ERNEST H. SHEPARD was an artist whose talent as a painter in oils, of portraits and English landscapes, is largely unknown to the world in general. Forgotten, too, are his many years as a Punch cartoonist and illustrator of over one hundred books. All that the public remembers today is that this gentle, kindly man was, as his biographer, Arthur R. Chandler, defined him, The Man Who Drew Pooh.
Just as Pooh eclipsed Milne’s ambitions to be considered a serious literary figure and dramatist, so was it to be with the artist Shepard.
In 1925 Milne was caught up in all the brouhaha of the bonanza around When We Were Very Young – and enjoying it. So was Daphne. She wrote a ‘PS’ on the bottom of one of his letters: ‘We are all very well and happy and pleased with each other.’
Milne’s letters to his new ‘collaborator’ are mostly in the Shepard Archive at Surrey university in Guildford. They are invariably addressed to ‘Dear Shepard’ and the replies to ‘Dear Milne’. No ‘Kipper’ or ‘Blue’. Milne’s writing is small and slopes in triangles from the top left to the bottom right of each page. Infuriatingly they are mostly undated.
Shepard always said that he found Milne difficult to know, but the author’s letters are friendly and almost paternal, although Milne was, at forty-four, three years younger than Shepard. He says, in one letter, early in the relationship, that this would be ‘the last time that infernal man Milne is bothering you. Pray forgive him and believe that he is ever yours in friendship and admiration.’
The first invitation to Cotchford appears to have been for September 1925, when Shepard and his wife, Florence, went down to meet the animals again and to explore the Forest which was their home – in reality and in imagination. There Shepard discovered a different Milne: relaxed and no long stiff and reticent as he had been at their first meeting in Mallord Street.
Moon, who had very little experience of playing with boys – even of his own age – was also delighted to discover that Shepard’s son, Graham, at the age of 18 and about to leave for Oxford university, was up for splashing about in the stream and doing muddy things, such as turning a floating log into a battleship and then an alligator.
The family returned to Hartfield in the spring of the next year and the two men set off on an ‘Expotition’ to explore the Forest which Moon and Pooh already knew so well.
At that time of year the gorse is ablaze on the moorland and woods are heavy with the scent of bluebells. They too followed the sandy track up to the high point of what Milne called ‘Galleon’s Lap’ – sixty something trees in a circle from where the sunrise is breathtaking and the whole world spread out until it reached the sky.
Moon said that he knew it was ‘Enchanted’ as no one had ever been able to count the trees and you could sit down carelessly up there and not be forced to get up in a hurry and look for somewhere else, because the grass was quiet and soft and green. ‘The Enchanted Place’ was to become the centre of Pooh’s world.
The Forest touched Shepard, too, and he began to draw. He was a keen observer. There is nothing static in his pictures; whether it is the prickliness of the gorse or the tail-drooping gloom of Eeyore, everything is alive.
His step-granddaughter, Penelope Fitzgerald, wrote sensitively about Kipper’s work, in the Sunday Telegraph on 22 December 1991: ‘He let his fingers blow across the page.’
The secret of Pooh’s personality lay in the way in which her grandfather placed his eye far lower down and further back than in any previous teddy bear. It was this that gave him the uniquely, bemused, anxious-to-please expression that prompted Christopher Robin (and the rest of the world) to say lovingly ’Oh Bear, how I do love you!’
‘We all love your pictures’, wrote Milne to Shepard, ‘you have made a delightful book of it.’
Milne’s own talent was playing with words and the use of language. With humorous twists and simple, sometimes silly sentences and idiosyncratic banter, each story is a drama full of action, smiles and ‘Deep Thoughts’. Characters come alive and can be shared between adult and child.
Humphrey Carpenter, in his book, Secret Gardens, suggests that Pooh’s world gives all children an unconscious understanding of human nature, which will remain with them forever.
Shepard liked to draw from life and so he became a fairly regular visitor to the Milnes. His beloved wife Florence was very ill at this time, and he found the work therapeutic. One of these meetings was recorded by Dutton’s President, John Macrae, when he visited Mallord Street, in 1926. He described Moon sitting on the floor with Pooh and the other animals, largely unaware of the significance of what was happening. A.A. Milne was on the sofa reading aloud and Shepard was sketching away in his accustomed pencil.
Milne himself described Macrae as an old man with a beard who insisted on saying ‘yessir’ and who flatteringly assured him that he went straight to the hearts of the people. ‘More likely to the heart of his banker’, Milne wrote tersely to his brother, Ken, afterwards (Ann Thwaite).
On 24 December 1925, In Which We are Introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh and Some Bees, was published in the Evening News, with a front-page banner headline, ‘A CHILDREN’S STORY BY A.A. MILNE.’ It appeared in far larger print than the main news stories – ‘Great Storm Sweeps over Derbyshire’ and ‘Lord Cobham’s Mansion on Fire.’
On Christmas Day, at 7.45 p.m on the wireless, the BBC offered a reading of the story by the well-known Actor-Manager, Donald Calthorp. This was the first interpretation of many – the best known probably being those by the growlyvoiced actor, Norman Shelley, on Children’s Hour, years later.
It is alleged that Churchill (himself a Winnie, of course) was so impressed that he commissioned Shelley to impersonate his voice and record some of his wartime speeches for the radio, when he was otherwise occupied in trying to win the Second World War.
Pooh must have been proud.
The new story would shortly be followed in the magazine, Eve, by Pooh Goes Visiting And Gets Into A Tight Place. This tells of the day Pooh called on Rabbit and got stuck in the entrance hole of his burrow and how Rabbit used his legs inside as a towel rail while he waited for Pooh to slim down and eventually wriggle his way out into the Forest. There were eight more stories until the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh finally launched the career of its hero.
The book, Winnie-the-Pooh, was published on 14 October 1926 and was dedicated rather gushingly to Daphne ‘because we love you’. She appears only once in any of the books – as Moon dutifully repeats ‘God Bless Mummy’ in Vespers and even then there is no illustration of her.
This was Pooh’s big moment. Christopher Robin is there of course – but he has become the sensible growing-up boy in the background (as he was becoming in real life) to whom his friends from the Forest, who would never grow up, would turn when in trouble.
Winnie-the-Pooh, the teddy bear, the romantic poet and philosopher, was now the hero. Thirty-two thousand copies of the book were immediately on sale in Britain and by the end of the year 150,000 copies had been sold in America, too.
Pooh spent much of his new celebrity status down in Sussex but over the following years was often required for personal appearances in London. With Moon, he met the not-quite-yet-famous Enid Blyton who, at the age of 29, had already published a dozen books. She described Moon, in his little brown overall and a shock of corn-coloured hair carrying ‘an enormous teddy bear, which he informed me was Pooh. He looked around the room for something he might devour. His bright eyes fell upon his father’s fountain-pen and he immediately took it up and pulled it into as many pieces as possible.’
Pooh watched the John O’London’s reporter, Claude F. Luke, being given the freedom of the brightly coloured nursery in Mallord Street.
His later encounter, for a second time, in 1928, with American journalist, May Lamberton Becker was a bit rougher. As she sat in the Mallord Street nursery a ‘large brown bear’ came tumbling over her shoulder. In Daff’s Pooh voice, small and gruff, the bear said ‘Here, hold me up, I mustn’t miss this’. So she sat with Pooh’s face against hers watching Moon boxing his father who was protected by a yellow cushion.
Ms Becker had sent Moon a rather magnificent Red Indian headdress after their first meeting. She was thanked effusively by Daff who assured her ‘He does look such a duck going out in it.’ She sympathised with the problem of a bear who, she believed, had almost overnight changed the name of a household institution – when all the teddy bears in America became Pooh-bears.