Winnie-the-Pooh: From Acton to Hundred Acre Wood

A new plaque to mark Winnie-the-Pooh’s birthplace was revealed in April in Acton, West London.  The Farnell Factory, which manufactured Britain’s first teddy bears, was Pooh's unlikely birthplace. Since the factory has since been demolished the plaque has been placed on The Elms, a Georgian house owned by the Farnell family.

The bear was one of a batch produced in 1921 and sent from silk merchant John Kirby Farnell’s factory to Harrods, where Daphne Milne, Christopher Robin’s mother, bought him for her son’s first birthday present.

Pooh spent the rest of his days flitting between the Milnes’ London home and Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, an area in East Sussex that inspired AA Milne’s Enchanted Place, Hundred Acre Wood, the House at Pooh Corner, and Pooh’s other favorite haunts.

 

It is unclear whether Pooh spent the entirety of World War Two at Cotchford Farm, when the real Christopher Robin was in the navy.   He had always felt resentful towards the toys that eclipsed him throughout his life.  His father also grew exasperated with the bear, as no one paid his adult literary works more attention than his vastly popular children’s stories, which he came to dismiss as “trifles for the young."

When AA Milne died in 1956 – notably with neither funeral nor memorial stone organised by his family, so disenchanted with his creations and alienated were they at this stage – he left much of Pooh’s legacy to The Garrick Club. The fund, known informally as “The Pooh Trust”, caused such infighting that the Club almost crumbled.

A plaque seems inadequate acknowledgement of such an eventful life. The original Farnell factory’s instructions for bear care are sadly prophetic: “The ideal place to keep an elderly bear is in a glass-fronted cupboard where it can be seen and taken out from time to time.”

 The Life and Times of the Real Winnie-the-Pooh: the Teddy Bear Who Inspired A.A. Milne by Shirley Harrison is published by Pen & Sword.