The boy stuffed by WINNIE -THE-POOH
A new Disney film paints a rosy picture of the real Christopher Robin. In truth, AA Milne’s bear-loving son loathed his father, was tormented by his fame... and enraged his family with an incestuous marriage
The adorable Winnie-The-Pooh stories and poems by AA Milne have been loved by generations of children since they were first published in 1926, when the author found inspiration watching his own son Christopher Robin play with his nursery toys. Those well known and whimsical tales of honey pots and heffalumps in the Hundred Acre Wood seemed to portray an idyllic and innocent world that revolved around a particularly cheerful little boy, stomping through the forest in his wellington boots.
But the instantly recognisable images of Christopher Robin, forever immortalised in Ernest Shepard’s iconic pencil drawings, could not have been more different from the real Christopher Robin, who came to loathe the harsh glare of the limelight he felt forced to endure, many years after he had grown out of playing with teddy bears and toy soldiers.
Famous almost from birth, Christopher’s early years were scarred by vicious taunts and cruel bullying, and he battled relentlessly against the public perception of him; he felt that everyone he met always expected him to be cheerful and cute. Christopher came to detest the phenomenal popularity of the character his father created, and a bitter rift developed between the two men that never healed.
The terrible gulf between the real Christopher Robin and his fictional counterpart is starkly highlighted in a just-released Disney film, which neatly glosses over the unpalatable reality of their turbulent relationship.
In the forthcoming movie, Christopher Robin, Ewan McGregor portrays the title role as a frustrated businessman who has lost his youthful imagination. The character and his long-suffering wife Evelyn, played by Hayley Atwell, have an adorable daughter called Madeline, although Christopher is too busy at work to spend much time at home. The film, which is a mixture of live action and CGI animation, sees Christopher reunited with imaginary cartoon versions of his childhood toys, reminding him of how he used to play as a child.
But this fictionalised version of events has almost no bearing on the truth of the Milne family dynamic. In reality, Christopher loathed his father and horrified his parents with an incestuous marriage to his first cousin, which resulted in a severely handicapped child. And both he and his father died still seething with resentment over the global success of Winnie-The-Pooh, which may have brought them untold wealth and fame but never gave either of them a moment of joy.
Milne had never wanted to be a children’s author. He started out as a sketch writer for the satirical magazine Punch, and had been enjoying a successful career penning adult plays and detective novels when he announced that he fancied a stab at children’s poetry, following the arrival of his baby son in the summer of 1920. His first attempt, When We Were Very Young, sold an astonishing 50,000 copies in the first eight weeks, and it remains one of the best-selling books of all time. Royalties poured in from then on, but none of his success ever made him happy. Milne longed to be taken seriously as a political commentator, but no matter what else he wrote, he was permanently labelled a children’s storyteller. His admirers plagued him with constant demands for more junior fiction, which soon became an intolerable burden.
He only ever wrote two volumes of short stories for children, Winnie-The-Pooh, which was published in 1926, followed by The House At Pooh Corner in 1928. In between he wrote his second collection of nursery rhymes, Now We Are Six, published in 1927.
Although Christopher was only eight years old when his father’s last children’s book was published in 1928, irreparable damage had already been done. The children’s stories may have been a mere 70,000 words in total, but they were enough to cause pain that would last a lifetime. For the next 60 years, Christopher would angrily go on to claim that his father had exploited precious and important moments from his pivotal childhood years without bothering to consult him first. He was furious that he had never given permission for his childhood to be made public property, and to Christopher, the best-selling books would always be a source of ‘toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment’.
He dropped the ‘Robin’ the moment he arrived at boarding school but his true identity was soon revealed, and, needless to say, schoolboys can be cruel to one another. They discovered that when he was very little, Christopher had been recorded reciting several of his father’s best-loved poems, with Milne insisting at the time: ‘He loves it, is quite unshy, and speaks beautifully.’ But what should have been a harmless recording session would come back to haunt them both in years to come.
When Christopher was a teenage pupil at Stowe, a boarding school in Buckinghamshire, other boys played that recording of him over and over again. ‘Eventually the joke, if not the record, wore out and they handed it to me,’ Christopher recalled later. ‘I took it and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field.’
Christopher laid the blame very firmly at the feet of his father for the searing humiliation he endured, and could never find a way to forgive him.
Years later when he was having trouble finding work after leaving the Army, Christopher was angry with his father for his lack of support. He said: ‘It seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon 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.
‘It was a period when, suitably encouraged, my bitterness would overflow. On one or two occasions it overflowed more publicly than it should have done, so that there seemed to be only one thing to do: to escape from it all, to keep out of the limelight. It is better to say nothing than to say something I might regret.’ He later added: ‘Christopher Robin
has intruded, however hard I have tried to keep him at bay; and he still fills me with acute embarrassment.’
By the time he reached adulthood, Christopher’s relationship with his parents was so strained that they mostly communicated via letters, and although his mother, Daphne de Sélincourt, prayed for a reconciliation, there was further pain in store when, in 1948, Christopher announced his intention to marry his first cousin, Daphne’s niece Lesley de Sélincourt. His parents were horrified and begged him to reconsider for the sake of any future children who could suffer genetic defects, but their pleas fell on deaf ears and the wedding went ahead. And all their darkest fears came true when their only grandchild Clare was born badly handicapped, suffering from a series of physical disabilities that would leave her confined to a wheelchair for life. Shortly after Clare was born, Christopher and Lesley moved hundreds of miles away from London to open a bookshop in Dartmouth, leaving his parents bereft, and matters were made worse when Christopher gave a newspaper interview describing them as cold and detached, blasting them for leaving much of his upbringing to nannies and packing him off to a school he despised.
When Christopher publicly revealed how his parents were often absent during his early years, Daphne was so devastated that she ordered her gardener to bury a beloved sculpture of her son in a deep hole in the grounds of their Sussex mansion, so she would never have to lay eyes on him again.
Dark shadows hung over Milne, who was troubled by bouts of depression and haunted by the horrors he witnessed in the trenches of the Somme during World War I. Life at home was far from peaceful, as his wife Daphne would disappear for weeks at a time, visiting the controversial American playwright Elmer Rice. Milne appeared to know all about his wife’s alleged affair, but he was rumoured to be having a fling himself, with a young actress called Leonora Corbett. Yet somehow, despite all the emotional turbulence their marriage endured, Daphne remained devoted to him, and she nursed her husband until the end. Even when Christopher knew his father was dying, he refused to visit and they had no contact in his final years. When he died in January 1956 at the age of 74, Daphne hoped to make peace with their son at the funeral, but after Christopher arrived in a scruffy overcoat, with no sign of his wife, she realised there was no hope, although she went on to live another 15 years.
Despite Christopher’s lifelong fight against his connection to Winnie-The-Pooh, he continued to sell his father’s books at his bookshop, until he passed away in 1996 at the age of 75.
And even now, almost a century after the tales were first printed, the legacy lives on as Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and their friends remain among the most popular and profitable children’s characters in the world. The rights were sold to the Disney Corporation in 1961 and boosted profits more than Christopher or his father could have possibly dared to predict. Pooh is Disney’s most popular character after Mickey Mouse, and global merchandising still rakes in a staggering $3billion a year.
It may not have been in the way either of them wanted, but both AA Milne and his son have achieved immortality.
‘The Extraordinary Life of AA Milne’ by Nadia Cohen is published by Pen & Sword History, priced €27.99.