There have been many explanations of Winnie-the-Pooh’s name, so many that it is a wonder Milne did not make a story out of them, in the manner of the Just So Stories. There is no question that the Winnie part came from a female Black Bear called Winnie (after Winnipeg), who was one of the most popular animals in the London Zoo during this period. (If you go to the Zoo now you can see a sculpture of a bear cub, which celebrates the link between them.) The real bear had crossed the Atlantic as the mascot of a Canadian regiment, the Princess Pat’s, and had been left on Mappin Terrace in the safekeeping of the Royal Zoological Society in 1914, when the regiment went to France. She lived there until her death in 1934.
Christopher Milne certainly met this bear on more than one occasion. There are various accounts of how he reacted. His father, as reported by Enid Blyton, would say ‘the bear hugged Christopher Robin and they had a glorious time together, rolling about and pulling ears and all sorts of things.’ It sounds rather hazardous. E. V. Lucas was a member of the Society and knew many of the keepers. Through him it was possible to open doors and gates not normally opened to the general public. Laurence Irving, Henry’s grandson, told a story – which had wide circulation in a letter to The Times in 1981 – of a visit to Winnie, when he invited the children of two of his Garrick friends, A. A. Milne and John Hastings Turner, to join his daughter Pamela on her fifth birthday. Mrs Irving’s version was that Pamela, who had a keen sense of smell, had exclaimed ‘Oh pooh!’ on meeting the docile beast; Daphne certainly told the story that Christopher had said the same, but with pleasure rather than distaste, having decided he liked the bear after some natural initial trepidation on meeting the huge if friendly beast. (‘The girls held their ground, Billy wavered, retreated a step or two, then overcame his awe.’) However, the date of the expedition, so firmly fixed by Irving on his daughter’s fifth birthday, makes it impossible that saying ‘pooh!’ to Winnie the bear at the Zoo can have had anything to do with the naming of Christopher Robin’s teddy. Pamela was five on 22 March 1926, certainly seven months before the book was published, but three months after the first Pooh story had appeared in print.
Irving, writing to the paper so long afterwards, might well have confused the birthday. But the expedition cannot have taken place in March 1925, because it is also linked firmly with Vaudeville Vanities, a revue in which all three men – Irving, Milne and Hastings Turner – were involved. Irving had designed the sets for a rendering of ‘The King’s Breakfast’, set to music by Fraser-Simson. It was an item which caused problems, as the producer felt sure that the Lord Chamberlain would object to the life-size cow’s pale terracotta udders. Milne and Irving were both on the side of the udders – ‘the source of the butter on which the plot depended’. Vaudeville Vanities opened late in 1926, after the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. Indeed, if the visit to Winnie took place, as Irving says, ‘during the long run of the revue’, it must have been to celebrate Pamela’s sixth birthday, in March 1927.
If I seem to have laboured this point it is because Irving’s story has been much repeated. ‘How did Winnie-the-Pooh get his name?’ is a common question; it is such an odd name. Christopher Milne says ‘I gave it to him’ but nearly always uses just ‘Pooh’ and it is that part of the name that causes most problems. I have heard children, sadly, refuse to take the book off the library shelf ‘because of its silly name’. A child psychotherapist was much taken with the fact that it was a swan that was first called ‘Pooh’ – a swan, in its pure whiteness, being the antithesis of the current association, in nursery language, with faeces. This association written without an ‘h’ – supposedly from the exclamation at anything smelly or disgusting – did not come into the language until the 1930s (according to Eric Partridge) and whether it has anything to do with Pooh Bear it is impossible to say. There is nothing smelly or disgusting about Pooh.
Really, it seems best to leave most of the explanation to A. A. Milne himself. He says that when they said goodbye to the swan at Arundel, ‘we took the name with us, as we didn’t think the swan would want it any more’. And when Edward Bear wanted ‘an exciting name all to himself, Christopher Robin said at once, without stopping to think, that he was Winnie-the-Pooh. And he was.’ Milne could not remember whether Winnie at the zoo was called after Pooh or Pooh after Winnie, but we know that that large Canadian bear was Winnie long before Christopher was born. Then there is the complication of the bear’s sex and of the mysterious ‘the’ in the middle of the name. Milne again:
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to say, ‘But I thought he was a boy?’
‘So did I,’ said Christopher Robin.
‘Then you can’t call him Winnie?’
‘I don’t.’
‘But you said—’
‘He’s Winnie-ther-Pooh. Don’t you know what ‘ther’ means?’
‘Ah yes, now I do,’ I said quickly; and I hope you do too, because it is all the explanation you are going to get.
It only remains to remember that Pooh had such stiff arms, ‘from holding on to the string of the balloon all that time that 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 that is why he was always called Pooh.’ Well, it’s possible.
And as for it not being possible for a male creature to be called Winnie, it is just worth wondering whether Pooh helped Churchill’s nickname during the war and reinforced his tubby reassuring image when Britain stood alone.
In the spring of 1925 Winnie-the-Pooh was still a toy bear and not a book. He was not even in a story. But after the success of the poems, everyone forgot about the detective story and started pressing Milne to produce another children’s book. When We Were Very Young was already firmly established as ‘the greatest children’s book since Alice’. Indeed, its rare status had been acclaimed immediately on publication: ‘It is a book that all children will adore. It is a book that mothers and nurses will laugh and cry over. It is a – classic!’