At cross purposes
John Vincent reports on the sale of ‘Pooh Bridge’... and author AA Milne’s regrets about the familial legacy of his world-famous bear.
His genteel, upper-middle class stories of a small bear called Winnie-the-Pooh have enthralled generations of children for nearly a century. But AA Milne’s worldwide success with Pooh, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger came at personal and professional cost.
Milne’s career as a playwright and comic writer was damaged and his son, Christopher Robin Milne, on whom the character in the books was generally accepted as being based, came to hate the tales that immortalised him. He once declared it seemed to him “almost that my father has 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 the empty fame of being his son”.
More than 20 years ago a manuscript was auctioned off at Sotheby’s revealing that Milne himself knew almost from the start that he had made a mistake in naming the boy after his own son. The author also insisted in a little-known essay penned in 1929 that, contrary to popular opinion, he did not base the character on the childhood antics of his real-life son.
Naively, Milne apparently expected the public to separate the two – despite dedicating his first book, When We Were Very Young (1924), to his son and giving the boy hero the same name in the three successive books, Winnie-the-Pooh, Now We Are Six and The House at Pooh Corner. In the enlightening essay, Milne wrote: “I feel that 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.”
His words proved prophetic. His son’s life was blighted by constant associations with the character in his father’s books and he refused to even stock them in his bookshop. It seems Milne was perceptive enough by 1929 to know he had created a monster that would have a detrimental effect on his son.
A reminder of my 2000 story came with the recent sale at Summers Place Auctions of the iconic bridge in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, forever associated with Pooh & Co and “poohsticks”. The carved oak bridge, depicted in EH Shepard’s illustrations for the books, sold for about £130,000.
The new owner is Lord De La Warr, whose Buckhurst Park estate includes Pooh’s “Hundred Aker Wood” and is close to Milne’s family home. The restored bridge, built in 1907 as a river crossing for horses and carts as well as pedestrians, was replaced in 1999 when it became degraded. It will either be rebuilt on the estate or near his pub, the Dorset Arms.
Just room for a few more unusual lots from the same Garden and Natural History sale: “spanner and nuts” steel bench (£6,250), naked Lady Godiva bronze (£2,000), bronze elephants and calves (£5,000), bronze crocodile (£4,250).