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History This Week is now in its sixth season, which is kind of crazy, but we're continuing to grow and to bring you stories from the past that you've never heard before.
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Five years in, we have a ton of episodes that you can always go back and listen to.
And we're also really excited about everything that's coming up.
We hope you are too. History This Week, August 24th, 1914.
I'm Sally Helm. Last night, a train left the prairie town of Winnipeg and traveled all the way to the shores of Lake Superior in Ontario, Canada.
The soldiers had to sleep on board. Some of them were probably nervous, maybe already missing home.
They're on their way to a military training camp half a continent away in Quebec.
From there, many of them will deploy to Europe to fight in World War I.
So when the train stops today in the lumber town of White River, many of the soldiers take the chance to get outside for a moment. stretch their legs, breathe the Ontario air.
And when they disembark they see something strange.
A small, black bear cub. A lot of the soldiers probably took notice.
It's not every day that you see a bear at the train station.
But one of them has a particular reason to stop and find out what's going on.
27-year-old Harry Colburn is an Army vet, not veteran, veterinarian.
His job is to take care of the horses in this regiment, make sure they're eating right, try to make sure they don't get sick, treat their wounds if they get hit by bullets or shrapnel.
Colburn talks to the guy who's brought the bear to the train station and learns that he's a local trapper who shot this cub's mother.
He says the orphaned cub is now for sale.
And Colburn makes a decision. Maybe he was feeling impulsive.
Maybe he was feeling lonely. Whatever the reason, he decides that today is the day to buy a bear.
He hands over $20, the equivalent of more than $500 today, and brings this bear cub on board the train.
She travels with him to training camp in Quebec, then across the Atlantic aboard a military transport ship bound for Europe.
While the soldiers are training for battle, Colburn trains this bear cub, giving her rewards of apples and condensed milk.
She sleeps under his cot, and she becomes the regiment's unofficial mascot.
Weirdly, having an animal mascot for your regiment wasn't all that uncommon.
Colburn names the bear for the prairie town where he's been living.
Winnipeg. Winnie for short. When Colburn and the other soldiers get deployed to the French warfront, it's clear that Winnie can't come along.
So Colburn drops her off at the London Zoo, planning to retrieve her when the war is done.
But while he's off fighting in France, Winnie becomes one of the zoo's most popular attractions.
And one of the children who comes to see her is a boy named Christopher Robin Milne.
He'll later name his own teddy bear after her.
Winnie the Pooh. Today, the real people, places, animals, and stuffed animals behind this beloved children's series.
How did a real-life boy and a real-life bear inspire some of the world's most famous literary characters?
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If a Canadian soldier buying an orphaned bear cub from a trapper is not the way you imagined the origins of Winnie the Pooh you are not alone.
It's really strange. A person who was once called the world's leading Pooh scholar agrees.
Amen, sweet. I'm a rather aged biographer.
Anne Thwaite is 88 years old. She's been a writer since the late 1950s, first writing children's books and then turning to biographies in the 1970s and 80s.
One of those books, about the English writer Edmund Gosse, won a big prize.
And after that, Anne Thwaite was under a bit of pressure as she selected her next subject.
A lot of publishers approached me with ideas. and most of them were wildly unsuitable.
But one publisher pitched a person she liked, A. A. Milne. author of the Winnie the Pooh books.
I said immediately, well, that would be marvelous if I could, because I'd always loved A.M.L. and I loved Winnie the Pooh books.
I'd read them as a child. He was perfect subject for me.
But there was a catch. Thwaite didn't want to do the book without the permission of Milne's living son, Christopher Robin Milne, who inspired the character of Christopher Robin.
I had said I wouldn't do it unless Christopher Milne was agreeable.
And I understand that he has agreed. turned down a number of biographers in the past.
In fact, he had said in print that he didn't want anyone to write a biography of his father.
But this time, he agrees. He even gives Thwaites permission to access all kinds of archival documents.
She's able to visit the Milne Country Home in southern England, which helped inspire the Pooh books and which was, and still is, closed off to the public.
It's a lovely place, remarkably rural and unspoiled, exactly now as it was then.
And she gets to meet with Christopher Robin Milne himself.
He was delightful. Very easy to talk to.
In fact, as I found out, very much like his father.
I think most people know that he had got very fed up idea of being constantly reminded of Christopher Robin and had rather turned his back on the whole thing.
But when I wrote the book, of course, he found out a great many things that he didn't know.
Thwaite had to work hard to reconstruct a picture of Christopher Robin's father.
Alan Alexander Milne. He was a very private person.
He was a very unsociable man. And if I'd met him...
I'm not sure that I would have found it easy to talk to him.
Milne was particular. music. He hated liquor.
He despised all forms of aggression, from professional soccer to war.
He said a rather dramatic sentence. It makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral depression. degradation, the war.
Like Harry Colburn, the veterinarian on that train in Canada, A.A.
Milne fought in World War I. He too was deployed to France, where he worked as a signals officer, laying communication lines in the heat of battle.
He actually went to the Somme. ghastly, ghastly place.
The Battle of the Somme lasted for months.
On the first day of fighting more than 19,000 British troops were killed and tens of thousands more were wounded.
By the time it was all over, more than a million troops had been wounded or killed.
The officer Milne was deployed with was dead within a week.
Milne himself gets sent home with trench fever near the end of the battle.
His fever reached, at one point, 105 degrees.
The horrific things he'd seen in France colored his outlook on the world for a long time afterwards, though he didn't like to dwell on it.
When he came to write his own autobiography, he didn't tell us very much about it.
He certainly didn't talk about it much in his life.
Through all of this, Milne was working towards his bigger goal, building a career as a writer.
I think he wrote four plays while he was still in the army, which was rather remarkable.
And they were a great success in London.
Milne was a talented playwright and humorist, fairly well known.
In fact, when he first met his future wife Daphne, she knew some of his magazine pieces nearly by heart.
The two of them were already married by the time Milne went to war, and a few years after his return, Daphne gets pregnant.
Christopher Robin Milne, the couple's only son, was born on August 21, 1920.
A few days later, Milne writes in a letter, Daff and Billy, to be Christopher Robin, but called Billy, are both extremely well.
He weighed 10 pounds or so, the nurse said. but I suspect that nurses are rather like fishermen. in that they tend to exaggerate.
The boy had a head of curly brown hair and, as Milne put it, Not a bad little face for his age.
His parents would call him Billy Moon. That was the way he initially pronounced his own last name, Milne.
What is his relationship like with his son when he's young?
They were very, very close. He was a very devoted father.
In fact, he would arrange guests to arrive not at the time when Christopher was having his lunch, We had to have lunch with Billy first.
Later in life, in an effort to distance himself from his reputation as a writer for children, Milne would claim... I am not... inordinately fond or interested in children. or no more sentimental than one becomes for a moment over a puppy or a kitten.
But all the evidence shows how extremely interested he was in his own son.
And, Anthwaite says, he was certainly interested in childhood.
He himself grew up with a lot of freedom.
He was very close to his brother. and they explored London on their bicycles.
Very safe in those days when there were no cars.
It may be that those happy memories were in his mind when, in 1923, another author asked him to write a children's poem for her new magazine.
And he said yes. The Milnes were, at the time, on a holiday in Wales, staying with a group often happens in Wales.
It was very wet. It rains all day in Wales, Milne wrote to a friend in a gloomy tone that we might later call Eeyore-like.
It might not have been so bad if he liked the company.
But Milne, remember, was antisocial. He was wanting an excuse to get away from the other people in the house party.
And so, when he gets this request for the poem...
It was a very good excuse to go and find a quiet place to cry and have a go.
Milne had never written for children before, but he locked himself in a back garden and started writing.
Before the trip was over, he'd finished not just that one poem, but a quarter of the poems that would make up his first children's book, called When We Were Very Young.
Once he said that there were three things that led to the poems, memory, observation, and imagination. memory from Milne's own childhood adventures, observation of his son, Billy Moon, who was named as Christopher Robin in four out of 44 poems.
And then, of course, imagination. What do you think it was that made the poems different from other writing for children that was were writing with limited vocabulary, as indeed many of our most popular writers today do.
But Milne never did that. He wanted his words to have richness, flavor, bite, and he knew the power of the occasional unfamiliar word.
Ernest was an elephant and very well-intentioned.
Leonard was a lion with a brave new tail.
George was a goat, as I think I have mentioned, but James was only a snail.
If one hears a small child referred to someone as well-intentioned, Who knows?
They've been reading A.A. Milne. When We Were Very Young was published in November of 1924.
It was hugely successful straight away. And one of the things that was remarkable about it as a children's book was that it was read by adults, bought by adults. and given to adults as presents.
Milne and his publishers got letters of appreciation from all over.
Three US Supreme Court justices wrote to him.
So did Fred Astaire. And readers around the world began to ask, What was the real Christopher Robin like?
Milne would later write of the fictional Christopher Robin.
To me, he was and remained the child of my imagination.
Milne said he didn't really associate the character with the child who was running around the house, the one he and his wife called Billy Moon.
Milne's wife Daphne once said that for Billy in those days, seeing his name in a story or a poem was no more unusual than a child seeing their face in a family photo album.
Still, Milne himself said that imagination was only one piece of the puzzle.
Some of it at least was observation. One of the poems in When We Were Very Young featured a teddy bear.
They stood beneath the window there, the king and Mr. Edward Bear. and handsome, if trifle fat, talked carelessly of this and that.
Mr. Edward Bear was a doll that had been gifted to Christopher Robin for his first birthday in 1921.
But at some point between the time Milne sat down to write that poem and a few months after its 1925 publication, Edward Bear got a new name.
Like many British kids, Christopher Robin had taken a liking to a particular animal in the London Zoo. a black bear named Winnipeg, Winnie for short.
And he'd come up with the name Pooh one day while feeding a reluctant swan.
A good name, because if you caught him...
And he didn't come. You could pretend you were just saying, poof.
I didn't want him anyway. And at some point, a child's logic led Christopher Robin to string those names together and begin calling his stuffed bear Winnie.
The bear soon begins to show up in the bedtime stories that Milne tells his son, calming stories meant to put a child to sleep.
They had to do with a bear and a balloon and some bees.
Meanwhile, as Christmas 1925 approaches, sales of Milne's book continue to climb.
A headline in a November edition of the New York Telegraph reads, Everybody's talking about this book, above a photo of the real Christopher Robin.
Everyone wanted to know, what would Milne write next?
And Daphne said, why don't you write down one of those stories that you told Christopher at bedtime?
On December 24, 1925, the Christmas Eve edition of the Evening News features a front-page spread.
A Children's Story by A. A. Milne. A few pages later, a banner headline spells out in all capital letters, Winnie the Poop.
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We help, you save. Just a few weeks after his Christmas Eve story introduces the world to Winnie the Pooh, A.A.
Milne writes a to-do list. Second on the a book at Daffs and Billy's special request of Winnie the Pooh.
The world Milne created was, like his poems, pulled from memory, observation and imagination.
In his son's nursery, he found the dolls who would become the main characters.
Found... and sometimes planted. The child already had poo and piglet, but Kanga, for instance, was added deliberately by Mel and to the nursery because he wanted to use another character in the story.
From his wife, Daphne, Milne got most of the voices.
She'd invented those while playing with Billy.
And the grounds of the Milne's country home ended up inspiring the Hundred Acre Wood, where Pooh and Piglet and the fictional Christopher Robin played.
They could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky.
The real place was called Ashdown Forest.
It is the most wonderful place to walk. Towards the end, you come down to Pooh Sticks Bridge.
So named for the game that the real Christopher Robin would play there with his father.
There's great pleasure in dropping sticks into a stream and watching them race each other across and come out the other side.
A. A. Milne works all of these details and more into his book.
Ten months after that first story comes out, he publishes a full book of stories, Winnie the Pooh.
And the world is introduced to a distinctive cast of characters.
There's the lovable Pooh. Of course, they're a very different brain.
Eeyore. Gloomy and pessimistic. Tigger. Boisterous, sort of trying to make the best of things, being optimistic.
Readers young and old would see themselves in the Pooh book characters.
Maybe it was Rabbit's self-importance. Well, said Rabbit. after a long silence in which nobody thanked him for the nice walk they were having.
We'd better get on, I suppose. Or Eeyore's negativity.
Could be worse. Not sure how, but it could be.
Each sentence is beautifully crafted. They're just so funny.
The chapters told readers just what they were getting.
Chapter 1, in which we are introduced to Winnie the Pooh and some bees, and the stories begin.
Chapter four. Your losers a tale? They're descriptive, aren't they?
The plots are simple. Christopher Robin throws Pooh a party.
Piglet gets stuck in a flood. a little anxious, he said to himself, to be a very small animal entirely surrounded by water.
The characters have adventures and misadventures.
They're self-aware. They accept one another, flaws and all. have such an emphasis on friendship, on kindness, on generosity. facing troubles bravely.
And they're just good. They're good in every sense.
They're well-written. and they have a good message.
The next year, 1927, Milne publishes another installment of The Pooh Stories, a book of poetry. called Now We Are Six.
The year after that comes The House at Pooh Corner.
The books were extremely popular. each new publication saw even greater demand.
And the name Christopher Robin becomes famous.
Readers didn't always like Christopher Robin the character.
In the stories, he's a sort of parental fetus.
For A.A. Milne, Christopher Robin, the character, and Billy Moon, his son, were always different people.
But readers, nevertheless, were interested in knowing more about the real Christopher Robin, who was, of course, just a child.
Milne became more and more uncomfortable with this.
And in 1929, he writes a letter to his devoted readers.
The dividing line between the imaginary and the legal Christopher Robin becomes fainter with each book.
This then brings me at last to one of the reasons why these verses and stories have come to an end.
To an end. Milne says there will be no more Winnie the Pooh books.
He writes, the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for him.
Moreover, since he is growing up, he will soon feel that he has had more publicity than he wants for himself.
But... Of course, it was too late. He couldn't stop people being interested in the child.
Milne tries to pivot back into writing for adults.
In 1931, he publishes a new novel and sets off on a book tour to promote it.
But everyone was more interested in asking about Christopher Robin than they were in asking about him himself.
Milne couldn't escape the world he'd created in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Readers had come to expect certain things from him.
Though he'd once been a popular playwright, after Pooh, Milne would never have another successful play.
And he came to present the way that people received his work.
He said even if he wrote something as simple as the cat sat on the map, everyone would turn it into a whimsical cat.
In fact, when he died, his obituary in Time magazine was headed, The Man Who Hated Whimsy.
Christopher Robin couldn't escape people's expectations of him either.
And he couldn't escape his fame. In 1933, Parents magazine ranked Christopher Robin Milne, then only 12, as one of the most famous children in the world.
He was teased. Not bullied exactly, but made pretty unhappy and distanced himself.
He came to hate. It wasn't the books, really.
It was his own identification with them.
By the time Christopher Robin grew up and had a career of his own, as a bookseller, in fact, he refused to take any money from the Pooh books.
After he got married, Christopher hardly spoke to his parents again.
The effects of the books on the family was disastrous.
It totally ruined, in the end, their relationship with their son.
In Christopher Robin's later life, though, he would return to his father's legacy.
He led a fight to protect Ashdown Forest from development.
He helped restore Pooh Sticks Bridge. It's now a popular destination for Winnie the Pooh fans, and Thwaite often takes groups of students there.
Now you have to take some sticks with you.
You have to gather them further up in the forest because all around the bridge itself, you won't find any.
There are so many visitors. He even helped pay homage to the strange Canadian story that helped give Pooh a name.
In 1981, Christopher Robin unveiled a statue of the real bear, Winnie, at the London Zoo.
There's also a statue in Winnipeg, Canada of Winnie with the veterinarian Harry Colburn.
One of Colburn's great-grandchildren said, that she grew up calling Winnie her Great Grand Bear.
And of course, Winnie the Pooh went on to be immortalized by Walt Disney.
So millions of children have grown up with Milne's characters as a feature of their childhoods.
The end of the books is about the end of childhood.
The last chapter of the last book is called in which Christopher Robin and Pooh come to an enchanted place and we leave them there.
In the final paragraphs, Christopher Robin says, Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won't you?
Understand what? Oh, nothing. He laughed and jumped to his feet.
Come on. Where? said Pooh. Anywhere, said Chris Robbins.
So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy, and his bear will always be playing.
And that's the end of the book. Anne Thwaite has read those books to her children and her grandchildren.
Soon, she thinks her great-grandchildren will be old enough to appreciate them.
The movie version, she says, just isn't the same.
She always hopes people will pick up the actual books.
In fact, she reread them herself just before we spoke to her.
I really did enjoy reading last night. I always have forgotten things and find other things.
But basically it survived extremely well.
And I rather wished I'd had a child in the house to read it to.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching, check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today.
If you want to get in touch, shoot us an email at our email address Or you can leave us a voicemail, 212-351-0410.
Special thanks today to Anne Thwait. Her most recent book about Milne and Winnie the Pooh is titled Goodbye, Christopher Robin.
This episode was produced by Julia Press.
History This Week is also produced by Julie McGruder, Ben Dickstein, and me, Sally Helm.
Our editor and sound designer is Bill Moss.
Our researcher is Emma Fredericks. McKamey Lynn is our senior producer.
Our executive producers are Jesse Katz and Ted Butler.
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