“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred,” Christopher Robin implores his bear in the final chapter of AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. This week Winnie-the-Pooh himself turned 100, and he certainly hasn’t been forgotten. Birthday celebrations have included a week of special programmes, introduced by the queen, on Radio 4; a collection of Royal Mail stamps; and a Google doodle.
Not bad for “a bear of very little brain” who appeared in four slim books. Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by EH Shepard, was published on 14 October 1926 and had sold 150,000 copies in the US by the end of the year.
Despite his success, the honey-loving bear was resented by both Milne and his son Christopher Robin Milne, the first for eclipsing his work as a playwright and comic writer, the latter for stealing his childhood. And he was too sugary for some. “It is that word ‘hummy,’” Dorothy Parker wrote waspishly under her pseudonym Constant Reader, “that makes the first place … at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up”. PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh were equally sniffy. But generations of children disagreed. Winnie-the-Pooh was voted No 7 in the BBC Big Read poll in 2003.
Pooh’s position as Britain’s favourite bear is under threat from a younger ursine model. Separated by 32 years and one day, Michael Bond’s A Bear Called Paddington was published on 13 October 1958. These two polite and accident-prone bears differ in more than a taste for honey or marmalade.
Both stories were created in the aftermath of war: Winnie-the-Pooh was Milne’s escape from the horrors of the Somme; Paddington was inspired by evacuees in the second world war. Pooh was based on a toy from Harrods, Paddington on a solitary teddy that Bond found in a toyshop on Christmas Eve. The Hundred Acre Wood is a sheltered rural idyll; Paddington arrives at a bustling postwar London station. Both are beloved at Buckingham Palace, but it was the bear from Peru who was invited to tea for the platinum jublee of Queen Elizabeth II.
Thanks to three hit films and now an award-winning musical, Paddington has shaken off his slightly fusty image to become an emblem of modern Britain. Where Paddington is progressive, Pooh seems stuck in a posher past.
Aside from being one of the world’s biggest merchandising franchises, Winnie-the-Pooh’s cultural afterlife has been bumpier. Screen adaptations have been mixed, from Disney’s 1966 animation, which EH Shepard declared “a complete travesty”, to the indie slasher horror Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, made after Milne’s US copyright expired in 2022. Pooh has become an unlikely symbol of political dissent in China after President Xi was visually likened to him in 2013, with protesters in Hong Kong picking up the comparison in 2019.
According to a Canadian medical journal, each character represents a form of neurodivergence or mental health disorder: Tigger stands for ADHD, Piglet for anxiety, Eeyore for depression and so on. The article may not have been entirely serious, but the author Matt Haig has described Winnie-the-Pooh as “the ultimate self-help book”. Pooh is not just a “silly old bear”. In our speeded-up age, where children spend more time on screens than outdoors, Milne’s world of freedom and innocence remains deeply comforting, for “in that enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing”.
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