The Tale of the Real Winnie Bear

Can anyone resist Pooh? I think not.

A R T L▼R K

On the 14^th of October 1926, Alan Alexander Milne’s iconic collection of children’s stories Winnie-the-Pooh was first published by Methuen in London. The story of the actual brown bear which inspired Milne’s cartoon teddy is a lot less known, even though it has been the subject of books, such as  Real Winnie: A One-of-a-kind Bear (2003) by Val Shushkewich, or even Hollywood movies, such as Bear Named Winnie (2005), starring M. Fassbender.

 “Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.” 

(From A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh)

In the movie, Fassbender played the role of Captain Harry Colebourn, the real discoverer of Winnie. Colebourn was a veterinary surgeon in the Canadian military, whose war-time diaries recorded the way he came across the bear. Born in Birmingham in 1887, Colebourn first came to Canada at the age of 18, worked in Toronto in the shipping industry to…

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