The Book Show

How did those charming stories called Winnie the Pooh come to have this particular name?

In his collection Why Not Catch 21? Gary Dexter charts the stories behind the titles of many popular, controversial and important books.

Gary Dexter says the background story of the title of AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh involves a real life bear in London Zoo during World War One, and a swan called Pooh.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: How did those charming stories called Winnie the Pooh come to have this particular name, and peculiar name at that? In his collection Why Not Catch 21 Gary Dexter charts the stories behind the titles of many popular, controversial and important books. He's already told us how Joseph Heller came up with Catch 22, and that George Orwell's 1984 began its life as The Last Man in Europe. But what about AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh? Well, it involves a real-life bear in London Zoo during WWI and a swan called Pooh. Here's Gary Dexter to explain.

Gary Dexter: Winnie the Pooh is an interesting title. If you were to name a soft toy something, you probably wouldn't come up with Winnie the Pooh. It originates really from three directions at once. The first strand came from WWI, it was to do with a Canadian veterinary surgeon called Harry Colebourn, and he was travelling on his way to the trenches with his troop train across Canada. The train stopped at a place called White River in Ontario and he looked out of the window and there on the platform he saw a black bear cub that was being offered for sale by a hunter that had just shot its mother. So he nipped out of the train, bought the cub for $20, got back in the train and took the cub with him over to Britain. That was their first stop before going on to the trenches in Flanders.

He named the cub Winnipeg after his own home town, which was 'Winnie' for short. So he deposited the cub with London Zoo because it was felt that the trenches wouldn't be a very suitable place for a bear. So he left the cub there. He actually survived the fighting and he came back in 1919 after five years, still intact, but he decided not to take the bear back with him to Canada because by that time Winnie had grown up into quite a large adolescent bear and it probably wasn't that practical to take it back on the ship, so he left it in London Zoo.

A couple of years later AA Milne, who happened to be a friend of the zookeeper, took his young son, Christopher Robin (and that's the same name, obviously, as the six-year-old child in the books) in to see Winnie in London Zoo, and Christopher Robin was actually allowed in to the bear cage to play with Winnie who was apparently very docile. He was so taken with Winnie that when he got back home he transferred the name 'Winnie' onto his own soft stuffed toy bear, so at that point it became 'Winnie'.

At this point you have to backtrack a little to a holiday that the Milne family took in a place called Angmering in Sussex in the early 1920s, and Christopher Robin made friends with a swan on a lake, and he called the swan Pooh. The explanation for that being that, as Milne says in a book of his, When We Were Very Young, which is a book that predates the Winnie the Pooh books, he says that Pooh is a very good name for a swan because if you call the swan and it doesn't come, you can just say, 'Pooh!' as if you didn't want it in the first place, which was the kind of thing they used to say in the 1920s.

And when Christopher Robin got back home after that visit to the swan, the two names merged, Winnie and Pooh, making this kind of hybrid bear/swan creature, which was the origin of the name for his stuffed toy and which of course AA Milne later took for the title of his book.

Ramona Koval: I'm not sure about that swan/Pooh business, I think it's about swans being big pooers actually. I think they were a bit shy about saying that in the olden days. That's Gary Dexter explaining how AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh got its name. His book is called Why Not Catch 21: The Stories Behind the Titles, and it's a Frances Lincoln book distributed here by Bookwise.

Guests

Gary Dexter
Columnist for the British paper, Sunday Telegraph.

Publications

Title: Why Not Catch 21: The Stories Behind the Titles
Author: Gary Dexter
Publisher: Frances Lincoln distributed by Bookwise
ISBN: 978 071 122 7965

Presenter

Gary Dexter

Producer

Sarah L'Estrange