The Extraordinary Life of A. A. Milne

By Nadia Cohen

The true story of the man who created Winnie-the-Pooh—yet struggled to enjoy the overwhelming success that it brought him.
 
Thanks to a phenomenally popular collection of whimsical children’s stories about a boy named Christopher Robin and his beloved teddy bear, A.A. Milne remains a household name in almost every corner of the globe. Generations have grown up loving the tales of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood.
 
But though his work brought unparalleled joy to millions, Alan Alexander Milne himself was never able to enjoy the fame and fortune they brought him. He died deeply resenting Pooh’s success—as far as he was concerned those stories were just a tiny fraction of his literary work, but nothing else he produced came close in terms of public appreciation. Milne died still unable to reconcile the fact that no matter what else he wrote, regardless of all the plays and stories for adults he had published, he would always be remembered as a children’s storyteller. And his son, widely hailed as the inspiration for Christopher Robin, could never accept his unique place in literary history either. He had barely reached his teens before he grew to loathe his famous father, who he bitterly accused of exploiting his early years.
 
This biography delves deep into the life of Milne—shedding light on new places, and telling stories untold.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526704481

Nadia Cohen

Nadia Cohen is an entertainment journalist who has worked at a number of national newspapers and magazines including Grazia and the Daily Mail. As a show-business correspondent she covered film festivals, premieres and award ceremonies around the world. Nadia was headhunted for the launch of a new American magazine, In Touch Weekly, and spent several years living and working in New York. She now lives in London and juggles family life with writing contemporary and historical biographies.

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Introduction

For many of us A.A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh stories need no introduction, since they have been loved by generations of children and their parents from the moment they were first published in 1926. They are so ingrained in our culture that certain sayings have become integral shorthand in family life. Growing up, we certainly included them in our daily rituals, sometimes asking for ‘butter for the Royal slice of bread’, or calling one another ‘a bear of very little brain’.

It is a charming and harmless tradition I have enjoyed passing on to my own children. As twin boys their favourite quote, which even appears on their bedroom wall, comes from what we all agree is the most appropriate poem for them, Us Two which includes the line: ‘Wherever I am there’s always Pooh, there’s always Pooh and Me.’

But despite the familiarity of his name, Alan Alexander Milne himself remains something of a mystery even now, sixty years after his death. A good deal of his most ardent readers do not realise that he also had a lengthy career as a successful playwright, screenwriter, novelist and was the brains behind countless humorous magazine articles. Fewer still know that he fought in the Battle of the Somme in the First World War and wrote propaganda pieces for the war effort as a member of a top-secret government unit called MI7b.

The youngest of three sons, he grew up in the boarding school where his father was the headmaster, and used many of the adventures he had with his older brother Ken as inspiration for his adorable literary creations. Others were based on stories he would tell his son Christopher Robin, who inspired the character of the same name.

Winnie-the-Pooh brought the author phenomenal fame and fortune, but made neither himself nor Christopher Robin happy. Alan died still seething with resentment that he was never taken as seriously as he would have wanted. He longed to be thought of as a thought-provoking and politically minded adult author, but no matter what else he wrote, he was permanently labelled as a whimsical children’s storyteller. Whimsical was a word he grew to despise deeply over the years, just as his son grew to bitterly hate the fact that his childhood had been made public property without his consent.

Christopher felt that his father would never have come up with the ideas without him, although Alan did his best to share the credit with his son who adored his toy animals, as well as his wife Daphne who gave the characters their voices. And of course he owed a great debt to his illustrator E.H. Shepard who brought each scene so magically to life. In his autobiography Alan explained:

The animals in the stories came from the most part from the nursery. My collaborator (his wife Daphne) had already given them individual voices, their owner by constant affection had given them the twist in their features which denotes character, and Shepard drew them, as one might say, from the living model.

Despite the stories and books Alan wrote for children being so well known, the man himself was enigmatic. In many ways, of course, he is remembered as every inch the traditional English gentleman who smoked a pipe, played golf and could usually be found reading The Times in a leather wing-backed armchair at his private members club.

But there was much more to this troubled man who spent much of his life trying desperately to change perceptions about him. Following a first class education at Westminster School and Cambridge University, he started his career as a humourist writing sketches for the satirical magazine Punch. But for an ambitious man like him, that job was never going to enough and so he branched out into novels and plays, with some success.

His publishers complained furiously when he sent them a detective story, and objected even more bitterly when he announced that he had decided on a whim to write children’s poetry. But his very first attempt, When We Were Very Young, turned out to be one of the best selling books of all time. It sold an astonishing 50,000 copies in the first eight weeks, and they soon stopped complaining when they saw the profits piling up! And now, almost a century after Winnie-the-Pooh was published, they still remain among the most popular and profitable children’s characters, contributing to a global industry that rakes in millions of pounds every year.

But for the author, and his son, they became an almost intolerable burden.

He refused even the most lucrative offers for more children’s stories, determined to focus on his plays, which he longed to have more widely appreciated. Meanwhile Christopher, famous almost from birth, endured vicious taunts and cruel bullying from other boys at school. He battled relentlessly against the perception that he must be that sweet little boy from the books. He felt his father exploited important moments from his childhood, and took all the credit for it, leaving him to fight his battles unsupported. Christopher said that by using his name, he had been deprived of his own identity, and wrote in his autobiography: ‘He filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.’

By the time the last children’s book, The House At Pooh Corner, was published, irreparable damage had been done. Their relationship in adulthood was strained and uncomfortable. And when Christopher decided to marry his first cousin, leading to the birth of a badly handicapped child, a rift deepened between them which never healed. Daphne was heartbroken when her only son openly described his upbringing as cold and detached, revealing that his parents left much of his care to a nanny and boarding schools.

When Christopher told how his mother was often absent during his early years, the fall-out culminated in her demanding that a sculpture of her son was to be buried in the grounds of their Sussex home where she would never have to lay eyes on it again.

Yet Daphne and Alan remained devoted to each other, and she nursed him until the very end, having survived a turbulent period in their marriage when Daphne spent weeks at a time visiting her lover in New York. Alan appeared to know all about her romance with American playwright Elmer Rice, but once again proved himself ahead of his time by turning a blind eye He was also rumoured to be having an affair at the time, the subject of much scurrilous gossip among the theatrical community, with a young actress called Leonora Corbett who was often cast in his plays.

But even at the peak of his success, while appearing to revel in the glitz and glamour of moving among the highest social circles, Alan always had dark shadows cast over him. He never really stopped grieving for the loss of his older brother Ken who had been his closest friend and ally until his early death. Nor could he ever let go of his firmly held political opinions, which he often discussed in strongly worded letters to the newspapers. Haunted by the suffering he witnessed on the battlefields of the Somme in the First World War, he declared himself a pacifist in a time of great national patriotism and pride in the Armed Forces. When Adolf Hitler began to seize power in Germany in the 1930s and the threat of a second global conflict loomed on the horizon, Alan wrote an impassioned plea for peace. He was frustrated by politicians’ inability to find a peaceful solution and Peace With Honour became one of his most challenging and widely read adult books.

But as the great man himself wrote in the introduction to Winnie-the–Pooh: ‘And now all the others are saying, What about Us? So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.’

CHAPTER ONE

‘It’s always useful to know where a friend-and-relation is, whether you want him or whether you don’t.’

Very few authors can ever dream of coming close to the legacy left by A.A. Milne. He remains a household name in almost every corner of the globe thanks to a phenomenally popular collection of whimsical children’s stories about an adorable little boy named Christopher Robin and his beloved teddy bear. Generations of children have grown up loving the tales of Winnie-The-Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood, which are still among the most popular – and profitable – fictional characters in the world.

But while the poems and stories bring unparalleled joy to millions today, just as they did when they were first published almost a century ago, their creator Alan Alexander Milne himself was never able to fully enjoy the fame and fortune they brought him. He died deeply resenting Winnie-the-Pooh’s enormous success, since as far as he was concerned those stories were merely a tiny fraction of his literary work; yet no matter how hard he tried, nothing else he produced during his long and fascinating career as a playwright and political activist ever came close in terms of public appreciation.

Throughout his charmed life the author blatantly defied the rigid social rules of the day. He ignored widespread and scurrilous gossip about his unconventional marriage, as his wife spent weeks at a time with her lover in New York while he entertained actresses in London. During two world wars, in times of great patriotism and national pride, he brushed aside accusations of cowardice as he campaigned for peace, and he never recovered from the heartache of losing his adored older brother tragically young.

All the wealth and adulation meant nothing since the author never resolved a bitter feud with his only son, the real-life Christopher Robin, who accused him of exploiting his childhood for his own inspiration and profit. Just like his father, Christopher was unable to come to terms with the unique place he held in literary history. He felt he was never given a choice. After suffering vicious bullying throughout his teens he grew to loathe his famous family, and could not forgive Alan for destroying those precious early years.

Despite a long illness that left him confined to a wheelchair, even on his deathbed Alan simply could not reconcile the fact that no matter what else he wrote, regardless of all the plays and stories for adults he had published, he would always be remembered fondly – but simply – as a children’s storyteller.

It has always been widely assumed that the famous tales were written about the imaginary adventures that his son had with his nursery toys, but it has now emerged that Alan actually drew much of the material from his own idyllic childhood. From the day he was born, on 18 January 1882 in Mortimer Road, North London, Alan Alexander was destined for literary success. He showed a remarkably advanced flair for writing from an extraordinarily young age, thanks to encouragement from his doting father John Vine Milne, the headmaster of Henley House, a small private boy’s school in Hampstead. John was absolutely delighted by the arrival of the youngest of his three sons and took a particularly keen interest in Alan’s early education. He was naturally gifted, and John was thrilled when the boy mastered reading at the age of 2½ – way ahead of both his older brothers David Barrett and Kenneth John. ‘In Papa’s house it was natural to be interested,’ Alan remarked years later. ‘It was easy to be clever.’

Alan was originally named Alexander Sydney, but his father returned to the register office to make the change within weeks, after deciding to rename him after his own beloved uncle Alan, known as Ackie, who lived with the family at the time. The earliest photo that survives of Alan was taken in 1886 when he was just 4 years old. He is seated alongside his two brothers – all of them blonde, blue-eyed boys – and all three are dressed in black velvet suits, buttoned knickerbockers and large lace collars, with long curly hair. According to the tradition of the time, children’s hair was not cut until they reached the age of 10, and Alan never forgot ceremoniously handing his flowing locks over to his mother Maria in a paper bag following his first haircut.

John Milne was a traditional father in many ways, urging his boys to be strong, independent and adventurous – he wanted ‘manly little fellows’ and Alan lived up to every expectation. He enjoyed the best of town and country life, since at that time Hampstead was at the very edge of London and a penny bus would take the boys from their street to the countryside of Cricklewood, where they were free to have adventures in just two short miles. A century ago Mortimer Road, which is now Mortimer Crescent, was a very respectable address. Indeed, the Milne’s nearest neighbours included a solicitor, a stockbroker, and a retired colonel, as well as the political author Annie Bessant. Next door to Henley House was a convent, St Peter’s House, home to twenty-five nuns and twenty-five girls, who were a constant source of fascination to the Milne boys! The illustrator E.H. Shepard, who would later bring the Winnie-the-Pooh tales so perfectly to life through his expressive drawings, was living just five minutes’ walk away, but he and Alan did not meet and form their fruitful partnership until they were working together at the satirical magazine Punch many years later.

Henley House, which is now a block of flats run by Camden Council, was never just an ordinary family home. Looking back in 1939 Alan described it as: ‘One of those private schools, then so common, now so unusual. For boys of all ages’. The 1881 census showed that there were thirteen boarders aged between 6 and 16 living at the school, one boy’s parents were based in Paris, another came from as far as Montenegro Bay; coincidentally the Milne family also had strong connections to Jamaica since John had been born there, the eldest son of a Scottish Congregational Minister called William Milne, who met his wife Harriet Newell Barrett after travelling to Jamaica to work as a missionary. William, who Alan later called ‘the world’s most unworldly muddler’, fathered ten children although his income never went beyond eighty pounds a year, so the family lived exclusively on porridge and only four of the children survived to adulthood. By 1874 John had been sent back to England where he found work as an apprentice in an engineering firm, although he spent his evenings studying Latin and Greek in the hope of qualifying as a teacher. He achieved his goal and took a job at a boy’s school in Shropshire, and as a keen flute player he would often attend musical evenings at a local girls’ school where he met his future wife Sarah Maria Heginbotham, Alan’s mother, who was always known as Maria.

John adored teaching, and always felt far more at ease with children than adults, although he looked so young that he had to grow a beard to help control his pupils who were often bigger than him. He was certainly one of the most popular members of staff, but his methods were controversial by the standards of the day and he landed himself in trouble at the Shropshire school when, just a week after the headmaster warned the boys that they would go to hell if they did not work hard, he told them there was no such place as hell and no everlasting fire. Not long after this scandal, John proposed to Maria, who turned him down initially. She was happily single and used to living alone, having had her heart broken by another man some years earlier. But John persisted, and eventually she accepted. John said: ‘In my wife I had a wonderful gift’, and in her only surviving letter, written when Alan got married and she was 73, Maria wrote a moving tribute to her own thirty-five happy years of ‘well-chosen partnership’.

John and Maria married near her home in Buxton, Derbyshire, on 27 August 1878; John was 33 and Maria was already 38 years old, which at that time was considered late to marry and certainly rather old to start a family. Their first son Barry was born three-and-a-half years later, and Maria was well into her forties by the time Alan came along. Following their wedding, the couple moved down to London and took over Henley House from a man called John Leeds who had been running it unsuccessfully – with just nine boarders – and the Milnes reopened the school under new management in the autumn of 1878. John feared they had invested their life savings in ‘twenty or thirty inky desks and half a dozen inky boys’.

It was a time before school regulation or inspections, so school owners were pretty much left to their own devices when it came to the curriculum, but if parents wanted their children to be educated beyond the compulsory leaving age of 12, they had no choice except to pay. The classical education offered by fee-paying grammar schools was already being seen as old fashioned, and private schools like Henley House attempted to plug the gaps in secondary education.

Alan took great inspiration from his hard-working father, and friends of the family would later draw many comparisons between John and his son’s famously wise and thoughtful character Owl. When Owl made his first appearance in Winnie-The-Pooh, Alan wrote: ‘And if anyone knows anything about anything, said Bear to himself, It’s Owl who knows something about something. Or my name’s not Winnie the Pooh, he said. "Which it is.’’’ While both wore a traditional schoolmaster’s cap and gown, John was not pretentious or pedantic like Owl, and never used long words in a bid to impress. And unlike Owl, John had a great sense of humour. His middle son Ken was just 3 years old when he apparently said that his father had ‘too much laugh’ for a schoolteacher.

Pupils arriving at Henley House found John was most unusual in his teaching methods, since he preferred to think of exams as ‘not tests of what a boy has learnt, but intended to make him think’. He would ask the boys to name things in the world that appeared most beautiful, and the reply that delighted him most was ‘a boy with a smiling countenance’. It was a happy school and when prizes were awarded, John made sure every boy who got more than seventy-five per cent of the possible marks received a prize: ‘There was no danger of emulation becoming envy,’ he insisted. And when his sons were toddlers he would perch them on a table to hand out the pupils’ prizes: ‘Without affection the schoolroom is a hard, forbidding place. With love, it becomes the next best place to home’, John said. Clearly Henley House was an unconventional school in many ways, the most notable being that John did not bother with many of the strict rules that governed other Victorian establishments at the time. He once surprised his pupils by announcing: ‘You will find no rule, for instance, that you may not put soup down your neighbour’s back, or that you may not go to church in your football dress’. Discipline was reserved for more important things – he could not stand lying, cheating or bullying.

Although John said that the boys would always go to their mother first when they needed comfort, Alan adored his father, and never enjoyed quite such a close relationship with Maria. Years later when he came to write about his parents, Alan said:

He was the best man I have ever known; by which I mean the most truly good, the most completely to be trusted, the most incapable of wrong. He differed from our conception of God only because he was shy, which one imagined God not to be, and was funny, which we knew God was not. As a child I gave my heart to my father. We loved Mama too, though not so dearly. I don’t think I ever really knew her.

And when summing up his relationship with his mother, he explained:

A mother’s job is not to prevent wounds, but to bind up the wounded. She had the Victorian woman’s complete faith in the rights of a father. It was he who was bringing us up. He conceded her the Little Lord Fauntleroy make-up and did his best to nullify its effect.

After Alan was born, there would be no more children for the Milnes, although John longed for a girl, as he admitted in 1928: ‘My only regret was that we had no daughters. But my wife used to say, "Sons are good enough for me..’’’

Maria remained very much in the background throughout Alan’s childhood. Although she was an excellent cook and artist – her schoolgirl tapestry of The Last Supper remains intact – Alan and his brothers appeared to have thought little of her and she does not seem to appear in his work. The most memorable female character that Alan created was Kanga, Roo’s sensible mother, who did very little apart from scold the other animals and dish out Extract of Malt, known as Strengthening Medicine. The various other women who appear in Alan’s poems were based on either his somewhat frivolous wife Daphne de Selincourt, or Christopher Robin’s nanny Olive Rand. Like Kanga, Maria was unemotional and not easily upset. She left most of the childcare to her husband who was responsible for educating and disciplining them. The boys recalled many happy memories of hiking with their father during long summer holidays spent in the idyllic Shropshire countryside. Maria made sure she had her way with the children’s clothes and their hair, but her influence did not reach far beyond that, and Alan had very few memories involving his mother: ‘When I was a

Reviews for The Extraordinary Life of A. A. Milne

[sandrabrower · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A.A. Milne has been one of my favorite authors since I was given the poetry book, When We
We’re Very Young at the tender age of 7. My mother would help me read some of the words i struggled with and my imagination would join the escapades happening in the poems. I still read the compilation every year.

So to delve deeper into the life of Alan, especially as a youngster, was like learning about a dear friend and hearing things you never expected. It makes me sad that he felt unappreciated for his works that didn’t entail Winnie the Pooh, because I enjoyed all his writings. His mystery novel, The Red House Mystery was my first delve into British novels.
His relationship with Christopher Robin was heartbreaking, however so many family relationships are curiously tenuous, although not usually over the stories of a children’s book. The insight that more of the Hundred Acre Wood’s Christopher experiences was closer to Alan’s life and not his son’s makes the lack of relationship even more heartbreaking.
I appreciated Nadia Cohen’s extensive research, her way of writing Alan’s story and her insight into his interactions with his closest friends.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Extraordinary Life of AA Milne.