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Christopher Robin Milne (21 August 1920 – 20 April 1996) was the son of author A. A. Milne. As a young child, he was the basis of the character Christopher Robin in his father's Winnie-the-Pooh stories and in two books of poems.
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Early life
Christopher Robin Milne was born at 11 Mallord St, Chelsea, London at 8 a.m to author Alan Alexander Milne and Dorothy de Sélincourt. His parents had expected the baby to be a girl, and had chosen the name Rosemary. When it turned out to be a boy, they initially intended to call him Billy, but decided that this would be too informal. They gave him two first names to help distinguish him from other Milnes, each parent choosing a name. Although he was officially named Christopher Robin, his parents often referred to him as "Billy". When he began to talk, he pronounced his surname as Moon instead of Milne. After then, his family would often call him "Billy", "Moon", or "Billy Moon". In later life, he became known as simply "Christopher".
On his first birthday, he received an Alpha Farnell teddy bear he called Edward. This bear, along with a real bear named "Winnie" that Milne saw at the London Zoo, eventually became the inspiration for the character of Winnie-the-Pooh. The teddy bear was about two feet tall, light in color, frequently losing his eyes, and a fairly constant companion to Milne.
As was customary for upper-class and upper-middle-class children at the time, Milne was reared by a nanny – Olive Brockwell. Meetings with his parents were restricted to short periods just after breakfast, at tea time, and in the evening, just before he went to bed. As he grew up, he spent more time with them; however, they spent little time together, so Milne divided his own time between his mother and his father.
Time spent with his father led to Milne's love of mathematics and cricket, as well as to their shared pacifism. Though Milne spoke self-deprecatingly of his intellect, referring to himself many times as being "dim", he was intelligent for a boy of his age. The reason for his denial of his intelligence was that he was able to solve complex equations with little or no difficulty but had to concentrate on much simpler ones.[citation needed]
From his mother, Milne acquired a talent for working with his hands. He owned a small tool kit, which he used to take apart and then reassemble the lock on his nursery door when he was seven years old. By the age of 10, he had modified the works of a grandfather clock, and altered a cap gun so that it would shoot real bullets.[citation needed]
Schooling
In his childhood, Milne was fond of being associated with his father's books, helping him to write a few of the stories. Once, he went so far as to organize a short play for his parents, reenacting a story about himself and his friends in the woods. However, after starting school, he was mocked by his peers, who recited passages from the books, particularly from the poem Vespers: "Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers." Milne therefore grew to resent the attention that his father's success had brought to him.
Milne first attended the Gibbs School, an independent school in London, in 1929. At the age of nine he went on to Stowe School, an independent boys' school in Buckinghamshire, where he learned to box as a way to defend himself from the taunts of his classmates. In 1939, he won a scholarship to study English at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Later life
When World War II broke out, Milne left his studies and attempted to join the army, but failed the medical examination. His father used his influence to get Milne a position with the second training battalion of the Royal Engineers. He received his commission in July 1942 and was posted to the Middle East and Italy.
While serving abroad, he began to resent what he saw as his father's exploitation of his childhood and came to hate the books that had thrust him into the public eye. After being discharged from the army, he went to Cambridge to complete his studies and graduated with a Third Class Honours degree in English.
On 24 July 1948, Milne married his first cousin, Lesley Sélincourt. His mother disliked the marriage, partly because she did not get along with her brother, Lesley's father Aubrey. (She had wanted her son to marry his childhood friend, Anne Darlington.) In 1951, Milne and his wife moved to Dartmouth to found the Harbour Bookshop, which turned out to be a success, though Dorothy had thought the decision very odd, inasmuch as Milne did not seem to like "business", and as a bookseller would regularly have to meet Pooh fans. While both of these factors did cause them frustrations, Milne and his wife ran their bookshop for many years without any help from royalties from sales of the Pooh books. He occasionally visited his father after the elder Milne became ill, but once his father died, he did not visit his mother during the 15 years that passed before her death.[citation needed]
A few months after his father's death in 1956, his daughter Clare was born, and diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy. She would later run a charity for the disabled called the Clare Milne Trust.
In 1974, Milne published the first of three autobiographical books. The Enchanted Places gave an account of his childhood and of the problems that he had encountered because of the Pooh books.
Milne gave the original stuffed animals that inspired the Pooh characters to the editor of the books, who in turn donated them to the New York City Public Library; Marjorie Taylor (in her book Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them) recounts how many were disappointed at this, and Milne had to explain that he preferred to concentrate on the things that currently interested him.[1]
Milne lived for some years with myasthenia gravis and died in his sleep on 20 April 1996. After his passing Milne was claimed by one newspaper to have been a "dedicated atheist".[2]
Bibliography
- The Enchanted Places (Dutton, 1975) ISBN 978-0140034493
- Path Through the Trees (Dutton, 1979) ISBN 978-0525176305
- Hollow on the Hill (Methuen, 1982) ISBN 978-0413512703
References
- Biography of C.R. Milne, with photographs of him at various ages throughout his life
- BBC News article 27 November 2001: Christopher Robin revealed (describes the discovery in 2001 of images of Christopher Robin Milne captured on a 1929 film of a school pageant held in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex).
- ^ Taylor, Marjorie (1999). Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. Oxford University Press. pp. 120. ISBN 0-19-507704-0.
- ^ "The books live on. But in real life Toad is dead; Alice is dead; Peter Pan and Wendy are long flown; and now Christopher Robin, a 'sweet and decent' man who overcame a childhood in which he was haunted by Pooh and taunted by peers, has left without saying his prayers - he was a dedicated atheist - aged 75." Euan Ferguson, 'Robin's gone, but swallows linger on,' The Observer, 28 April 1996, News, Pg. 14.
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