|
Scottish-Crafts
Tel:
+44 (0)773 328 4443
To bookmark this site press Ctrl and
D on your keyboard.
Join our mailing
list
|
 Alan
Alexander Milne (January 18, 1882 – January 31, 1956), also known as A.
A. Milne, was a Scottish Author, best known for his books about the teddy
bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various children's poems. Milne was a noted
writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh
overshadowed all his previous work.
Milne
was born in Scotland but raised in London at Henley House School, a small
independent school run by his father, John V. Milne. One of his teachers
was H. G. Wells. He attended Westminster School and Trinity College,
Cambridge where he studied on a mathematics scholarship. While there, he
edited and wrote for Granta, a student magazine. He collaborated with his
brother Kenneth and their articles appeared over the initials AKM. Milne's
work came to the attention of the leading British humour magazine Punch,
where Milne was to become a contributor and later an assistant editor.
Milne
joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the
Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating illness, the Royal
Corps of Signals. After the war, he wrote a denunciation of war titled
Peace with Honour (1934), which he retracted somewhat with 1940's War with
Honour.
During
World War II, he was Captain of the Home Guard in Hartfield & Forest
Row, insisting on being plain 'Mr Milne' to the members of his platoon.
Milne
married Dorothy (nicknamed "Daphne") de Selincourt in 1913, and
their only son, Christopher Robin Milne, was born in 1920. In 1925, A. A.
Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. He
retired to the farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an
invalid.
Milne
is most famous for his Pooh books about a boy named Christopher Robin,
after his son, and various characters inspired by his son's stuffed
animals, most notably the bear named Winnie-the-Pooh. The source of the
name is reputedly a Canadian black bear named Winnie (after Winnipeg),
that was used as a military mascot by the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, a
Canadian Infantry Regiment in World War I, and left to London Zoo after
the war. After its heroics On September 14 1915, the bear was named
'Winnie the Pooh', years before Milne adopted it. E. H. Shepard
illustrated the original Pooh books, using his own son's teddy, Growler
("a magnificent bear"), as the model. Christopher Robin Milne's
own toys are now under glass in New York. Milne also wrote a number of
poems, including Vespers, They're Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace, and
King John's Christmas, which were published in the books When We Were Very
Young and Now We Are Six. Several of Milne's children's poems were set to
music by the composer Harold Fraser-Simson. His poems have been parodied
many times, including with the books When We Were Rather Older and Now We
Are Sixty.
The
overwhelming success of his children's books was to become a source of
considerable annoyance to Milne, whose self-avowed aim was to write
whatever he pleased, and who had, until then, found a ready audience for
each change of direction: he had freed pre-war Punch from its ponderous
facetiousness; he had made a considerable reputation as a playwright (like
his idol J. M. Barrie) on both sides of the Atlantic; he had produced a
witty piece of detective writing in The Red House Mystery. Indeed, Milne's
publisher was displeased when he announced his intention to write poems
for children, and he had never lacked an audience.
But
once Milne had, in his own words, "said Goodbye to all that in 70,000
words" (the approximate length of the four children's books), he had
no intention of producing a copy of a copy, given that one of the sources
of inspiration, his son, was growing older.
His
reception remained warmer in America than Britain, and he continued to
publish novels and short stories, but by the late 1930s the audience for
Milne's grown-up writing had largely vanished: he observed bitterly in his
autobiography that a critic had said that the hero of his latest play
("God help it") was simply "Christopher Robin grown up ...
what an obsession with me children are become!"
Even
his old literary home, Punch, where the When We Were Very Young verses had
first appeared, was ultimately to reject him, as Christopher Milne details
in his autobiography The Enchanted Places, although Methuen continued to
publish whatever Milne wrote, including the long poem 'The Norman Church'
and an assembly of articles entitled Year In, Year Out (which Milne
likened to a benefit night for the author).
After
Milne's death, his widow sold the rights to the Pooh characters to the
Walt Disney Company, which has made a number of Pooh cartoon movies, as
well as a large amount of Pooh-related merchandise. She also destroyed his
papers.
Royalties
from the Pooh characters paid by Disney to the Royal Literary Fund,
part-owner of the Pooh copyright, provide the income used to run the
Fund's Fellowship Scheme, placing professional writers in UK universities.
 Biographies
of writers Biographies
of Poets
Poetry
Music
and Songs
(back
to Famous Scots)
|
Crafts
Crafts
Crafts
Crafts
Crafts
A A Milne