Winnie-the-Pooh author AA Milne hated children, cheated on wife and fell out with son who inspired book – new movie reveals
New film Goodbye Christopher Robin starring Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie tells the dark family secrets of the beloved children's writer
TO the world, AA Milne is the author who brought the innocent joy of childhood to life through his stories of Winnie-the-Pooh.
But the man behind the enduring tales grew to hate their success, didn’t like children, cheated on his wife and died estranged from his bitter son.
That only child — whose name really was Christopher Robin — was packed off to boarding school, remorselessly bullied, married his first cousin and had a severely handicapped daughter.
Now a new film starring Domhnall Gleeson as writer Alan Alexander Milne and Margot Robbie as his wife Daphne examines the fallout between the boy and his parents.
But many of the family’s darker moments remain in the shadows.
Milne was already a respected writer for Punch magazine when, in 1923 during a wet holiday in Wales, he started to write verse about his three- year-old son Christopher and his Harrods teddy bear.
When We Were Very Young, published the next year, followed by Winnie-The-Pooh in 1926, made Milne a household name for the whimsical portrayal of a little boy and his friends in Hundred Acre Wood.
Yet the success saw Milne seethe because he yearned to be taken seriously as a political commentator.
Fans were more keen to meet his son than him, and he wrote to a friend that: “It was Christopher Robin, not I, who the Americans were clamouring to see.”
But he continued with the books, and Now We Are Six was published in 1927, followed by The House At Pooh Corner in 1928.
Then Milne informed his publishers that that was their lot.
Instead he devoted himself to largely ignored plays and anti-war commentary.
The success meant nothing to his glamorous wife Daphne de Selincourt either. Hating that Milne had moved the family from West London to a farm in the depths of Sussex, she took a lover.
She met American playwright Elmer Rice at a party in New York and would spend weeks at a time with him in the US and in London.
Milne turned a blind eye, as he too had taken a lover — young actress Leonora Corbett who had appeared in a couple of his plays.
Christopher, meanwhile, was largely raised by his nanny, played in the film by Kelly Macdonald.
He later said: “My father’s heart remained buttoned up all through his life. Some people are good with children. Others are not. It is a gift.
“You either have it or you don’t. My father didn’t. I can only guess that although I might not have missed my mother and would certainly not have missed my father, I would have missed Nanny most desolately.”
At ten he was sent to boarding school, by now furious that his childhood was public property.
The constant taunts at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire were a source of “toe-curling, fist-clenching, lip-biting embarrassment”.
And it got worse. When he was little Christopher had been recorded reciting several of the poems, and once the record surfaced in Stowe his bullies played it repeatedly.
Christopher, played by child actor Will Tilston in the film, later recalled: “Eventually the joke, if not the record, wore out and they handed it to me. I took it and broke it into a hundred fragments and scattered them over a distant field.”
He never forgave his father, who he said had “filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son”.
By adulthood, Christopher only communicated with his parents via letter and refused to see them.
Meanwhile, his father gave away the original Winnie-the-Pooh toy bear and his stuffed friends Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and Kanga, which had all belonged to Christopher.
They had been in the living room of the writer’s home until an American publisher asked to borrow them in 1947. No one asked for them back and they gathered dust in a box in a New York office for decades.
The rights to Winnie-the-Pooh were partially sold to Disney in 1961 and handed over completely in 2001 for £240millionMaking family life even trickier, Christopher fell in love with his first cousin, Daphne’s niece Lesley de Selincourt.
To the disgust of his parents, the pair married in 1948 and their only daughter Clare was born with cerebral palsy, suffering disabilities which left her confined to a wheelchair.
Daphne was heartbroken, and matters were made worse still when Christopher gave a damning interview blasting his parents for neglect and calling them cold and detached.
Horrified Daphne was so angry she ordered staff to dig a deep hole in the grounds of their home to bury a sculpture of Christopher so she would never have to lay eyes on it again.
Milne died in January 1956, aged 74. Christopher arrived at the funeral in a scruffy overcoat and it was the last time
Daphne would see her only child, although she would live for another 15 years. Even on her deathbed she refused to see him.
The family’s six-bedroomed home, Cotchford Farm in Hartfield, East Sussex, was sold to Rolling Stone Brian Jones, who was found dead in its swimming pool in 1969.
Christopher, meanwhile, had grudgingly accepted a share of his father’s legacy even though he hated the idea of taking a “lift from my fictional namesake of all people”. But he relented “for Clare’s sake”.
He later sold half his share in the future royalties for just £150,000 to the Royal Literary Fund and ploughed the cash into care for his daughter.
He and wife Lesley ran a small bookshop in Dartmouth, Devon, for more than 20 years until his death, aged 75, in 1996.
SNEAK PEAK Here's the first glimpse of stars Domhnall Gleeson and Margot Robbie in upcoming A.A. Milne biopic
His daughter set up the Clare Milne Trust in 2002 to fund disability projects in Devon and Cornwall. She passed away in 2012, aged 56.
Pooh and his friends are still among the most profitable children’s characters in the world.
The rights were partially sold to Disney in 1961 and were handed over completely in 2001 for £240million — which included £30million for the Clare Milne Trust.
The profits for Disney have been astounding. Pooh is the company’s most popular character after Mickey Mouse. Global merchandising still rakes in £3billion a year.
And as for the original Pooh and his friends? By now rather ragged and loveworn, they were finally rescued from the publisher’s office and sit on display behind bulletproof glass in New York Public Library.
- Nadia Cohen is the author of The Extraordinary Life of AA Milne, published by Pen & Sword Books later this year. The film Goodbye Christopher Robin opens on Friday September 29.
