'He was desperate to escape': Why the real Christopher Robin resented being linked to Winnie-the-Pooh

AA Milne's first Pooh book was published a century ago in October 1926. Generations of children loved it, but its inspiration, the author's own son, told the BBC that he took to "running away when people bring up the subject".

"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred." This is the plaintive cry made by Christopher Robin to his teddy bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, in the final chapter of The House in Pooh Corner. 

British novelist and playwright AA Milne needn't have worried. The first Winnie-the-Book was published 100 years ago in October 1926, and introduced a cast of characters modelled on the author's son and the soft toys he played with: lovably dim Pooh Bear, nervy Piglet, hyperactive Tigger, pessimistic Eeyore. Far from being forgotten, in the century since then the characters have taken on a life far beyond the parameters of their idyllic home, the Hundred Acre Wood.

From 1966, they became the subject of animated and live-action Disney films, in what is now one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. Pooh Bear has even courted controversy in Poland for being "inappropriate", sparked memes mocking the Chinese president Xi Jinping, and prompted tongue-in-cheek pop-culture theories in which the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood have been "diagnosed" with different psychological conditions.

Yet the reality of Pooh's inception and following success was not easy for Milne's son, who appeared in the books as Christopher Robin. On the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 1976, he said that he was "excited and proud" when the books were first published, but that the thrill of being linked to Winnie-the-Pooh "began to pall when I grew a bit older".

He then came to resent his father's literary use of the childhood games he played in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, the inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood. "It seemed to me almost that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son," Christopher wrote in his 1974 memoir The Enchanted Places.

As portrayed in the 2017 film Goodbye Christopher Robin, his was not quite the carefree childhood of Milne's books. "People like myself were in those days brought up by nanny. And really all my childhood up to the age of 10 was nanny-dominated," he told the BBC in 1971.

He revealed that he didn't know his parents in his early years. "Both my parents were fairly remote up to the age of about........

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