THE SIMPLE ANSWER TO almost any question today is to ‘Google it’. So try exploring Winnie-the-Pooh, plus whatever the topic of your choice, and you will open up some astonishing and amusing discoveries of varying reliability.
Winnie-the-Pooh and Hitler
‘Operation Winnie-the-Pooh’, was the code name for an alleged plot by the British to smuggle Adolf Hitler from Berlin in 1945. Greg Hallett’s book Hitler was a British Agent, tells the persuasive but unlikely story of his escape. It claims that he left the Bunker at 3.50 p.m. on 30 April 1945 and hid in the bulkhead passage until 8 p.m. ‘Operation Winnie-the-Pooh’ it is claimed, rescued Hitler through the emptied locks of the upper River Spree and then by submarine, boat and plane – destination Spain.
Winnie-the-Pooh and the Indian Ocean
On 27 December 2009, 24-year-old Sarah Outen rowed alone into Mauritius. She was the first woman and youngest person to make the journey single-handed across the notoriously unpredictable Indian Ocean.
‘Adventures make life real and exciting’ she said, ‘I had known since a youngster that I would live for adventures.’ Her eclectic iPod list was loaded with Winniethe-Pooh, War and Peace, Jane Austen and various adventure books. The music shuffled between Mozart, Queen, the Rolling Stones, the Dixie Chicks, Fleet Foxes and Sigur Ros.
Winnie-the-Pooh and Barak Obama
Before he became U.S. President, one of Barak Obama’s key advisors asserted that Winnie-the-Pooh, Luke Skywalker and British football hooligans could shape the foreign policy of the United States.
Richard Danzig who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and was tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of U.S. strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh, which can be shortened to: ‘If it is causing you too much pain, try something else.’ Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: ‘Winnie-the-Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.’
Winnie-the-Pooh and the big guns
Having just survived the Dunkirk evacuation and Battle of Britain, the British did not have an immediate answer to the German artillery threat from France. The high ground to either side of the Port of Dover was fortified on the personal order of the Prime Minister (who had visited to see the situation in person), and large calibre guns dug in there. At first, the only British cross-Channel guns already in place were Winnie and – later in 1940 – Pooh (named after the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the bear Winnie-the-Pooh). These were two 14 -inch (35.6 cm) guns positioned behind St Margaret’s, Kent. They were spares taken from the stock of guns of the battleship HMS King George V. As they needed mountings, one was used from HMS Furious and the other from a test range. Neither was in a turret. Operated from a separate firing-control room, they were manned by twenty-five men of the Royal Marine Siege Regiment.
These boosted morale. Winnie fired Britain’s first shell onto continental Europe in August 1940 – but proved slow and ineffectual in comparison with the German guns. Together they targeted the German guns (though they were too inaccurate and slow to target German shipping).
Winnie-the-Pooh and Queen Elizabeth II
In June 2006 Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 80th birthday with several hundred children in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Among the guests was Winnie-the-Pooh – sadly, not the original Winnie who, at the age of 85 was too old to travel but sent greetings from New York.
The Palace gardens were transformed into a fantasy land and actors performed a rollicking drama based on Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant about the terrible day the Queen’s handbag was stolen.
Speaking on the platform afterwards Her Majesty admitted she was relieved to be reunited with her bag as she was never normally without it. ‘British children’s literature has been for many years an extraordinary success story’, she told the crowd, who sang Happy Birthday to her.