The Real Life Story That Inspired Winnie-the-Pooh
The world-famous Winnie-the-Pooh stories were inspired by a real boy named Christopher Robin and his real Winnie-the-Pooh toy. This made many fans assume the real Christopher Robin’s childhood was as idyllic and magical as the tales from the Hundred-Acre Wood. But this simply wasn’t the case. In fact, the real Christopher Robin faced incredible difficulties in his childhood and later in life. He even came to dislike the bear the world fell in love with.
A life without worry
The very first Winnie-the-Pooh tales appeared in the 1924 poetry collection When We Were Very Young and 1926's Winnie-the-Pooh book. In these light-hearted stories, Christopher Robin plays in the Hundred-Acre Wood without a care in the world.
His main concerns include sourcing his best friend Winnie-the-Pooh’s next supply of honey. He also goes on an expedition to find the North Pole and throws woodland parties for his friends — Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, and Rabbit.
A writer goes to war
The person responsible for bringing the stuffed yellow bear to life was Alan Alexander Milne — or A. A. Milne. Before writing Winnie-the-Pooh, he enjoyed a career as a playwright and had published three novels. But first, Alan fought in World War I.
In 1916 he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme — a devastating campaign in which hundreds of thousands of men died. It seems that his time at war stuck with him, and he is thought to have experienced various symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Dealing with the fallout
After the war, the author reportedly mistook popping balloons for cannon fire and thought that buzzing bees were bullets. In his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now, Alan revealed it made him “almost physically sick” to think of “that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war.”
“It seems impossible to me now that any sensitive man could live through another war,” Alan wrote elsewhere in his memoir. “If not required to die on other ways, he would waste away of soul-sickness.”
A bumpy relationship
He had already married Daphne de Sélincourt in 1913, and in 1920 they had their son, Christopher Robin Milne. Five years after Alan returned from WWI, he decided to move his family to the countryside. They ended up in a county home called Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, England.
It is here that the inspiration for Pooh would be fully articulated. But despite what you might think from the Winnie-the-Pooh books, father and son did not have a particularly close relationship.
A.A. Milne was not a fan of children
“It was my mother who used to come and play in the nursery with me and tell [my dad] about the things I thought and did,” Christopher Robin once said, according to the New York Times. He added, “It was she who provided most of the material for my father’s books.”
Alan even remarked that he didn’t like children all that much. He once told an interviewer that he felt no more feelings towards them than someone has “over a puppy or a kitten.” The same was seemingly true of his own son.
Christopher Robin was closer to the nanny
In a 1988 interview, the real Christopher Robin told The Telegraph, “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.”
Christopher Robin’s relationship with his father, according to Christopher, was non-existent in the early years. His relationship with his mother, Daphne, was not much better. It is unsurprising, then, that he grew very fond of his live-in nanny, Olive Rand.
Fame brought problems
He told The Telegraph, “For over eight years, apart from her fortnight’s holiday every September, we had not been out of each other’s sight for more than a few hours at a time.” His father was usually writing.
After Alan published the Winnie-the-Pooh books, Christopher Robin was immediately famous. He was photographed with Pooh, he had to sing a song in front of an audience, and he even recorded an audiobook of the tale. It was fun... for a time.
"He had filched from me my good name"
Christopher Robin told The Telegraph that he "quite liked being famous" — at first. "It was exciting and made me feel grand and important," he said. But then he went to boarding school — and he started to feel resentful towards his father.
He even told The Telegraph that he felt as though his father “had got where he was by climbing on 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.”
Christopher Robin was bullied for his fame
At the age of nine, Christopher Robin left home to attend boarding school. It was an ordeal for the young boy, as his fame and public connection to his childhood teddy meant that he was badly bullied. He had to endure both verbal abuse and physical attacks.
He chose to learn boxing as a way of standing up for himself. Many years later, according to The Sun, he remarked that these incidences at school caused him “toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment.”
"I found myself disliking him"
In his 1974 memoir, The Enchanted Places: A Childhood Memoir, Christopher Robin admitted to mixed feelings about the fictional version of himself. He wrote, “At home I still liked him, indeed felt at times quite proud that I shared his name and was able to bask in some of his glory.”
He added, “At school, however, I began to dislike him, and I found myself disliking him more and more the older I got.” He also began to resent his father for creating "a dream son" in his books — instead of playing with his real son.
Their relationship improved — for a while
Father and son did manage to repair their relationship — after Alan stopped writing Winnie-the-Pooh books. The author stopped writing, he once said, out of "amazement and disgust" about his son's celebrity.
"I feel that the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for him," Alan wrote. "I do not want C.R. Milne to ever wish that his name were Charles Robert." The pair had nine good years together where they would do "the Times crossword and algebra and Euclid." But this was followed by "the inevitable parting" in 1938.
The war and more troubles
Christopher Robin's studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, were interrupted by World War II. With a little help from his father, Christopher became a sapper with the second training battalion of the Royal Engineers. In July 1942 he received his commission and traveled to Italy and the Middle East
A year later as a platoon commander, Christopher was wounded and had to make the journey home to England. He returned to university and majored in English Literature. But he had trouble finding his vocation and at one point even worked selling lampshades at a department store.
A further separation
Christopher Robin was resentful and struggling. He told The Telegraph he felt it was because of his father that he had “a household name but no role in life.” Yet what happened next caused a more definite separation between him and his parents.
Much to his parents’ dismay, Christopher Robin then fell in love with and then married his first cousin, Lesley de Sélincourt. The pair met in 1947 and were hitched a short time later, in July 1948.
A match that tore the family apart
Rather unsurprisingly, Christopher Robin and Lesley bonded over the fact that they both disliked Winnie-the-Pooh. Lesley was not impressed by Christopher’s connection to the fictional namesake and instead, saw him for who he was.
Not only this, but she didn’t view his father Alan’s work in high regard either. Christopher Robin’s parents didn’t approve of the match — but it wasn't just because of how Lesley felt about Alan.
Alan didn't always like Winnie-the-Pooh
In It’s Too Late Now, Milne revealed that he'd had enough of writing for children after the 70,000 words it took to write the four Winnie-the-Pooh books. It was “the number of words in the average-length novel” — but he felt trapped by them.
“I wanted to escape from [children’s books] as I had once wanted to escape from Punch; as I have always wanted to escape,” he wrote. “In vain. England expects the writer, like the cobbler, to stick to his last.”
A conflicted legacy
Alan added, “It is inevitable that a book that has had very large sales should become an object of derision to critics and columnists.” Dorothy Parker famously wrote a takedown of the Pooh books in The New Yorker.
But, Alan retorted, “We all write books, we all want money: we who write want money from our books. If we fail to get money, we are not so humble, nor so foolish, as to admit that we have failed in our object. Our object, we maintain, was artistic success.” None of this conflict brought him closer to Christopher, though.
Going against the family
Apparently, his father didn't like the fact that his son was marrying a blood relative. But his mother, Daphne, had also been estranged from her brother — Lesley’s father — for three decades.
Despite the protestations, in 1951 Christopher Robin and Lesley decided to move to Dartmouth in the south of England. Later that year, they opened a bookshop on the harbor — also to his mother's dismay.
Making a new living
"You're going to have to meet Pooh fans all the time!" she told Christopher. Years later, Christopher admitted to The Telegraph that his mother "always hit the nail on the head no matter whose fingers were in the way."
But the bookshop was a success. Not that Alan would have known about it. Christopher said the pair rarely saw each other in the years leading up to Alan's death in 1956.
“I had to accept it, for Clare’s sake”
Christopher Robin and Lesley had their only child in 1956. Clare was born with severe cerebral palsy. She couldn’t walk without help and needed 24-hour care. It was Clare's birth that forced Christopher to finally confront his past.
Up until this point, Christopher Robin had been adamant that he didn’t want to get a “lift from [his] fictional namesake of all people.” But the birth of his daughter put things into perspective. “I had to accept it, for Clare’s sake,” he explained.
Clare "set us an example"
In his first autobiography, The Enchanted Places, Christopher Robin wrote that his daughter "set us an example and taught us a philosophy that parents don't usually expect to learn from their children." He wrote, "Lucky Clare to have such a mother."
Christopher showcased another skill of his: working with his hands. He made Clare bespoke cutlery and furniture that were adapted for her. His nurturing side came out when he brought home a pet for her to play with, too.
The family were never reconciled
Christopher Robin later wrote that his book The Enchanted Places "combined to lift me from under the shadow of my father and of Christopher Robin, and to my surprise and pleasure I found myself standing beside them in the sunshine able to look them both in the eye." But the family never reconciled.
The Daily Mail reported that after Christopher told a journalist about his childhood — and how his parents had been distant while he was growing up. The article came out after Alan had died.
A death in the family
A stroke and brain surgery in 1952 had left Alan as a shell of himself, and by the following year, his friend John Middleton Murry wrote that “he seemed very old and disenchanted.” Then he died in January 1956, aged 74.
According to the Daily Mail, though, Daphne was heartbroken by Christopher's comments in that article. The statue of Christopher that stood in her garden was soon buried. She supposedly wanted him out of sight and out of mind.
Daphne realized they'd never make peace
Apparently, Daphne wanted to use her husband’s funeral as a way of approaching Christopher and making peace. But, according to the Daily Mail, Christopher arrived without his wife and in a "scruffy jacket." This put an end to her plans.
The pair didn't speak — or rarely spoke — for the last 15 years of her life. Christopher told The Telegraph that he only saw her one more time after the funeral. He revealed he'd said goodbye "long ago" and was no longer angry.
Christopher Robin was angry for a long time
He was angry in 1976, though. This was long after Disney had bought the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh and his stories and began using the character in globally beloved movies. Pooh had been successful before Disney — but Disney pushed it into a new stratosphere.
"I don't identify with many of the things which are being marketed under the name of Pooh as anything to do with anything I ever owned or felt any fondness for," Christopher told a London newspaper in 1976. "Frankly, the exploitation of the books makes me sick."
Pooh as a cult
"It's nothing to do with any of the Milnes. It's a caricature," Christopher added. "To me, Pooh is a toy I had as a child. When he first appeared in print, the books were true to my idea of him and that was fine."
He finished, "But he has now gone well beyond that and become a cult." Christopher had been so over Pooh at that time that he didn't mind that his father had given his toys — including the real Winnie-the-Pooh — over to the books' publicity needs.
Winnie-the-Pooh on display
The toys toured bookstores and libraries before they were donated to the New York Public Library where they went on display. The real Winnie-the-Pooh had been bought at Harrods in London for Christopher Robin's first birthday on August 21, 1921.
According to the New York Public Library, "The stuffed animals range in height from 25" (Eeyore, the biggest) to 4 1/2" (Piglet, the smallest)." They've been on display to the public since 1987 — although not always happily
Pooh almost went home
Christopher Robin was fine with the bears being in New York, but he did mention to The Telegraph that it would be nice for them to visit England every now and then. In 1998 this seemingly set off a brief international skirmish.
"Pooh and his friends become the center of international attention when a British Member of Parliament decides they should be returned to England," wrote the New York Public Library. "The United States and England agree that Pooh and his pals are happy and healthy on American soil, and it is unanimously decided that they will remain at The New York Public Library."
Christopher made peace
We're sure Christopher — who died in 1996 — wouldn't have minded. In that same interview, Christopher said, “I like to have around me the things I like today, not the things I once liked many years ago.”
He also reminded readers, “It’s been something of a love-hate relationship down the years, but it’s all right now... I can look at those four books without flinching. I’m quite fond of them really.”
Goodbye, Christopher Robin
In the last years of his life, Christopher did things involving Pooh that might have seemed unthinkable years before. He unveiled a statue of the bear at ZSL London Zoo and helped with the restoration of Pooh Sticks Bridge in Ashdown Forest.
He even got involved with the creation of a memorial for his father and for the illustrator of the Pooh books, E.H. Shepard. He died with no anger left towards his father — or the honey-loving bear of his childhood.