The Real Winnie-The-Pooh Was a Girl from Ontario

One hundred years ago this month, readers first met a bear named Winnie-the-Pooh.

A.A. Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh on Oct. 14, 1926, introducing the character who would become one of the best-known bears in children’s literature.

Pooh was fictional.

Winnie was not.

The name traces to a real female black bear from Canada, a soldier heading to the First World War, and a chance encounter on a railway platform in Ontario.

The story began on Aug. 24, 1914, just weeks after Canada entered the war.

A troop train carrying Canadian soldiers east stopped at White River, Ontario. Among the soldiers was Harry Colebourn, a young army veterinarian.

Colebourn spotted a trapper on the station platform with an orphaned black bear cub on a leash.

He bought her for $20.

The purchase wasn’t simply a story Colebourn would tell years later. He recorded it in his diary that day.

Colebourn named the cub Winnipeg after the Canadian city where he lived. Before long, the name was shortened to Winnie.

And Winnie went to war.

A Bear Crosses The Atlantic

The cub became a mascot for Colebourn’s unit and traveled overseas with the soldiers.

During their training in England, Winnie reportedly slept beneath Colebourn’s cot and ate foods including condensed milk and apples.

But when Colebourn received orders to leave for France in December 1914, taking a bear along was no longer practical.

He arranged for Winnie to stay at the London Zoo.

The plan was temporary. Colebourn expected to retrieve her after the war.

Winnie, however, was beginning a second life.

While Colebourn served overseas, the young black bear became a favorite among zoo visitors. She developed a reputation for being unusually gentle and comfortable around people.

Children could feed her by hand and were even allowed to ride on her back — something almost unimaginable at a modern zoo.

Colebourn survived the war and eventually returned.

He also returned for Winnie.

But by then, he saw how well she had settled into her new home and how popular she had become with visitors.

Rather than take her back to Canada, Colebourn decided to leave her in London.

In 1919, he donated Winnie to the zoo permanently.

She would live there for the rest of her life.

Christopher Robin Meets Winnie

Among the thousands of children who eventually visited Winnie was a young boy named Christopher Robin Milne.

He began seeing the bear at the London Zoo in 1924.

Christopher Robin already had a teddy bear at home. It had been named Edward.

After meeting Winnie, that changed.

The boy renamed his teddy bear Winnie.

But “Pooh” came from somewhere else entirely.

Christopher Robin had known a swan called Pooh, and the two names came together.

Winnie plus Pooh.

The teddy bear that had started life as Edward was now Winnie-the-Pooh.

Christopher Robin’s father was the author A.A. Milne.

The child’s stuffed animals and imaginative world inspired Milne’s stories. Along with Pooh came familiar characters including Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga and Tigger.

Christopher Robin himself became a character.

And on Oct. 14, 1926, Winnie-the-Pooh was published.

The Real Winnie Lived Until 1934

The real Winnie never returned to Canada.

She remained at the London Zoo until her death in 1934, nearly two decades after Colebourn first spotted the orphaned cub at that Ontario railway stop.

By then, her shortened name had already traveled somewhere Colebourn could never have anticipated when he paid $20 for her.

It had entered children’s literature.

The name’s story also creates an unusual contrast with the fictional Pooh.

Milne’s bear is generally considered male. The real Winnie was female.

She wasn’t a honey-loving resident of the Hundred Acre Wood, either. She was a Canadian black bear whose life intersected with the First World War, the London Zoo and, eventually, a little boy carrying a teddy bear.

The connection might never have happened had any part of that chain been different.

Colebourn had to see the cub during the troop train’s stop in White River. Winnie had to travel to England. Colebourn had to decide that the zoo was a better permanent home for her. Christopher Robin then visited the zoo and became so fascinated with Winnie that he renamed his own bear.

And the name still needed one final ingredient: a swan called Pooh.

A century after Milne published Winnie-the-Pooh, the character has long since become more famous than the animal that helped name him.

But behind the fictional bear is the story of a very real one.

The most famous bear in English children’s literature is named after a female black bear from Ontario who crossed the Atlantic as a Canadian soldier’s pet, combined with the name of a swan.