The Hundred Acre Wood is home to many — from Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin to Rabbit, Piglet, Eeyore, Owl, Kanga, Roo, Tigger and Lottie the Otter.
Today, we celebrate 90 years of Winnie-the-Pooh, a character brought to life by A.A. Milne. At this milestone, its time for something new too. The Milne estate wanted a new character based on one of Christopher Robin’s toys...like the other residents of the Hundred Acre Wood.
The official sequel, The Best Bear in All the World , was released on October 6. It is a delightful collection of four seasonal short stories — spring, summer, autumn and winter. It follows Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends through the year in the Hundred Acre Woods. The Best Bear in All the World will remind us why Pooh stories are wonderful, as well as introduce him to a new generation of readers. The book is written by Paul Bright, Kate Saunders, Brian Sibley and Jeanne Willis and illustrated by Mark Burgess. The fact that they are all fans of the Pooh stories did not make their task less daunting.
Pooh’s new friend
“The thought of Pooh encountering a penguin seemed no more outlandish than his meeting a kangaroo and a tiger in a Sussex wood, so I started thinking about what might have happened if, on a rather snowy day, Penguin found his way to Pooh Corner,” says Sibley. He went on to say that the photo of the author and his son with the penguin toy came to mind while he was “pondering what other toys Christopher Robin might have owned but which were never written about”.
Burgess said that he was aiming for the spirit of Milne’s illustrator E.H. Shepard, “rather than slavishly copying”, when illustrating the sequel, and that he especially enjoyed drawing Penguin.
Winnie-the-Pooh is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear. WhenWe Were Young is a book of children’s verse, a published in 1924. The first book of stories was published in 1926, titled Winnie-the-Pooh where Milne introduced the characters. Two years later came The House at Pooh Corner , followed by Now We Are Six in 1927. All the volumes were illustrated by E.H. Shepard.
Milne created the character of Winnie-the-Pooh for his son Christopher Robin Milne and based it on his stuffed toy teddy bear. Christopher did have other stuffed toys and they came alive as Eeyore, Kanga, Tigger and the others. Hundred Acre Wood was in reality, Ashdown Forest in Sussex, England.
The naming of Christopher’s teddy bear is yet another tale to be told. Harry Colebourn, a Canadian Lieutenant bought a bear cub from a hunter, while he was on his way to England. He named the bear Winnie, after his home town Winnipeg, in Manitoba, Canada. Winnie was smuggled into England and he later became The Fort Garry Horse Regiment’s mascot. When Colebourn went to France, he left Winnie with the London Zoo. After the war, he donated the bear to the zoo. Christopher met Pooh, a swan, when on holiday. He combined both names while christening his bear.
In the first book, Winnie-the-Pooh , Milne explains why the little bear is often called Pooh. “But his arms were so stiff ... they stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think – but I am not sure – that is why he is always called Pooh.”
