Winnie-the-Pooh

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Winnie-the-Pooh began life not in the pages of a book but in a Christmas story printed by the London newspaper Evening News on the 24th of December 1925. A. A. Milne wrote a bear who was friendly, fond of honey, and possessed of very little brain. Within a year, that bear had a book of his own. Within decades, he had become what the children's author and literary critic John Rowe Townsend called "the spectacular British success of the 1920s". By 2002, Forbes magazine ranked Pooh the most valuable fictional character in the world, with merchandising products alone generating more than $5.9 billion that year. How did a stuffed toy bought at Harrods department store become one of the most recognised figures in the history of literature? And what happened to that original toy bear, the one that started everything?

• 2. Winnie, Pooh, and a Name

  ›

  In 1921, A. A. Milne bought his son Christopher Robin a stuffed toy bear from Harrods department store. Christopher Robin gave the bear three names, each drawn from a different creature. The first was Edward. The second was Winnie, borrowed from a real Canadian black bear then living at London Zoo. That bear had been purchased from a hunter for C$20 by Lieutenant Harry Colebourn of the Fort Garry Horse cavalry regiment, at White River, Ontario, while he was travelling to England during the First World War. Colebourn, a veterinary officer, named her after his hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba. He brought Winnie to England and left her at London Zoo when his unit deployed to France. After the war she was officially donated, having become a well-loved attraction. The third name, Pooh, came from a friend's pet swan the Milne family had encountered while on holiday. American writer William Safire later suggested the name may also have been shaped by the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado of 1885. A bronze sculpture of Winnie as a young cub, made by Lorne McKean, was unveiled at London Zoo in September 1981 by Christopher Robin himself.

• 3. The Hundred Acre Wood

  ›

  In 1925, Milne bought a country home called Cotchford Farm, near Hartfield, situated a mile to the north of Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. The forest sits on the highest sandy ridges of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, 30 miles south-east of London. Christopher Robin Milne later described the family's routine: his father would remain in London through the week, then the four of them would take a large blue, chauffeur-driven Fiat down every Saturday morning and return every Monday afternoon. From the front lawn they could see across a meadow to a line of alders fringing the River Medway, and beyond that, through more trees, a bare hilltop crowned by a clump of pines. Christopher Robin wrote in his autobiography that "Pooh's forest and Ashdown Forest are identical." The fictional Hundred Acre Wood was in reality Five Hundred Acre Wood. Galleon's Leap in the stories was drawn from the prominent hilltop of Gill's Lap, while a nearby clump of trees became the Enchanted Place, so named because no one had ever agreed on whether it contained 63 or 64 trees. The game of Poohsticks was first played by Christopher Robin and his father on a wooden footbridge across the Millbrook in Posingford Wood, close to Cotchford Farm. When that footbridge had to be replaced in 1999, the architect used Shepard's drawings from the books as a primary source.

• 4. The Illustrator's Bear

  ›

  E. H. Shepard's drawings of Pooh were not based on Christopher Robin's own stuffed toy. According to James Campbell, the husband of Shepard's great-granddaughter, Shepard used his own son Graham's bear, named Growler, as the model. When Campbell took over Shepard's estate in 2010, he found many drawings and unpublished writings, including early Pooh sketches not seen in decades. Campbell reported that both Shepard and Milne felt Christopher Robin's bear looked too gruff and not sufficiently cuddly, so they agreed on a different model. Shepard sent Milne a drawing of Growler, and Milne replied that it was perfect. Shepard's sketches of pine trees and other Ashdown Forest scenes are now held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The original 1926 illustrated map of the Hundred Acre Wood, which appears in the opening pages of Milne's books and in the first Disney adaptation, sold for £430,000 at Sotheby's in London in 2018, setting a world record for book illustrations.

• 5. Stephen Slesinger and the Red Shirt

  ›

  On the 6th of January 1930, a New York entrepreneur named Stephen Slesinger purchased US and Canadian merchandising, television, recording, and other trade rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh works from Milne for a $1,000 advance and 66% of Slesinger's income from those rights. The result was rapid. By November 1931, Pooh was a $50 million-a-year business. Slesinger created the first Pooh doll, the first Pooh record, the first board game, the first puzzle, the first US radio broadcast on NBC, and the first Pooh animation and motion picture. He also gave the bear his signature look. In 1932, Slesinger drew Pooh in a red shirt for an RCA Victor picture record, the first time the character appeared in colour. Parker Brothers introduced A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh Game in 1933, again showing Pooh in his red shirt. In the 1940s, Agnes Brush created the first plush dolls with Pooh wearing a shirt. After Slesinger died in 1953, his wife Shirley Slesinger Lasswell continued developing the character. In 1961 she licensed rights to Walt Disney Productions, and that same year A. A. Milne's widow Daphne Milne separately licensed motion picture rights to Disney as well.

• 6. Disney, Copyright, and the Courts

  ›

  Since 1966, Disney has released numerous animated productions starting with the theatrical featurette Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. Three subsequent featurettes, including Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day in 1968 and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too in 1974, were combined into the feature-length The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh in 1977. The franchise grew into one of Disney's most successful, with Pooh generating $6 billion in 2005, a figure surpassed that year only by Mickey Mouse. The commercial relationship produced decades of legal conflict. In 1991, Stephen Slesinger, Inc., sued Disney alleging that Disney had breached a 1983 agreement by failing to accurately report revenue from Pooh sales. Disney was sanctioned by a judge for destroying forty boxes of evidentiary documents, but the suit was later terminated when it emerged that Slesinger's investigator had searched through Disney's garbage to retrieve discarded evidence. A three-judge panel upheld the dismissal on the 26th of September 2007. A. A. Milne's US copyright on the Winnie-the-Pooh character expired on the 1st of January 2022-95 years after first publication, placing the character in the public domain in the United States. Independent filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield responded by producing a horror film titled Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. UK copyright will expire on the 1st of January 2027, the first day of the first calendar year at least 70 years after Milne's death.

• 7. A Global Cultural Presence

  ›

  In China, images of Pooh were censored from social media in mid-2017 after internet memes comparing Chinese Paramount Leader Xi Jinping to Disney's version of the character became popular. The 2018 Disney film Christopher Robin was denied a Chinese release. Pooh's Chinese name was censored from video games including World of Warcraft, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Arena of Valor. In October 2019, the South Park episode "Band in China" featured Pooh as a prisoner; South Park was banned in China as a result. Taiwanese pilots have worn morale patches depicting a Formosan black bear punching Winnie-the-Pooh, with demand surging after images of active duty personnel wearing them circulated widely. Elsewhere, the bear's cultural reach takes warmer forms. Japanese figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu, a two-time Olympic champion, regards Pooh as his lucky charm and is regularly seen with a stuffed bear during competitions. After one of his performances at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, one spectator reported that "the ice turned yellow" from all the stuffed Poohs thrown onto the ice. In 2006, Pooh received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, marking 80 years since Milne's creation. In 2018, Alexander Lenard's Latin translation of the first book, Winnie ille Pu, first published in 1958, remains notable for having been the only Latin book ever to appear on The New York Times Best Seller list, a distinction it earned in 1960.