Christopher Robin Milne; Son of Pooh’s Creator

Christopher Robin Milne, immortalized as Winnie the Pooh’s friend in the children’s stories of his father, A. A. Milne, has died, the Times of London reported Monday. He was 75.

The newspaper did not give the cause of death or where he died.

As an adult, Milne was known to resent the melding of his real childhood and the fictional one in his father’s tales. He said he could not remember, for example, whether it was the real or fictional Christopher Robin who invented the game of “pooh-sticks,” dropping sticks from a bridge into a flowing stream.

In 1924, his father, Alan Alexander Milne, already well-known for his light hand at literature and fiction, published a book of verse inspired by his 4-year-old son, “When We Were Very Young.”

His son’s affection for a bear named Winnie at the London zoo became the model for hugely successful children’s books--”Winnie-the-Pooh” (1926), the verses “Now We are Six” (1927) and “The House at Pooh Corner” (1928).

Pooh made his entry in the first book by being dragged down a staircase by Christopher Robin, backward, on his head.

“It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

“Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie the Pooh.”

Photographs show how closely A. A. Milne modeled the fictional Christopher Robin on his son: the same wide, inquisitive brown eyes, the same carefully cropped mop-top, the same gingham smock.

But the grown Christopher Milne displayed a tendency to counter his father’s wishes: He dropped out of Cambridge in 1939 to enlist in the army; he was wounded in Italy during World War II.

He married his cousin Lesley de Selincourt in 1949--again, not his father’s choice for his bride--and became a bookseller. He endured countless parents pressing Pooh books into his hands for an autograph.

In private, he pursued his passion for carpentry, building special furniture for his daughter, who suffered from cerebral palsy.

His father died in 1956, and he remained silent about the effect of the series’ immense popularity on his life for nearly 20 years, until he wrote books of his own.

Milne described his father as a man who used his small son’s youth to stave off his own middle age. “When I was three, my father was three. When I was six, he was six . . . he needed me to escape from being 50,” he wrote.

He is survived by his wife and daughter. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.