From a nursery to a book

Alan Alexander Milne began telling bedtime stories to his son Christopher Robin about the boy's soft toys. The stories grew into a book published on 14 October 1926, and its cast came straight from the nursery: a teddy bear named Winnie, a piglet, a donkey, a tiger and two kangaroos. Milne had already built a reputation with novels and plays. Ernest H. Shepard drew the illustrations, but he did not give the bear the red top that became its trademark, a change that came in the early 1960s when Walt Disney bought the rights.

The real bear behind the name

Harry Colebourn, born in Britain in 1887, emigrated to Canada, trained as a veterinarian and joined the Royal Canadian Army Veterinary Corps. While travelling to join his regiment in the First World War, he bought a black bear cub in White River from a hunter who had killed its mother. The female cub was named Winnie after Winnipeg, the Canadian city that was then Colebourn's home. In 1914 the regiment was sent to England for training, and the bear went with him as the pet and unofficial mascot of the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade. In December 1914 Colebourn handed her to London Zoo, hoping to collect her after the war. He visited her on home leave, and in 1919 he decided the zoo was the best place for her and gave her to it permanently. Christopher Robin met the bear there, and he named his own teddy after her. The 'Pooh' half of the name goes back to a swan the Milne family saw on a holiday.

From Hundred Acre Wood to the internet

Winnie-the-Pooh has also become a meme. SRF describes an early internet template that shows Pooh in increasingly elegant stages, from a relaxed armchair to a tuxedo with a monocle or top hat, paired with captions that sound ever more refined while saying the same thing. Online he is also read as an icon of body positivity, thanks to a scene in which he admires his belly in a mirror and the self-mocking line "I am short, fat, and proud of that". A GIF of him dancing with Arielle and Donald Duck, animated by digital artist Leon Denise and circulating since 2016 at the latest, has several billion views on Giphy. The meme also took a political turn. Because internet users in China repeatedly compared the bear with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, such images and allusions are regularly censored there.

Books, screens and Soviet cartoons

Publishers sell more than 45 million copies of his books in the United States alone, according to NZZ. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame carries his name. Disney secured the rights to the stories in 1961, and its film Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day won an Oscar in 1969. The Soviet animator and director Fyodor Khitruk made three cartoons about the bear between 1969 and 1972. The films were possible partly because the Soviet Union joined the Universal Copyright Convention only in 1973. The first work was translated into German as early as 1928. Screen versions changed some of the story and characters, but the spirit of enjoying life among friends has stayed the same across the century.

Anniversary broadcasts and tributes

BBC Radio 4 marked the anniversary with a series of readings. The first episode, Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, is read by Lenny Henry and abridged by Jeremy Mortimer, while Jim Broadbent reads the episode Eeyore has a Birthday. The first episode opens with a specially recorded introduction by the Queen, made earlier this year at Pooh Sticks Bridge in Ashdown Forest, the landscape that inspired the Hundred Acre Wood. In it she recalls childhood games of Pooh Sticks and describes the bear's stories as offering "kindness, wisdom" and "simplicity in a very complicated world". Dutch broadcaster NOS spoke to Annelies Jorna, who translated the books into Dutch, about why the stories have lasted.

“Winnie the Pooh was not very moralistic and was written truly from the perspective of children.”

The stories still work for readers a century on, according to the translator, because they avoid the lessons that filled children's books at the time.