Steve Hendrix
Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, a real stuffed bear called Winnie-the-Pooh lived near a small forest in England with a real little boy called Christopher Robin Milne.
Then Winnie-the-Pooh took a Very Long Trip, because that’s what bears do when Publishers ask, and the Trip turned into a Stay and now he lives in a glass case at the New York Public Library, which very much wants to keep him.
But today is the day his book, also called “Winnie-the-Pooh,” is turning 100, and some people in Britain who love him very much want him to come home.
Oh, bother.
It has been a century since A.A. Milne published the first collection of stories based on his son’s little stuffed menagerie - on Oct. 14, 1926 - and Winnie-the-Pooh has been beloved ever since as a cuddly, comforting and quintessentially English icon.
Britain is celebrating with anniversary editions, commemorative stamps, LEGO sets and a newly authorized sequel, “A Little Boy and His Bear.”
But for some, the absence of the bear himself spoils a bit of the fun, and they have renewed a decades-long campaign to repatriate the actual Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and Kanga from New York.
Or at least to have them visit. If Paddington Bear can get to London from Darkest Peru, they reason, what’s keeping Pooh Bear trapped in the Big Apple?
Christopher Robin Milne died in 1996, at the age of 75. But two years ago, Gyles Brandreth, an author and friend of Christopher’s, traveled to New York as an emissary of Queen Camilla hoping to arrange an anniversary stay at Buckingham Palace for the 105-year-old fleecy émigrés.
The library, citing the toys’ age and their talent in attracting tens of thousands of visitors a year, wouldn’t budge, Brandreth said.
“It would be wonderful if it happens, but I can’t see it happening anytime soon,” he said. “The ball is now really in the court of the New York Public Library.”
The library, which did not respond to a request for comment, has resisted high-level entreaties before. Efforts to bring Pooh home over the years have entailed questions in Parliament, motions in Congress, pleas from prime ministers and mediation by two presidents. In 1998, they drew a defiant speech by then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Now, the requests are coming from Camilla, who paid her own royal visit to the library earlier this year.
The palace declined to comment on the queen’s discussions with library officials, confirming only that she reunited the aged Kanga with a replica of Roo, a Very Small member of the Milne collection.
The actual Pooh, a 20-inch Farnell teddy bear purchased at Harrods in 1921 for Christopher’s first birthday, has been on display with his mates since the late 1980s as part of the library’s vast “Treasures” collection.
The toys were not purloined, kidnapped, auctioned by Sotheby’s or flipped by greedy collectors on eBay.
A.A. Milne, with the adult Christopher’s blessing, gave them to his US publisher for a publicity tour in 1947. The publisher donated them to the library 40 years later. And they are in good company, alongside Charles Dickens’s desk, a first-edition Plato and a Shakespeare First Folio.
In 2016, they got a professional refresh by conservationists that the library documented on Instagram.
But the clean provenance and their New York highlife has never appeased Pooh partisans who think Fifth Avenue is much too far from the Hundred Acre Wood.
“Just like the Greeks want their Elgin Marbles back, so we want our Winnie-the-Pooh back, along with all his splendid friends,” Gwyneth Dunwoody, a Labour member of parliament, said in the House of Commons in 1998.
Dunwoody’s motion that the government raise the issue with the Americans kicked off official efforts to bring back “the Pooh Five,” as she called them. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair had just arrived in Washington for talks with President Bill Clinton. Reporters were ready with the softball, er, toy questions.
Blair told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that the issue would be low on the agenda. His spokesman later said the government position was that the Americans would properly care for the aging playthings.
Clinton reportedly said losing them would be “unbearable.” State Department spokesman James Rubin said the U.S. would take no position on the issue since the toys were privately owned, while also denying he would ever “pooh-pooh an issue of this significance.”
“GET STUFFED!” was the New York Post headline.
Bronx-born Democratic Rep. Nita M. Lowey introduced a congressional resolution to keep the critters where they were. Giuliani showed up at the library with reporters to say they were better off in the U.S. than the U.K.
“Winnie-the-Pooh is an example of the very best in immigration,” the mayor said, according to an account in The Washington Post, holding the bear with white-gloved hands. “Hey Winnie,” he said, “you got a green card?”
And so nothing happened, which is a thing that often happens after a great deal of Official Fuss. It was - as Eeyore might have said if anyone had bothered to ask him, which nobody ever does - about what you’d expect.
But the effort didn’t die.
Prime Minister David Cameron brought it up years later during a meeting with President Barack Obama. Reportedly, an aide in the Oval Office called the head of the library, Anthony Marx, asking if the two leaders could announce that the toys were going home during their news conference.
Brandreth, who interviewed Marx, recounted the episode in his new biography of Milne, “Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear.”
“You don’t understand,” the aide said. “I’m speaking on behalf of the president of the United States.”
“You don’t understand,” Marx replied. “I am the president of the New York Public Library - and the answer is no.”
The rebuff, Brandreth said, persuaded Pooh’s British admirers to try a gentler approach that they hope will bear fruit, or bear bears, eventually. The king and queen have offered Winnie and friends a room at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle whenever they would like to visit.
“It’s not a campaign,” Brandreth said. “It’s an invitation.”
And so the invitation continues to stand. And Winnie-the-Pooh continues to sit, in a thoughtful sort of way, which is what very old bears in very nice glass cases mostly do.