Milne wrote to Ken in 1926 not only of Christopher and all the interest as the Pooh stories began to appear regularly month by month in both England and America, but also of politics, of cricket and golf and of servant problems. It was the year of the General Strike, but nothing survives to tell us what Milne thought about that. The ‘politics’ at one point related to personalities. Apparently, Milne had sneered at Lord Bridgeman, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Ken had admonished him. In his reply to the admonition, Milne referred to an Academy painter, another old Etonian, John Collier, whose portraiture was described as achieving ‘a sober veracity slightly reminiscent of Frank Holl’, now hardly himself a name to conjure with. The passage seems worth quoting at length because it shows so clearly Milne’s attitude to the Establishment, his inability to suffer fools gladly, which was always so characteristic of him. It also suggests Milne had a rather less conventional attitude to the avant-garde in art than some might suppose:
Talking of Bridgeman:
Suppose Roger Fry (say) were to be talking of the more advanced continental painters, and were to end up: ‘Meanwhile for England the shining genius of a Collier is enough’ – and suppose you were to say ‘Why sneer at Collier? His artistic genius is his own affair. It may not be great, but it is adequate for the work he does, work done competently and honourably’ – what could Fry answer? I suppose something like this.
‘I am not “sneering” at Collier particularly; or, if I am, only in as much as he pretends to be something he isn’t – that is, in as much as he gives himself the airs of a great painter. What I am really “sneering” at is the artistic perception which looks for nothing higher than a Collier, which is satisfied with a representative Academy full of Colliers, which tolerates the bestowal of rewards on the Colliers and the Colliers only.’
Bridgeman (from his looks, and from all I have heard of him from those who know him) is an utterly uninspired, unimaginative, rather bewildered mediocre little man, such as you could find in thousands all over England. If you say that such a man is entirely competent to fill the post of First Lord, I have no doubt you are right. But one is allowed to ask oneself: ‘In that case: (1) Ought such a man to get the ￡5,000 a year and the honours and glory that, for some obscure reason, we have been in the habit of giving our First Lords? – and (2) Ought we to be satisfied with our methods of government, if government means nothing more than a Bridgeman rather red in the face saying “Yes. Yes” and signing something?’
Hence these sneers. The truth is that since the war I have been utterly sick of, and utterly uninterested in, politics. Perhaps the fact that I played round Ashdown Forest behind Joynson-Hicks at Easter has intensified my contempt for statesmen. My God, the profound mediocrities that emerge.
Joynson-Hicks was the Conservative Home Secretary at the time of the General Strike.
Milne went to see the MCC play the Australians and was pleased when the England team for the first test match turned out to be almost exactly the one he had predicted to Ken (‘Larwood for Allen is the only difference.’ He had wanted Larwood ‘and he may go in yet’.) The brothers were jubilant in August when in the last match of the series a tremendous partnership between Hobbs and Sutcliffe meant the Ashes would return to England after fourteen years. ‘It was a triumph for the selectors,’ the papers wrote, and Milne almost felt he had been one of them.
When the family returned to London at the end of August they found that their new cook (‘our Penn has left us’, he had told Ken a little earlier) had been entertaining a young gentleman from Jermyn Street:
They had been living happily, honeymooning so to speak, at 13 Mallord Street, kindly borrowed from Mr and Mrs A. A. Milne. We knew nothing of this until Monday morning when we came down to breakfast and found that the cook (who had welcomed us home beamingly the afternoon before) had vanished in the night. Thereafter we heard all and more than all we wanted to. The charwoman, who comes once a week, told Daff that our house had been turned into a ‘bad-ouse’; in fact from all we heard Daff and I might have been arrested for keeping one.
They returned hastily to Cotchford. Christopher did not go back to school until halfway through September. After some initial problems, they were now being very well looked after at Cotchford by a reliable couple. The handsome gardener, George Tasker (someone said he looked like a Spanish sea captain), would stay with them for the rest of his life and put up, apparently quite willingly, with Daphne’s imperious ways. She was immensely pleased with the prizes they won at local horticultural shows and would introduce Tasker to visitors as her ‘head gardener’. (He had a nephew who helped.) Though the Taskers lived in a cottage at the top of the drive, Tasker’s daughter Brenda would remember that the only time Mrs Milne ever came there was just after the gardener’s death. She came with a friend for support and Brenda could not decide ‘if she was a very shy person or a complete snob, who was quite unaware of any other person around’. She had certainly been irritated many years earlier when she had to find a new cook at Cotchford because Mrs Tasker was expecting her second child, Peter.
Winnie-the-Pooh was published on 14 October 1926 in London and on the 21st in New York. There was one annoying misprint. Somehow Milne had left ‘his’ instead of ‘her’ for Kanga at the end of Chapter VII, having started off interestingly thinking the kangaroo a father, in spite of the pouch. (He originally wrote, ‘An animal who carries his child about with him in his pocket . . .’ The male pronouns are crossed out heavily in the manuscript; somehow the final ‘his’ in the chapter slipped through and survives in the first edition.) And some officious copy-editor had corrected Piglet’s spoonerism ‘spleak painly’ in the same chapter: it was years before that was noticed and put right. But, in general, Milne was extremely pleased. The balance between type and illustrations was so much more satisfactory than it had been in the cluttered pages of newspapers and magazines, where the stories had made their first appearances.