Winnie the pooh

100th anniversary of A A Milne and E H Shepard, with James Campbell

36 min listen

On this week’s Book Club podcast we’re celebrating the 100th anniversary of a landmark in children’s publishing, When We Were Very Young — which represented the first collaboration between A A Milne and E H Shepard, who would (of course) go on to write an illustrate Winnie-the-Pooh. Sam Leith is joined by James Campbell, who runs the E H Shepard estate. He tells Sam how the war shaped the mood and success of that first book, why Daphne Milne’s snobbery and ambition left Shepard out in the cold, what happened to Christopher Robin… and how Pooh became Pooh. 

Cambridge comes unstuck on Winnie the Pooh

Oh dear. Over the weekend, Cambridge University’s Twitter account celebrated the graduation of its most recent cohort with some pearls of wisdom that it attributed to one of its former students – AA Milne, the creator of Winnie Pooh. Milne graduated from Trinity College Cambridge with a B.A. in Mathematics at the beginning of the twentieth century and it was to him that the social media staff turned for inspiration, writing in a now deleted tweet: ‘Congratulations to everyone graduating from #Cambridge in absence today! Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” – AA Milne (Trinity, 1900) A nice sentiment