The End Of Winnie The Pooh

Sources/References

Books

Chapter I. In which we meet Christopher Robin and his bear

  • AA Milne Invented Owl and Rabbit (and not based on toys)

    • Quote from “The Enchanted Places” (1974) by Christopher (Robin) Milne

    • “Did Christopher Robin or Mrs. Milne help him with ideas? Yes and no, it seemed. There was the Forest and the Five Hundred Acre Wood. These were real. Then there were the animals. They were real, too (except for Owl and Rabbit that he had invented). His wife and his boy (always his boy, never Christopher. Odd!) had, as it were, breathed life into them, given them their characters. What he had done was to write stories round them. The stories were entirely his own invention.”

  • Poems fron When We Were Very Young
  • The neckline of Eeyore caused his head to sag like he's depressed

    • Quote from “The Enchanted Places” (1974) by Christopher (Robin) Milne

    • “Eeyore, too, was an early present. Perhaps in his younger days he had held his head higher, but by the time the stories came to be written his neck had gone like that and this had given him his gloomy disposition.”

  • Christopher Robin using sticks to measure water levels

    • Quote from “The Enchanted Places” (1974) by Christopher (Robin) Milne

    • “All morning I watched it - we all watched it - fascinated. And every now and then I went out with a stick to mark the place where the tide had reached, a line of sticks getting nearer and nearer to the steps up to the path that ran outside the drawing-room.”

  • How the Mr Men made their millions (New Statesmen - 2021)

    • The official story is the simplest one. Fifty years ago, in a small village in Surrey, a little boy named Adam turned to his father at the breakfast table and asked, “Daddy, what does a tickle look like?” Roger Hargreaves was a creative man – the father-of-four had worked in advertising for more than 13 years – so he took out a notepad and pen and began to sketch an answer to appease his son.

    • It’s disputed if the son’s question was strictly speaking the “true” origin and may have been the result of Roger Hargreaves doodling characters leading to it’s creation.

Chapter II. In which we say goodbye to Christopher Milne

Chapter III. In which we say goodbye to Christopher Robin

  • Surprising literary ventures (Spectator - 2005)

    • “Alan Milne rather resented being known only as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh. As he liked to point out, he had also written plays, novels and non-fiction. Among his works in the latter category was Peace with Honour (1934), which called on Britain to avoid war with Germany at all costs (Milne had first-hand experience of the first world war, having served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a signals officer and seen action on the Somme, so perhaps this was understandable). But War with Honour was his thoroughgoing retraction of Peace with Honour. Piglet had spoken; now it was Eeyore’s turn. ‘If anybody reads Peace with Honour now,’ Milne wrote, ‘he must read it with that one word HITLER scrawled across every page … I accept the facts, and I accept this war. For German Peace means all that Modern War means — and worse. It means not only the torturing to death of bodies but the poisoning to death of souls … And the ultimate truth which will always be sacred is that the soul is more important than the body.’”

  • AA Milne’s pacifism and patriotism (New Statesman - 2021)

    • “It’s a compelling read not least because Milne is genuinely wrangling with his conscience, trying to find a way of squaring his love of his country with his hatred of war. Of course, by the time the true nature of Nazism became clear, he had to renounce – or modify – his pacifism in the book’s sequel, War with Honour (1940). Clearly there’s something ridiculous about performing such a flip-flop, but you have to admire the honesty and energy with which he tried to think through his change of mind.”

  • Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (Bartleby/archive.org)

    • “The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.”

    • Compiled by James B. Simpson in 1988

  • The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff (1982)

    • Wikipedia Summary: The Tao of Pooh is a 1982 book written by Benjamin Hoff. The book is intended as an introduction to the Eastern belief system of Taoism for Westerners. It allegorically employs the fictional characters of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories to explain the basic principles of philosophical Taoism. The book was on the New York Times bestseller list for 49 weeks. Hoff later wrote The Te of Piglet, a companion book.

    • Taoism Summary (Wikipedia): Taoism or Daoism is a diverse tradition indigenous to China, variously characterized as both a philosophy and a religion. Taoism emphasizes living in harmony with what is known as the Tao—generally understood as being the impersonal, enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality.

  • Return to The Hundred Acre Wood: writing the Winnie-the-Pooh sequel (Telegraph - 2009)

Chapter IV. In which we have to explain the gopher

  • "Pooh" Revelation Vindicates Disney Film (Punch/archive.org - 1966)

    • This is a joke/satircal article written by Angela Milne, the actual niece of A.A. Milne, mocking the “Americanisation” of the original Pooh text. The following quotes/extracts did not actually happen.

    • “It was on a fine May morning in 1925 that Christopher Robin came home from a walk in Ashdown Forest to tell excitedly how he had seen a perfectly extraordinary little animal frisking round an elm-bole. Nobody then believed the child’s incoherent description, but next day when my uncle was sitting in the garden reading a Mid-Sussex Herald headline: GOPHER ESCAPES FROM CHEWING-GUM CRATE IN BRIGHTON DOCK.”

    • “I never saw the whole Gopher Draft, as we called it. But from fragments it is clear how far flagging inention was revitalised — for example in “Eeyore’s Birthday,” where the gopher delivers a Western Union singing telegram; or in “Expotition to the North Pole,”’ where this helpful little fellow drives up in a provision-laden truck only to be snatched by a vulture and dropped over a cliff into the English Channel and blown back on land by a whale. No wonder my uncle realised, as he worked on this gopher, that Pooh and Piglet and the rest of them now sounded stiff and British by comparison!”

    • “Only in the books, of course, for in real life in those days you couldn’t get a British boy to talk or even dress like an American; facts which irked my uncle as the new Pooh concept gripped him ever more firmly. “Whyncha talk gutsy, Butch?” and “How come you ain’t wearin’ ya paper Brooklyn Dodgers cap?”’ were remarks which rang round the Sussex farmhouse at this period.”

    • “As things are, you will confine the appeal to a handful of illiterates munching hamburgers in Kalamazoo”

    • “YOU MENTIONED ON TELEPHONE THAT GOPHER HAD REPLACED A QUOTE DURNED LITTLE NO HYPHEN GOOD HOG CALLED PIGLET UNQUOTE STOP WHY NOT BRING HIM BACK TO PLUG GOPHER GAP QUERY”

  • TV Tropes

    • Originally, for The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh, under the “Canon Foreigner” section, they had stated:

      • Canon Foreigner: Gopher is an odd subversion of this, in spite of only appearing in the cartoons. Christopher Robin Milne's autobiography, The Enchanted Places, reveals that A. A. Milne had planned to include an American Gopher in his Pooh books, but his publisher nixed it. Enchanted Places reprints a short poem from the lost Milne version of Gopher. Hence his phrase "I'm not in the book" (which doubles as a joke about him not being in the phone book).

      • Archive.org link here.

    • Following the release of this video, this section was disputed and removed. It now states:

      • Canon Foreigner: Gopher is a character that was created by Disney, and never appeared in any of A. A. Milne's Pooh books. Hence his phrase "I'm not in the book" (which doubles as a joke about him not being in the phone book). Gopher was originally intended by Disney as a replacement for Piglet, and indeed served this role in 1966's Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree. However, Disney quickly double-backed on this decision, allowing for Piglet's subsequent animated appearances.

  • The Disney Studio by Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley (1988)

    • “A gopher, possessing what Woolie Reitherman called a ‘folksy all-American grass-roots image’ not only set up an excavation business in the 100 Acre Wood, he ousted Pooh’s devotion companion, Piglet. ‘It appears,’ wrote The Daily Mail in outrage, ‘that in the Very Unenchanted Forest or film commerce, a gopher is worth more than a Piglet .’”

  • A Disney Package: Don't Miss the Short (New York Times - 1966)

    • “THREE cheers for "Winnie the Pooh"! "The Ugly Dachshund"? He'll do.The treat in yesterday's new holiday package from Walt Disney is not the latter, a live-action feature, but the delightful cartoon supplement, running 27 minutes, that the master has culled from those endearing children's stories by A. A. Milne. About time, too, and we can only hope that "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" means a whole series to come.”

  •  The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh The Story of A. A. Milne and His Writing for Children by Ann Thwaite (1992)

    • “Shepard called [Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree] 'a complete travesty', but Daphne Milne said in an interview in Woman, from which the pictures and caption above right are taken, 'Ever since I sold the film rights of the Pooh books to Mr Walt Disney, I had been wondering with some anxiety what he would make of them in a cartoon. I had confidence in Mr Disney's genius for handling imaginative themes - yet, one never knows whether one is going to agree! On an evening last August I turned on the television in my London flat to see a brief advance excerpt of the Pooh cartoon being shown in a programme about Walt Disney films. I was nervous. If I did not like this version of Pooh I would feel deeply disappointed and hurt. Pooh is part of my life, part of my cherished memories. I leaned forward. There was a nursery scene and a glimpse of Christopher Robin as a child in cartoon. There was the tree in, the 100 Aker Wood with bees buzzing about it, and Pooh, attached to a balloon, sailing upwards in search of honey, his favourite food.... I relaxed. It was all right. Nothing jarred. I was very relieved.'”

  • General Information (Pooh-Corner.org/archive.org)
  • Piglet (Winnie-the-Pooh) (Academic.com)
  • Look what they've done to your bear, Milne. (The Free Library - 2007)
  • Original Manuscript

    • In 1971 there was an official publication of the original manuscript of Winnie The Pooh. This includes comparisons to the original hand-written wording to the final version. Copies of this publication are rare and very expensive, so I was not able to secure a copy.
      However, I located this (blurry) image of the Preface for the manuscript. It remarks on small differences, such as the opening introduction of “Here is Edward Bear” was originally “Here is Big Bear”. This preface makes no mention of the Gopher. Therefore I concluded (coupled with discrediting the Punch article as fictitious) if a massive difference from manuscript to final was changing Gopher’s parts into Piglet’s, this preface would have mentioned this radical difference between the two.

Chapter V. In which Pooh is entirely surrounded by lawsuits

Chapter VI. In which Pooh murders a bunch of people

Chapter VII. In which we have a Contradiction

  • AA Milne's relationship with nostalgia

    • Quotes from “The Enchanted Places” (1974) by Christopher (Robin) Milne

    • “My father, who had derived such happiness from his childhood, found in me the companion with whom he could return there. But with Nanny in the way he could only take his dream son and return in imagination - to mend a train or keep a dormouse or go fishing. When I was three he was three. When I was six he was six. We grew up side by side and as we grew so the books were written. Then when I was nine and he was nine Nanny left. We could now do real things together: reality could in part replace the dream. For the next nine years we continued to grow up alongside each other. I was not aware of this, of course. I just saw him as my father. But he, I now suspect, saw me as a sort of twin brother, perhaps a sort of reincarnation of Ken. I - as I have already mentioned - needed him. He no less but for a different reason needed me. He needed me to escape from being fifty.”

    • “But the Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. For this was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own : it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round. So sometimes my father is using it to describe something I did, and sometimes he is borrowing it to describe something he did as a child, and sometimes he is using it to describe something that any child might have done. "At the Zoo", for example, is about me. "The Engineer" is not. "Lines and Squares" and "Hoppity" are games that every small child must have played.”

    • “There was an A.B.C. at the far end of the King's Road just before you got to Sloane Square. That was the one we went to, and we went there by bus, of course, for the bus' trip was part of the memory. My father had scrambled eggs on toast (they didn't run to "ham-and-eggs") and I had baked beans on toast. And when the holidays were over and I was back at school, his first letter to me would recall that happy lunch that he and I had had together. He and I - and the ghost of Ken. . . .”

  • AA Milne’s brother, Kenneth Milne

    • Quotes from “The Enchanted Places” (1974) by Christopher (Robin) Milne

    • “There was one great difference between my_father and myself when we were children. He had an elder brother; I had not. So he was never alone in the dark. Lying in bed with the lights out he could so easily be "talking to a dragon" and feeling brave, knowing that if the dragon suddenly turned fierce he had only to reach out a hand and there would be Ken in the next bed. But I could take no such risks.”

    • “My father was lucky in that this was something that could have clouded, but in fact did not, his earlier relations with his brother. Ken. Alan, sixteen months his junior, was intellectually his superior. Ken was clever, Alan cleverer. Ken was successful, Alan even more successful. All through their very happy lives together Alan was always to beat Ken, yet Ken was never to feel resentment. How fortunate for the two of them that the talents had been dealt out in this way, that if one of them had to suffer from jealousy it was Alan (who didn't need to), not Ken. How nice if, when my turn came, I could have been another Ken. How sad that I wasn't.”

    • “But of my uncles I knew only what my father's autobiography told me: that he had disliked Barry (though it was never made clear exactly why), and that - for reasons all too obvious - he had adored Ken.”

      • David Barrett "Barry" Milne was the eldest of the three brothers.

    • “Light verse started where almost everything else in my father's life started - with Ken. They were young men, Alan still at home. Ken articled to a solicitor, when they made the unexpected discovery that each had a talent for it. "Good Heavens," wrote Ken in answer to Alan's first effort, "You can do it too." So from then on they collaborated, and for two years they wrote light verse together.”

  • The Path Through The Trees by Christopher Milne (1979)

    • “To his many friends my father had been 'Alan' or 'Blue', the man they had talked to at the Garrick Club, the man they had played golf with at Addington or Ashdown Forest; and as they had known him so they would remember him. To many others he was known only through what he had written. He was articles in Punch. He was plays. He was Pooh.”

  • A.A. Milne : His Life by Ann Thwaite

    • “In particular, I felt this as I used one of my main discoveries - a large cache of letters from Milne to his beloved brother, Ken, most of them written in the 1920s when the children’s books were coming out and when the two brothers saw comparatively little of each other as Ken was dying of tuberculosis in Somerset. Milne wrote from London chiefly to entertain him and to keep him in touch with what was going on.”

  • Kenneth John Milne (WikiTree)

    • Died 21 May 1929 at about age 49 

  • What Luck! The Autobiography of A. A. Milne (The Atlantic - 1939)

    • “It was not until the beginning of my second term that we had our first contribution accepted. Ken invented a nonsense verse, a little in the Limerick vein, which, once found, provided us with an easy formula for humor.”

    • “At the end of the summer term, [Ken] announced his withdrawal from the partnership. His reason was that I could do ‘this sort of thing’ [poetry] just as well without him, and that he would prefer to try some other sort of thing without me. In short, his heart wasn’t in frivolity; he wanted to be more serious.”

  • Endings and Anxiety (Evolution Counseling - 2018)

    • “Many of us have a really hard time with endings. Why? Because they remind us, consciously or unconsciously, of our mortality. Death is what all endings have in common. Even in those many endings where physical death isn’t imminent symbolic death still is.”

  • There’s no need to be scared when things end (Irish Times - 2020)

Chapter VIII. In which we go beyond the ending

  • Christopher Robin's American Accent

    • Extract from The Disney Studio by Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley (1988)

    • “Film critic of London’s Evening News, Felix Barker, learning that Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree was to be screened at a Royal Film Perforomance, cabled the Studio:
      REGRET EXCERPTS FROM CHRISTOPHER ROBIN SHORT SHOWN HERE GIVE HIM AMERICAN ACCENT STOP BEG TO POINT OUT THIS CHARACTER VIRTUALLY ENGLISH FOLK-HERO STOP SUCH TREATMENT BOUND TO CAUSE CRITICISM STOP PLEASE CONSIDER REDUBBING BEFORE TOYAL FILM SHOW STOP
      Barker continued his campaign by pointing out that The House At Pooh Corner was not the work of Damon Runyon and asking if Walt would have dared given Johnny Appleseed an English accent. Eventually, after serveral weeks’ silence on the part of the Studio, it emerged that the only print of the picture in Britain had been recalled to Hollywood. ‘Disney is going to redub the voice!’ Barker announed triumphantly.

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