributed by the leading literary lights of the day – including three of the authors A. A. Milne admired most: Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and J. M. Barrie. (Of those asked, only George Bernard Shaw declined the invitation to contribute something.) Milne’s poem arrived with a simple compliment slip dated 10 October 1922.
Milne recalled writing the poem, as a distraction, ‘while at work on a play’. When he had ‘wasted a morning’ on it, he gave it to his wife, Daphne, ‘as one might give a photograph or a valentine, telling her that if she liked to get it published anywhere she could stick to the money’. She sent it to Vanity Fair in New York and was delighted to receive fifty dollars for it. In due course, according to Milne, she ‘collected one forty-fourth of all the royalties of When We Were Very Young, together with her share of various musical and subsidiary rights’. With ‘decorations’ by E. H. Shepard, the poem was reproduced and framed and hung in thousands of nurseries across America and the British empire. Alan did not begrudge