The Queen of England, Camilla, stopped by the New York Public Library on Wednesday to pay a special visit to a small, carefully preserved stuffed animal that the library’s president and chief executive, Anthony Marx, called “the world’s most famous teddy bear.”
That would be Winnie-the-Pooh, a toy bought from Harrods department store in the 1920s and given by A.A. Milne, the author of the “Winnie-the-Pooh” books, to his son, Christopher Robin Milne. Along with the other stuffed animals that inspired the books — Kanga, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger — Pooh resides in pride of place in a climate-controlled case in the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures.
Alas, Kanga’s baby, Roo, got lost somewhere in an English apple orchard in the 1930s. But Camilla, who arrived in the United States on Monday for a state visit with her husband, King Charles III, came to the library bearing the next best thing: a bespoke replica of Roo produced by Merrythought, Britain’s oldest surviving teddy bear manufacturer.
The visit was the first by a British royal to the New York Public Library since its founding, in 1895, and the queen took the opportunity to promote her literary charity, the Queen’s Reading Room.
“I’m hoping my voice isn’t going to conk out before the end of this speech,” Camilla said during a reception at the library’s flagship location, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Guests included library and literary luminaries — Sarah Jessica Parker, Jenna Bush Hager and Amor Towles among them — and a sprinkling of British expatriates living in New York, including the former Vogue magazine editor in chief Anna Wintour. “As you can imagine, I have been talking quite a lot over the past few days,” Camilla said.
Camilla kept Roo in her purse while carrying him into the library, according to Marx. She then presented the doll to the library on a cushion emblazoned with the Union Jack.
It was quite sporting of Camilla not only to bring a present, but also to resist any impulse to take Pooh and his friends home with her. Such a request has been made before. In 1998, a member of the British Parliament named Gwyneth Dunwoody visited the toys in their previous location in the library — the children’s room of the Donnell Library Center, which was located on West 53rd Street — and was not pleased with what she saw.
“They look very unhappy indeed,” Dunwoody said at the time. “I am not surprised, considering they have been incarcerated in a glass case in a foreign country for all these years.”
In making her plea, Dunwoody invoked the poster child of problematic national treasure acquisitions, the ancient sculptures seized from the Parthenon in the early 19th century that have been on display at the British Museum for more than 200 years.
“Just like the Greeks want their Elgin Marbles back,” she said, “so we want our Winnie-the-Pooh back, along with all his splendid friends.”
The response from New York back then: No way, José. Vowing to do “anything we can do to keep them here,” then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he would pay a personal visit to the library to check on Pooh & Co. “He just wants to reassure the bear that he is safe on American soil,” his spokeswoman, Colleen S. Roche, said at the time.
All this raises the question: Why did Pooh, a Very English Bear, end up spending his retirement with his friends in a glass case — a studio apartment for five — in Midtown Manhattan? Milne, his creator, was a Very English Author; the bear’s home was the fictional, but also Very English, Hundred Acre Wood. (It was inspired by Five Hundred Acre Wood, a portion of Ashdown Forest, near Milne’s country home in East Sussex.) If the bear could talk, surely it would be with an English accent.
The answer requires a circuitous wander deep into the thicket of the past. It all began more than 100 years ago, when Milne purchased that stuffed teddy bear at Harrods as a present for his 1-year-old son.
Christopher Robin named him Edward Bear, but then changed the name, basing it on two other animals: Winnipeg (“Winnie,” for short), a Canadian bear who ended up in the London Zoo during World War I; and Pooh, a swan who appears in Milne’s book “When We Were Very Young.”
Other stuffed animals — a kangaroo and her joey, a donkey, a tiger and a small upright pig — soon joined the Milne menagerie. Along with Christopher Robin, they became characters in Milne’s whimsical, internationally best-selling books, and eventually part of the Disney cartoon universe. The books, which offer pre-Trumpian examples of using Sporadic Capitalization to Emphasize Certain Things, chronicle adventures like Piglet’s encounter with an elephantine Heffalump, Roo and Tigger’s efforts to get down from a tree and Pooh’s attempts to correctly count his honey jars.
For decades, the original animals remained in the possession of Christopher Robin Milne, who grew up to become a bookstore owner, although he felt conflicted about how the books had affected his life. (“My name was famous all over the world but it made me miserable to be pointed out as the son of my father,” he once said.) On a visit with Milne fils in 1947, Elliott Macrae, the president of E.P. Dutton, the books’ American publisher, spotted Pooh and his gang languishing in the corner of Milne’s living room — everyone present and accounted for, except for the lost Roo.
Milne offered the toys to Macrae, who spirited them away on a tour of the United States. Dutton later bought the dolls from the A.A. Milne estate, and they were put on display in a glass case in the publisher’s lobby on Park Avenue. Occasionally, they were briefly liberated for visits to schools, literary festivals and the like.
Dutton itself was sold in 1985. Two years later, the publish ing house’s former owner, John Dyson, who was then the chairman of the New York State Power Authority, helped to arrange their donation to the New York Public Library.
The squabble over the bear’s rightful home during the Giuliani administration died down, but about 12 years ago, “the question of whether Pooh should go for a visit to the United Kingdom came up,” Marx, the library president, said in an interview. In the end, it was determined that the trip would prove too damaging to the health of the old bear.
A bit careworn, even mangy-looking in their old age — in some cases bits of fur had rubbed off — Pooh and the others were given a professional makeover by a textile conservator several years ago. The idea was to restore the dolls to the way they looked when they were young, as a cosmetic surgeon would a person getting a face lift. Repairs included “neck alignment, clavicle repair and bottom fluffing,” The Guardian newspaper reported.
“We were careful not to have any work done that would change their appearance in any way,” Michael Inman, the Susan Jaffe Tane curator of rare books at the library, said.
“They are so serious about the preservation of this animal that when he went for his conservation and was briefly outside of the glass box, I asked if, as president of the library, I could touch him,” Marx said, of the Pooh toy. “I was politely told no.”
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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