Cadet Branch. Brandreth. 2025. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Brandreth, Gyles. 2025. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear: A. A. Milne and the Creation of Winnie-the-Pooh. St. Martin’s Press.
This is an interesting book, not least because of its author.
Gyles Brandreth, for those — like me — who do not know him, appears to be something like a modern-day John Boswell: an inveterate, and Tigger-like, satellite of British high society. According to the Wikipedia, he was born in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1948 to a father who was a lawyer in the Allied Control Commission and belongs to a reasonably well-established society family (a genealogy entry for one of his ancestors indicates that the Brandreths in the eighteenth century kept their name when they married into families, but, lacking their own arms, adopted those of the family they joined). He is related both to Jeremiah Brandreth, the last man executed in England by axe (for rebellion), and to Admiral Thomas Brandreth, a nineteenth-century Third Lord of the Admiralty.
Gyles was president of the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and later president of both the Oscar Wilde Society and the British Scrabble Society; he was European Monopoly Champion (the game, not the commercial strategy), for a while held the world record for the longest kiss on television, and runs what sound like museums dedicated to both ugly woollen sweaters (apparently a trademark of his) and teddy bears. He was MP for Chester in John Major’s government, during which he served in the Treasury and as Assistant Whip. He is an inveterate participant in, and former host of, British game shows.
And he writes like it. One of his most noticeable tics as an author is telling you exactly where he is as he writes the sentence you are reading: at the New York Public Library, looking at their collection of Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals (the NYPL has them all except Roo, who was lost when Christopher Robin was a child); in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, examining the Milne papers; leaving Buckingham Palace after meeting Queen Camilla to discuss what the British might offer the NYPL in exchange for a loan of the Pooh toys (the Magna Carta? A crown?); on Poohsticks Bridge in Ashdown Forest, where Christopher Robin used to play as a child. These are all places that exude access, and Brandreth seems to know everybody, from his good friend Christopher Robin to various theatre luminaries. It is somehow typical and appropriate that he is the father and son of members of the Garrick Club (the Garrick was A. A. Milne’s favourite club), but not one himself.
This is not to say that Brandreth is a bad writer. In fact, he is very fluid and clear (he also appears to have written the book — which was published just in time for the 100th anniversary of the first Pooh story, on Christmas Eve 1925 — in about six months, starting around Christmas 2024). But he writes from a very well-established position: as somebody who inhabits the modern form of the world in which A. A. Milne ended up, and who is very comfortable in his own skin. You want to be skeptical of his privilege and connections (or at least I did), but he wears them well.
In terms of the story of the Milnes’ life (A. A. and C. R.), there is not much to say. A. A. Milne was an extremely well-known commercial writer and dramatist of the early twentieth century. He is remembered primarily for his children’s books and poetry, but, prior to the publication of these, was mostly recognised as a popular dramatist. His circle included H. G. Wells and J. M. Barrie at the older end (Wells had taught at a school run by J. V. Milne, the father and grandfather of A. A. and C. R. respectively), and P. G. Wodehouse as a contemporary. He worked as an assistant editor at Punch and served as a signals officer in the First World War.
The Pooh books are closely based on A. A.’s observation of C. R.’s playtime and made the family immensely rich and famous in the new, post-mass-media way that was just starting in the 1920s: the first Pooh story appeared in a newspaper but had a BBC radio tie-in; he signed a merchandising agreement after the books became a success in the U.S.; and young Christopher recorded a novelty record of songs while still a child.
Later C. R. came to resent this fame — as a child because it meant he was teased in boarding school; and as a young adult because he could not shake his status as the Christopher Robin when he tried to make it as a writer in London. Eventually, he and his wife, Lesley, moved to Wales and established a bookshop, using the revenue from their share of the Pooh royalties to support a cystic-fibrosis society in honour of their daughter Clare.
Resentment seems to have run as strongly as privilege in the Milne circle. C. R.’s wife, Lesley, was also his first cousin, daughter of a maternal uncle. But the couple did not know each other growing up because C. R.’s mother, Daphne, was didn’t speak to her brothers. On the paternal side, A. A. seems to have hated his older brother, Barry, from the time he was a child. C. R. despised his mother (and seemed to run between ice-cold and boiling hot with his father). Lesley had nothing good to say about either of her parents-in-law.
No explanation is given for any of this — and even the intrepid Brandreth seems to have no idea why any of these feuds arose. It just seems to be How Things Are, as Pooh might have said, if any of the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood behaved in a similar way.
But of course they didn’t. Which is probably why we love the books.
