Winnie-the-Pooh's name came from a zoo bear and a swan
Christopher Robin Milne's teddy was first called Edward. After the boy fell for Winnie, a tame Canadian black bear at London Zoo named after Winnipeg, the toy became Winnie. The Pooh part came from a swan. His father, A. A. Milne, turned the result into books that eventually eclipsed everything else he wrote, to his lasting irritation.
Milne was born in Kilburn, London, on 18 January 1882, and grew up at the small school his father ran, where H. G. Wells briefly taught. He reportedly taught himself to read at two, went to Cambridge on a mathematics scholarship and graduated in 1903, though writing was his real love. He joined Punch, rose to assistant editor, and was a sharp fielder in amateur cricket sides made up of authors, sharing the field with the likes of J. M. Barrie and P. G. Wodehouse.
War interrupted. Commissioned in 1915, he served as a signals officer on the Somme in 1916 until trench fever sent him home, then wrote propaganda for military intelligence. Afterwards he became a busy playwright, produced a detective novel, The Red House Mystery, and wrote four short films in 1920 for a company co-founded by Leslie Howard.
Pooh arrived gradually. A poem about a teddy bear appeared in Punch in February 1924; the bear featured in a London Evening News story on Christmas Eve 1925; Winnie-the-Pooh followed in 1926 and The House at Pooh Corner in 1928, all illustrated by E. H. Shepard, who modelled the bear on his own son's teddy, Growler. Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger were real nursery toys, while Rabbit and Owl were invented. The Hundred Acre Wood is Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest, near the family's Sussex farm, where visitors still play Poohsticks from the bridge.
Milne complained that the public always wanted his last success repeated, and insisted the only good reason to write anything was wanting to. He also fell out bitterly with Wodehouse, accusing him of near treason for broadcasting from Berlin during the Second World War; Wodehouse retaliated with parodies of the Christopher Robin poems. The original toys now draw around 750,000 visitors a year in New York. Milne died in January 1956.
Source: A. A. Milne
