Born in Kilburn, London, England on 18 January 1882 to Jamaican born John Vine Milne and Sarah Marie Milne, Alan Alexander Milne grew up at a small independent school ran by his father and he taught himself to read by the age of 2. One of his teachers was writer H.G. Wells who wrote The War of the Worlds. Alan attended both Westminster School and University of Cambridge’s Trinity College where he studied on a mathematics scholarship and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 1903. Despite that, his biggest interest was writing, and he collaborated with his brother Kenneth to write articles with the initials of AKM.

British humour magazine Punch took an interest in Alan’s writing and that led to him becoming a contributor and assisted editor. His other interest was on the cricket field where he was a fielder two armature cricket teams that mainly composed of the most famous male British writers living at that time like J.M. Barrie (the writer of Peter Pan), P.G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle (the writer of the Sherlock Holmes books).

Alan married Dorothy de Sélincourt who went by the name Daphne in 1913. When World War 1 broke out, he joined and served as an officer for the Royal Warwickshire Regiment before becoming a second lieutenant in the Regiment’s 4^th Battalion. Alan fought in the bloody Battle of Somme in 1916 as a signals officer but caught trench fever and was shipped back to England. The trauma he suffered from the battle (something shared with Lord of the Rings writer J.R.R. Tolkein) can be seen recreated in the film Goodbye Christopher Robin. Alan was discharged from the British Army in February 1919, and he settled on Chelsea’s Mallord Street. In 1920, he and Daphne had their only child Christopher Robin Milne.

In 1921, Alan bought an 18-inch Alpha Farnell teddy bear for his son from Harrods department store. His son Christopher Robin first called him Edward, but that was all about to change.

In 1924, Alan curated a collection of children’s poems he called “When We Were Very Young” under the pseudonym A. A. Milne. The inspiration for these poems came from his then four-year-old son’s pastimes, and they had titles like “Buckingham Palace” and “Halfway Down”. It showcased Alan’s long-time talent for light verse, and he followed it up with another collection in 1927 called “Now We Are Six”. In 1925, he wrote a story that the London Evening News published called “The Wrong sort of Bees” and this was the first appearance of his son’s beloved teddy bear who was now called Winnie The Pooh after both a bear called Winnie and a swan Alan had called Pooh. A lot of the early Winnie the Pooh stories that followed “The Wrong Sort of Bees” were inspired by the father-son bonding activities Alan and Christopher Robin had together and some of Christopher Robin’s other toys were the basis for Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Roo while Alan’s imagination created Rabbit and Owl. The Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex was the inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood in the Winnie The Pooh stories. The Winnie the Pooh stories were illustrated in the 1931 edition of Wind in the Willows illustrator E.H. Shephard whose daughter Mary illustrated the Mary Poppins books for P.L. Travers.

The stories were just the pick me up that many people needed after World War 1 since the stories were so happy and cheery. What’s not to love when it comes to a honey-loving bear? The books were instant best sellers! Yet, that came at the cost of the real Christopher Robin being exploited by the press and the publisher’s PR team who thought “never mind the chap’s mental health, why don’t we get a lot of people to meet the boy who inspired the stories our boss’ client’s stories when he clearly didn’t ask for this. What could go wrong?” The success of the books had a negative influence on the relationship Christopher had with his dad and they only made up once Christopher Robin was about to fight in World War 2. By that point, at least 12 Winnie the Pooh books had been written. A.A. Milne also wrote a play called Toad of Toad Hall which was also an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham.

A.A. Milne didn’t live long enough to see Disney’s iconic adaptions of his Winnie the Pooh stories as he died on 31 January 1956. It should be noted that Disney weren’t the ones who came up with a red shirt wearing Winnie the Pooh but they did popularise the image. While Winnie the Pooh has entered the American public domain in 2022, he will enter the Irish and the British public domains in 2027 as there, the copyright lasts the author’s life and 70 years after the author’s death. As for Alan’s son the real Christopher Robin, he lived a quiet life running a bookshop and died in 1996.