Alan Alexander Milne

Notable Works

• The Red House Mystery (1922) originally serialised in London's Daily News (1921)
• When We Were Very Young (1924), poetry collection
• Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
• Now We Are Six (1927), poetry collection
• The House at Pooh Corner (1928)
• Toad of Toad Hall (1929), theatrical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows

About

Alan Alexander Milne was born in Kilburn, London to John and Sarah Milne on 18 January 1882. He grew up at Henley House, a small private school run by his father, where one of his teachers was HG Wells. He attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge on a mathematics scholarship. At Cambridge, he edited and wrote for Granta magazine and later joined Punch as a contributor before becoming assistant editor. He married Dorothy “Daphne” de Sélincourt in 1913. A talented cricket fielder, Milne played for two amateur teams of British writers: the Allahakbarries and Authors XI. His teammates included JM Barrie, Arthur Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse. Milne was commissioned into the 4th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1915 and served on the Somme as a signals officer, invalided back to England with trench fever. He was a signals instructor and joined Military Intelligence to write propaganda (1917-1918).

After WWI, he published 18 plays and three novels, including The Red House Mystery (1922). Milne was an early screenwriter for the nascent British film industry, writing four scripts in 1920 for actor Leslie Howard’s company, Minerva Films: The Bump; Twice Two; Five Pound Reward; and Bookworms. In 1929, Milne adapted Kenneth Grahame’s novel The Wind in the Willows for the Liverpool Playhouse as Toad of Toad Hall. Performed in the West End in 1930, it has been revived regularly since. He bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in East Sussex.

Winnie-the-Pooh

The character of Winnie-the-Pooh made his first appearance in print in a short poem called ‘Teddy Bear’ that Milne wrote for Punch in February 1924, a few years after the birth of his son, Christopher Robin. That poem was re-published in Milne’s first children’s poetry collection, When We Were Very Young, also in 1924, with illustrations by Punch staff cartoonist EH Shepard. A year later – on Christmas Eve 1925 – the short story that would become the first in Milne’s famous Winnie-the-Pooh collection, The Wrong Sort of Bees, was published in the London Evening News, featuring a boy named ‘Christopher Robin’ and toys named after his son’s stuffed animals. The story was included in the book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). Another book of poems, Now We Are Six, followed in 1927. The House at Pooh Corner (1928) was the final book in the Winnie-the-Pooh series.

The rapid success of these four slim books soon far eclipsed Milne’s other work as a playwright and detective novelist and led him to express “amazement and disgust” over the immense fame his son was exposed to. When writing about his decision not to publish any more Pooh books, BBC Archives report him as saying: “I feel that the legal Christopher Robin has already had more publicity than I want for him. I do not want CR Milne to ever wish that his name were Charles Robert.”

Later life and death

Milne retired to Cotchford Farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid; by August 1953, “he seemed very old and disenchanted,” as the writer John Middleton Murry wrote to a friend. Murry was editor of The Adelphi magazine, which published a number of Milne’s stories towards the end of his life.

Milne died in 1956, aged 74.

Legacy

After Milne’s death, the literary rights passed to his wife, Daphne. The media and merchandising rights had already been acquired by film producer Stephen Slesinger in 1930, with his widow selling them on to Disney in 1961.

When Daphne herself died in 1971, the literary rights were split between four beneficiaries: Milne’s family, the RLF, Westminster School and the Garrick Club. In the decades since, the enduring success of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories has generated £91 million for the RLF’s grants, education, and outreach programmes. In 2001, along with the other beneficiaries, the RLF sold their interest in the Milne Estate to the Disney Corporation. The sale of these rights enabled the RLF to establish a nationwide programme of RLF Fellows, enabling universities to host professional writers to work with students on their academic writing.

The original manuscripts for Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner were bequeathed by Milne to Trinity College Library, in his former Cambridge college. A memorial plaque in Ashdown Forest, unveiled by Christopher Robin in 1979, commemorates the work of AA Milne and EH Shepard, who “captured the magic of Ashdown Forest, and gave it to the world”.