What Winnie-the-Pooh teaches us about friendship, care and the desire to be useful

The decade straddling the First World War was a period of unusual brilliance and fecundity in British culture. There were the great formal innovators of literary modernism: Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, D H Lawrence and E M Forster. But then there were those more closely associated with mass culture, who enjoyed a degree of commercial success as well as cultural influence: Rudyard Kipling, Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, Agatha Christie, P G Wodehouse, G K Chesterton, Jerome K Jerome, even Charlie Chaplin.

Many of these authors moved in the same circles, crossed paths with one another and promoted each other’s work. Indeed, most of the male writers, at one point or another, belonged to an amateur cricket team founded by Barrie — best known as the author of Peter Pan — named “the Allahakbarries” (evidently on the basis of the misapprehension that the Arabic phrase Allahu Akbar denotes something like a general petition for divine help, the equivalent of “Heaven help us”).

Perhaps the unlikeliest member of this generation of famed writers was a self-deprecating, somewhat reclusive detective story writer and occasional columnist for the satirical weekly magazine Punch, named Alan Alexander Milne. Having enjoyed some modest success as a playwright after the war, on 21 August 1921 Milne purchased a nondescript brown teddy bear from Harrods at Knightsbridge as a birthday present for his infant son, Christopher Robin. Gradually, the nursery would be populated with a small society of stuffed animals: a drooping donkey for Christmas that same year; a tiny piglet the following year from a next-door neighbour in London; later on, a green-eyed tiger, a kangaroo and her joey. It was Milne’s wife, Daphne, who brought the menagerie to life for her son, supplying the voices, the dispositions, the relationships.

Observing their play, a couple years later A A Milne penned poem called “Teddy Bear” in which the first glimpses of his most famous creation can be seen:

A bear, however hard he tries,

Grows tubby without exercise.

Our Teddy Bear is short and fat,

Which is not to be wondered at;

He gets what exercise he can

By falling off the ottoman,

But generally seems to lack

The energy to clamber back …